AUTHOR’S NOTE: I could not say what I needed in this introduction even nearly as well as a wise Native American, Big Thunder, of the Wabanaki Alogonquins. The story will clear understanding as to why I chose the words of my brother, Big Thunder who said “The Great Spirit is in all things; he is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the earth is our mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground, she returns to us…”_
So it is written, and so it is true? I have proven this time and time again, but still await Daniel.
A Hunter of forty-plus years sits; the smoke from a meditative pipe curls like a bland wreath about his graying head. He is in ever-deepening thought. Outside, it is deadly, bitter cold. The earth around his forest home is smothered by a half-fathom of snow. So cold, this night, the crystals of snow appear like so many strewn diamonds and the silvery, full moon somehow, by some celestial magic, casts a lambent glow onto the blanket of white, making it appear strangely bluish. And, at this he wonders, saying to himself, “God at work in his most favored art studio…”
He continues to think, this time more deeply. Becoming more intimate with his heart’s language, his mind’s hard-earned wisdom, he gazes through the window. The snowy diamonds glitter, seeming almost alive and cosmic as he trips the switch to the front yard floods. They flicker magically under the cast light of the full moon and that which he has added. “This world has given me riches far more precious than jewels.” He thinks aloud, though whispering now, as he falls into a more melancholy frame of mind. The floods are shut off and the moonlight allows that virtually none of the beauty of this harsh winter’s night is lost. Instead, it becomes even more beautiful to him, for now it is all natural. Alone, the work of his Heavenly Maker, and to himself, he smiles…
He knows his time has come, for he fought it off for some time now, this ever-stronger feeling in the depths of his heart. He sighs, knowing his thinking of being alone with his thoughts, is about to steal away something very dear to him. Something some say, “He lived for his whole life long…” He walks away from the window with a cumbrous heart for somehow, he is torn by his tentative decision. But he knows. His heart knows as does his aging mind, that he is fast-losing his sedulous desire, his ancient, atavistic instinct, his natural God-given need to kill. He wants so, to hold on, if just for one more season of him against the elements, against the alleged odds, against the magically elusive whitetails he so loves. All of these he seemed forever able to defeat and conquer, regardless of the pains and frustration they sometimes caused. But it was time. His heart had spoken and he always followed its commands and, holding on emotionally or otherwise, would be but a superficial feeling.
The tea-kettle whistles to him from the kitchen. His deerskin moccasins allow him to slip quietly across the room so as not to awaken his two sleeping children, his wife of nearly a quarter-century. He thinks of his beloved native American brothers and how they might describe his silent walk: “Like a shadow of a cloud passing across a field…” But he has always been respectful of their need for rest, for time alone, for space, freedom, and quiet. As he has always been with the whitetails, the second love of his predatory life.
Above all things at which he excels which may be a precious few, deer hunting is what he does best, save loving his family who so tolerantly puts up with his passions for the hunts of Autumn; of his love for guns and gun powders and bullets and shooting and yes, perfection in utilizing them all…
The well-sugared tea warms him, affords his body and degenerative back added life, if just for the shortest time. Again he fights the urging in his heart, and whispers to his own, half-deaf ears, “I don’t think I can hang it up.” He wonders about what he will do to support his family. What he will do to fill his heart come autumn? He, after all, is by profession, an outdoor writer; a man who, for years heard the friendly-fire joking of his readership who referred to him as, “The Whitetail Man.” How will he write of deer hunting if he follows his heart? For this is what helped, substantially, in his gaining an unassuming reputation as a writer of whitetail hunts…
He thinks, “I cannot write of current affairs for they in the most part, depress and flood despair upon the readers. I cannot write of professional football, for it is violent and there’s enough of that in God’s world. And too, it is too much like big-business with the titanic salaries and the players are but huge, fleshly facades that have little love of the sport, though there are exceptions.
“I cannot, certainly, write of society for it is that which I have for all my adult years, tried so to escape or at worst, avoid. What then will I do if I choose not to hunt the whitetails, the animals I most love and best know?”
The time is 3:15 A.M., and the night deepens into something almost celestial, almost holy perhaps? Another cup of steaming, revitalizing tea warms his palms as he stares through the window. It is beautiful and the drifts of snow appear to him as white waves on an albino sea that God has frozen before they could break and flow to shore. Almost inviting they seem, even with the deadly cold revealed on the thermometer as minus one degree. There is no wind. The spruce outside his window stands dead-still, frozen and in dormant sleep.
An aging set of snowshoes hang upon his makeshift office wall next to a photo of a writer friend, Charley Waterman. Charley smiles, seemingly beckoning him as he stares at the photo, challenging him to, “Go, Joe, go!”
“Crazy,” he thinks aloud, “too late and far too cold.” But then he remembers of his last hunt, the first day of antlerless deer season. He looks down at the finger of his right hand, a painful reminder that was severely stung, frostbitten, by yet another day of deadly, Arctic-like cold. “The sacrifice,” he says to himself, “I forgot to offer my sacrifice after I killed the doe!”-He, a man who deplores the proverbial, “loose ends.”
