He had been an avid hunter for nearly 45 years. The endeavor had become a sort of religion to him. And he somehow felt a nagging sorrow for those who never chose to hunt, or to touch, feel, see, hear, taste and inwardly experience the wonders that only hunters can. He is, in his heart and mind, a millionaire.
Nothing or no one could ever steal away that palatable richness he could always summon at the mere closing of his failing eyes. And his health, more than just moderately failing him now, forced him to lay down his beloved firearms. Perhaps the occasional, easy, grouse hunts, and the double season for turkeys would be in his future. He didn’t know for sure. Only the Great Spirit knows the script, and he shall follow it as He might ask of him.
When the first autumn arrived after he realized he could no longer navigate his most favored coverts or the core areas of his beloved whitetails, he felt with a cumbrous sorrow that he would have to be satisfied with a couch potato status. Memories of past hunts, especially those moments beneath steel-blue winter skies he’d spent with his son in the serenity of enchanting sylvan chasms, would be reason to rejoice, and with those memories of the precious few others with whom he, on rare occasions, shared the hunts of autumn.
His many guns stood erect but grossly dormant in the corner by the hutch, in his modest living room where he would always be near them. Dust from a nearby furnace duct left its visible toll on his usually sparkling collection. Only one, a 7mm-08, always stood out as cleaner, more special than the rest. One which, during a hard time in his life, had been given to him by a dear friend. Something about that little gun is sacred to him. From the time it was given to him it became a benediction in steel and walnut.
His tolerant wife of near countless years would always jokingly say, “The house always leaned a little toward that side where his guns are standing.” And he would laugh at that. For in an abstract sense, his many firearms were like children to him. Each carried its own selection of golden memories stored safely inside the finely grained walnut stocks. When these memories – his only wealth – were needed, he would pluck a gun from its special place and handle it much like a person would a newborn puppy. And only then, during those times of needed fondling, would they be made to sparkle again. Never was there a deliberate effort to clean them, as there were during those times when hunting was an obsession. Anymore it’s only the 7mm-08 and a vintage Ruger flat-bolt in .284 Winchester given to him by another friend, because he had cried on his shoulder about always wanting one, gets any real attention anymore.
If a person were to have stolen a look through his evening window, through a glazed kaleidoscope of tenacious winter ice, they may have seen him smiling. Pipe clenched securely between his acrylic teeth, smoke curled like a bland wreath above his thin, graying hair, coaxing up the memory of his first buck. A memory, which although two-score old, seemed like yesterday. Difficult, perhaps, to retrieve, but he forever managed by closing his eyes tightly, then tighter, until, finally, it was there, and he found himself in a forest of yesteryear, still-hunting as his grandfather, father and uncle had taught him.
He deplored something he was born with, a keen sense of perception that was all but scary at times. He wished he could discard it, but of course he couldn’t, so he’d learned to live with it. Things he’d perceived prematurely were what he called gut feelings. Those same feelings had caused him to realize, sooner than he wanted to, that it wouldn’t be too long before his days like those when he took his first buck would be over for good. Those times belonged to yesterday. A place he could only summon in dreams and memories.
The ridge top where he’d killed his first buck, a loping 4-point, was just behind his rural boyhood home about five miles out of Greensburg. He carried an old 1903 Model A-3 .30-06 Springfield that had the most perplexing iron sights, with an ungodly elevation slide etched with yardage numbers he’d never need.
He’d jumped the group of five deer not long after starting out. They ran directly away from him and over a roll on the hillside. He reminisced about holding his breath for what seemed an eternity. When you’re holding your breath and your first five deer are getting away, lickey-split, flags at full staff, and one’s wearing legal headgear, let me tell ya, 10 seconds is an eternity.
His uncle, Buck Budd, however, had taught him well the intimate habits of wary whitetails. If he could get to one side of their chosen escape route, then pray like a starving man they would circle back, he might be in business. Luck was with him; he chose the right side, and the rest as they say, is history. At the crack of his old military rifle, the 4-point fell.
He struggled desperately with the slingless rifle and crudely field-dressed buck, through brush and briars that clung to his hand-me-down woolen pants as though intent on devouring his tender, 16-year-old flesh. No regrets though, mind ya.
The hour walk he and his Uncle Buck had taken going in took some five hours to retrace. But they eventually made it. And ya know, old Uncle Buck never once offered to help in any way. Didn’t quite understand it then. Do now, though. And the veal-like tenderness of that buck is a memory that’s fully alive and well within him today.
Then he remembered back when he’d taken the revered double on grouse. It was Pap’s favorite game bird, Buck’s, too, and they came home with too darned few, according to their rare honest accounts.
He remembered “War Baby Doubles” that he’d written for Game News in 1984, that walked readers through that hunt. He could never forget how excited Pap was that day, or the tears in Uncle Buck’s warm sky-blue eyes. Each of them was so proud of him. Fact is, he remembers Pap getting really fired up when he told it on the day it happened, as they all stood in the spruce-framed front yard outside of Greensburg. He got his tongue all wrapped around his eyeteeth and said to the gang, “That there boy of mine shot goubles on drouse.” We all laughed.
He also remembers the time Pap asked him to get across the road to Crissinger’s Swamp and bag a couple of ringnecks. Pap slid two hulls into the old German double and handed it to him, smiling. He wanted to show his business partner and best friend, Tony Morelli, the boy’s stuff. The kid was a nervous wreck with that show-your-stuff business. Lot of pressure to put on a boy, giving him an audience and telling him to go get dinner. In addition, he had to hope for a flush close enough that the two could see him from where they stood on the front porch, which did sit rather high and allowed for a good view of the swampy field.
He carried the old double open until he made the tentative leg-spread over the rusty barbwire fence, then eased her shut. It sounded like the closing of a Swiss safe. He no sooner took a step when several birds flushed. Two of them wore white neckbands, and one went straight out in front while the other veered to the left.
He had to wait a second or two, cause the old double shot tighter than the southbound end of a northbound chipmunk but, in short order, he cut loose. The going away bird folded up like one of those origami birds he made as a kid. The rooster on the left had just leveled off with wings set to glide when the German tossed pellets at it. The bird acted like it was hit, but changed its flight pattern, turning toward the house just after he’d shot. Wings locked, it was heading directly for the front porch where Pap and Tony stood watching.
That ringneck looked like one of those paper airplanes tossed in school when the teacher had her head turned. That doggone bird smacked right into the porch and fell dead. He’ll never forget what Pap said to Tony. “Not only can my boy shoot like the dickens, he delivers the goods, too.” Pap later told him that Tony had asked whether Joey did that all the time and, of course, Pap, joker that he was, said to Tony, “Doggone right he does, Tony, look who taught him.” Memories, the greatest gift a life of hunting gives a man.
This is why he knows that his percolating recollections will keep him warm and full until the Great Spirit calls him to that place where hunting season never ends. And where a hunter is never too old to walk the fields and witness autumn sunsets.
He recalled yet another time in his life when finances were tight, a time when buying a holiday bird would have strained the family budget. He’d killed a young buck that year, and his kids, whom he feared had inherited some of his acute perception abilities, asked why they couldn’t just have a big old venison roast for Thanksgiving.
He plucked some carrots and beets from the sand bucket in the cellar, placed pearl onions around the roast, sliced some slab bacon and then prepared the Thanksgiving meal. The kids insisted they preferred a meal of venison, and today, as he reached back to that time, he believes they had really meant it.
He can recall every word, almost hear them in fact, of the grace said at that Thanskgiving meal. They each said their own thanks, aloud and in traditional order, but each thanks seemed so much warmer than the usual. Their prayers had softer tones that seemed to come from deep within.