His thoughts drift to a time nearly thirty-years ago, when he’d spent a Summer on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. There he learned the ways of the people he most loves, the Native Americans. They taught him the ways of the hunter, a brave, the “Indians’” ways, all of which are good. “You must always make your sacrifice to Mother Earth when she gives to you, Joseph Lone Eagle, or she will not yield you anything more, ever…”
They called him, after he became blood brother to one chief, Joseph Lone Eagle, because of his constant need for time alone. When fishing, hunting, when just exploring along the banks of the Wind River, his blood brother, perceptive as most of the Native American people, noticed his displeasure when anyone would try to follow him, talk with him, or even watch him as he headed out to those wild places beyond sight of Crowheart, the small town where he’d stayed while visiting the Shoshones, the Arapahos.
He recalled clearly, accurately, the words of his blood brother: “You Joseph, are a man who starves for solitude, time to gather yourself and your inner-spirit into one being. Your mind into a single thought mass. Your heart wants always to be open to one feeling at a time, so it may fully taste of it and, so, in the tradition of the Shoshones, I shall name you Joseph Lone Eagle, for you have also, many times, told me of your love for that great hunter of the sky. Of your envy of his unbound freedom. It is fine with your brother that you feel this way. I understand your need for being alone. It is a manly thing to crave solitude if he is to be worthy of his title, man. A man cannot touch his dreams or reach out to them, nor speak to his heart and listen to it without quiet time alone. And so it is with you. Perhaps, more so than most, for you are a writer, a deep thinker and a loner in disguise. I see how you show love for your fellow man, but when you are done with it, you again wish deeply for solitude, that which your eagle heart most craves. Yes, you are, from this day on, Joseph Lone Eagle. I shall tell this to the others, so that they will know of and respect your need.”
He laces on his boots, the unmade sacrifice being his motivation, and swings a goose-down jacket around his shoulders. The snowshoes are taken from their mooring and carried to the steps of his porch. Snowshoes secured, he steps down onto the crusted snow, being strangely careful so as not to trample those crystals that look to him, like diamonds, so many cosmic jewels. He will travel the long mile, perhaps more, to the spot where his last whitetail was felled, a doe on the run. The full moon would make for his easy navigation; his favorite pipe would warm his cotton-gloved hands.
The night seemed without life, but he is a hunter. He knows better. There are a thousand eyes watching his every move; a thousand sentient ears listening intently to every step and breath he takes. A screech owl brings his mind back to reality and he smiles with frozen cheeks: “Good morning.” He whispers to the owl, unseen but somewhere near and above his cowered head. He is glad to have the company, however short the time…
His snowshoes barely mar the crusted snow and the going is easy, though the distance than he’d anticipated. Or is it his aging, degenerative back stretching the distance? No matter now.
The hollow looks alien to him in the moonlight. The shadows stretching out like so many more trees lying upon the ground where, before, there were none. The sterile whiteness of this always enchanting belly on the earth makes it appear more vast, more desolate and lonely. Like that of the lunar surface. He feels a bit lost but to him this is good. “It is good to feel this way, for it stirs the adrenalin and pits it against the steely cold, warms my aching bones…” At least this is what he thinks, for he knows it helps him, psychologically to ward off the grave discomfort of the night’s bitter cold.
He hears the near-silent whisper of a great horned owl’s wing beats in a desperate, perhaps futile, stoop toward something unknown to him, unseen. He smiles and speaks. “Hunt on comrade, for I too, hunt. But in the light of day and with far more advantage than that which God has given you.” He feels it is healthy to talk to oneself, to the wildlife that crosses his chosen paths. For wild things talk back without words, to his mind, the same as being in agreement with him. He laughs as he thinks, “Perhaps I should have wed a great horned owl?”
Two more hollows and he should be there. There on the hogback where he killed the white-tailed doe and yes, there where the bitter cold froze his four-pound gray mass, his brain, causing him to forget the tradition of sacrifice taught to him by his beloved Shoshone brothers. There, in the place that may very well lay claim to his frostbitten finger which, on this night, ached as though it were being steeped in the juices of Hell. A small price, he feels, for all the pleasures, all the inspiration, all the winter venison so cherished by him and his family. And, of course, all the other joys bestowed upon him in those yesterdays he forever revisits that dwell within his heart. He thinks of the possibility of his finger being lost: “I have lost far more in my associations with unkind mortals, and those scars do not show. And time indeed, does not heal all wounds…”
He laughs again as he thinks of his wife, of her probable enjoyment of his frozen jaws- his not being able to speak a permanent thing. Whitetails and family-always on his mind…
One more hollow, he wonders? For the time has been longer than he thought it should. He sits and rolls the warm, briar bowl of his pipe about his cold cheeks. “Is my sense of time and direction degenerating too?” No, it’s not, as he looks back over his shoulder and spots the hogback upon which his deer had fallen in an instant death. “Finally.” He whispers…
He attempts to build a small, hand-warming fire with tinder he chips from the ragged, dry bark of a hickory and fallen boughs from a hemlock. There is no breeze to aid the cause and his hands are rigid with the ever-deepening cold. He trembles until, finally, the small fire begins to warm him.
From his pocket, he removes a photo of a most beloved and recently fallen friend. He whispers, “Hello, Daniel Loud.” It is the only photo he has of his longtime friend who has passed on but days before; a hurtful blow even to the so-called, calloused hunter, the predator of God’s making, whose hunts are dictated by the heart.
His memory serves him dutifully of hunts past with this man, this friend of but a few in his lifetime. And so with this store of memories, he feels that the photo is not all he has left of his fallen friend, still, it is precious to him…
He folds the photo into a tiny square and whispers, “Until we meet again, my friend.” And with that, he buries it in the litter of the forest floor then covers it with lichen and pine needles-and over the top of it all, he sprinkles a goodly amount of his most favored pipe tobacco. He looks skyward into the pastel blue of early dawn: “This,” he whispers, “is all I have to give as physical sacrifice, but one day there will be more, and soon…”
He stands to leave as the soft, blue sky brightens, showing a sliver of lucent sun. Walking toward home, his thoughts become mosaic-like, a mixture of something lost, something gained. Oddly enough, he is cold no more and the light of morning seemingly shortens his return home.
His wife awaits him, watching from a window as he struggles over the crusted snow on the large field before their home. She waves to him, but at that moment he couldn’t see through his flooded eyes. He blinks to clear his sight and sees her stepping onto the front porch deck.
“Well, Old Man of the forest, where have you been?”
He looks up at her as she holds open the front door, forces a smile from the depths of his heart and says, “Church. I’ve been to church.”
“And the sermon?” His wife questions.
He sits on the step for a moment and in his eyes there’s a look she has never before seen. “Well?” she asks.
“The sermon?” He says, his voice weakened, hindered by a stabbing in his throat. “The sermon was about sacrifice. About man learning how and when to recognize that time when he must move over for a new generation and about the self-mandated cessation of beloved quests in his life, whether one or many. And there was talk of pursuing new dreams, you know? Narrowing it all down to but a single dream? Like my lifelong dream of killing one, giant, whitetailed buck?”
And sure she knows. She’s been his wife nearly twenty-five years. His wife who has, for so long, been tolerant of his crazy dreams and hunting passions. She places her hand on his shoulder and he looks at her through grateful eyes and speaks. “You know, even as the earth sleeps beneath the strain and cold of snow, the animals of the forest struggle. So tenaciously they hang in there, determined to survive, to find their next meal, especially the whitetails. How I love them for the many years of joy, of sometimes grueling challenge in fair chase and those many times they let me win. It is time to close a certain chamber of my predatory heart forever and only leave open that one which has yet to fill. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Softly, she answers, “Yes, of course I do. I thought this would happen to you years ago.”
He rubs his weary eyes, his aging, weathered cheeks wrinkle to form the slightest smile. “Remember the time I told you of a summer I’d spent with the Indians and how they named me Joseph Lone Eagle?” He doesn’t await an answer. “And how they taught me the ways of the Indian hunters and the sacrifice that must always be part of the hunt? That if man, as a hunter takes from Mother Earth, he must always put something back, something of personal value?”
“Yes.” His wife whispers, her arm now warming his shoulder.
“I did that today in the hollow where I killed the doe. I gave tobacco, my cherished photo of Daniel and my solemn promise during the offering. I promised to move over, to allow the young hunters their sacred bounty and I gave thanks for the many years of joy I’ve had hunting the whitetailed doe .I didn’t do this without considerable reservation, but I’ve given my word and will forever hold to my promises. From this day forward,” he looks into her eyes and smiles, “Joseph Lone Eagle will hunt only the majestic, giant bucks that have haunted his dreams in each of his forty-years a hunter.”
A sort of pellicle now covers a very special chamber of his predatory heart. It seals well, the promises he made in the enchanted hollow of the whitetailed doe and, in that this writer knows him intimately, it is certain to forever remain, just that way…a promise well-sealed.
“Come into the house,” said his wife, “You must be awfully tired?”
“No,” he said, “No, I’m not so tired. Just cold. Very, very cold.” Already he was missing his only photo of his dear, dear friend, Daniel…
And yes, he feels a hurt, a sense of great loss. For no longer will he hunt the whitetailed doe, no longer can he hunt with his fallen friend, at least on Earth. But he is a hunter, a predator of God’s miraculous making and he had, so very long ago, learned to live with life, with death and, with sacrifices. It is all too familiar to his predatory heart…