He shifted into a more comfortable position in his old, overstuffed chair, and recalled his two greatest memories, when his son shot his first deer, a fat old doe, and his second deer, a little buck. Knowing his son could shoot as well as him, when his son missed a shot at his first doe he asked if he’d bumped his scope or dropped his rifle. The boy said he hadn’t done either. They went down behind the barn to check. Sure enough, it was shooting low and about five inches to the right. Anxious for his son to get a deer, he told him to take a reliable old .30-06. The boy was reluctant, because he had always called that old gun Pop’s magical one-shot “thirty-ought.”
He laughed, remembering the time he took that rifle out West for elk. Cowboys out there had poked fun at the gun, but nobody was laughing after he killed a good bull at 400 yards.
Well, long and sweet story made short, Justin took a huge doe; one shot at 70 yards and down she went. He told Pop afterwards that he was shakin’ like Maggie’s drawers in a windstorm. Pop has to admit that afterwards, when the boy wasn’t around, he shed a tear because he was so happy. His son thanked him and reminded him of how special Pop’s gun was. Great memory, that one, one of the precious few that sits in the front row.
He remembers his son’s first buck, and one could almost see his heart beating beneath his faded plaid wool shirt, one his son had bought him for his 50th birthday.
Some might say he and his boy got into the woods a bit early that year. Perhaps. But to his way of thinking, a hunter never gets into the deer woods too early. Just after daybreak he had his 16-year-old son sit tight, near a blowdown, while he sneaked across a mountaintop swamp. Figuring he’d push out a thick section of woods toward the stand, he remembers his son saying that he’d lived and breathed hunting since he was on Similac formula. And he was right. He didn’t need any instructions.
He had just begun the drive when he heard his son’s 7×57 bark in the distance. He wasn’t sure just when the buck broke out of that thicket, but from the way he pieced it together in his mind before returning to his son, he figured the boy had to take a pretty long shot. When he reached the boy, his son’s forehead was covered in tiny sweat droplets. The boy said the buck had come out on the far side of the swamp, and he knew that he could put it down at that distance. He questioned, without time out for a breather, “that it had to be better than 200 yards across there, huh, Pop?” He had dropped that buck in its tracks.
Before they went over to the buck, the boy asked his father to take a look at the trunk of the fallen hemlock where he’d set up. Carved into that ancient tree was the name, Sam. Only Sam they ever knew was Pop’s kid brother’s dog that had died several years before.
“Think it’s some sort of omen like you’re always talking about, Pop? I mean Sam’s name being carved on that old tree?” the boy asked.
He told him that it certainly seemed like a great omen, that it would be wonderful to remember it as such, in old Sam’s honor.
Never in the old hunter’s life would he find the tepid memory of his son’s first buck far removed from where it may be immediately recalled. That morning the young man carried a look in his eyes more precious and brilliant than the northern lights. It would be next to impossible for him to forget exactly what his son had said while draggin’ that fat buck off the mountain. He said his buck was the very thing great memories were made of, and fine young man he is, he never once mentioned how long his shot was. Pop had stepped off more than 250 yards as they walked to it that morning, more than a hundred paces farther than any shot Pop had ever made hunting whitetails.
And the boy told his father something else that day. He had said, “Memories of this day hunting with you, Pop, will live within me forever. Thanks for the hunt, Pop, I love you.”
I happen to know that the old man feels exactly the same as the boy in this story. Teardrops lay on the rim of his wrinkled eyelids as he so tenderly summoned the memories. And anyone with a heart could tell from that glistening, there were many more memories.
During hunting season, should you drive past his old farmhouse, you may see him sitting alone in his office, looking out toward the woodland across the road. He’ll be reminiscing about golden hunts now long gone, with a warm smile on his weathered face. Because, for this old hunter, those hunts sit in the front row of his mind and heart where he may easily, and so very often, touch them needfully and yes, as warmly, as only an old hunter can do. And that moment in time may have marked the first in the history of the world that the rains came after the rainbow. That is the rain in the old man’s heart. And that moment when he had to bid his days of walking the rainbow a reluctant goodbye.