We all wear a leash it seems, for most it is electronic, that smartphone, twitter, internet connection to the world. Some people can not take it off, for any length of time at all. I am the odd one in I do not have a smart phone, I have a phone the size of a small brick. If someone ever gets a text from me, they'll realize I'm either dying or out of bacon, it's something serious People look at the phone and say "what apps does it have?" It's said with the same expression as "what do you mean, you're not on Facebook!?" I say "it has the ringing app" and they think I'm kidding
Some would think me odd, but I'd rather think I'm not out of synch with communication technology, I just move around the edges of it, haunting it, seeing the world by and in a different perspective, a world designed by the same grand engineer, but seen not in bursts of texts, fragments of rock and stone and sky, the fragility of soul, the strength of bone, impervious to the harder air, and open to the warmth of flesh.
Frankly, I just prefer to run off lead.
But imagine for a moment that time, of our parents, grandparents, and beyond Where there was no TV, often no radio. Neighbors might be miles away, what books were in the house, were perhaps read dozens of time already.
I remember though, my Mom saying, that growing up, although there could be times of great aloneness, she was never lonely, for their was a creativity in that solitude Grandma would make cakes and breads and jams, some to eat, and some to sell, so there would be food each day after my Grandfather died so young. For the children, when their chores were done, there was much to explore; fields and furrows, the fragrant bins of a local grist mill, remnants of wheat to chew as gum, flax that slid through the fingers like water, leaving a puddle on the floor.
When everything was done for the season, my Mom would crawl up in her uncle's barn, her small form high up into the barn and sit in a little space, the sun on her face, and dreaming of, not cold and hunger, but of kings and warriors and mysterious woods fraught with deer, living and dying beyond the hubbed little world of a Depression farm.
No one cared what some celebrity twittered they had for breakfast, no one reported in every nano second what they were doing or where they were going, Women knew when their men would come in by the tilt of the sun, and meals were spent, not with heads held down, texting, but with heads bowed, giving thanks for the opportunity to work hard for their food.
I too, still need those kind of days, and for me, they are often the days of the hunt.
It's a fall morning, the sky clear and cold. Overhead, a satellite tracks across the sky catching and tossing down words both meaningful and meaningless, the whole world connected by electronic devices, as much a part of them as something they wear. My phone is silent Honestly, I don't even know if I brought it with me. I really don't care.
I look out at the world at ground level as a child does, everything so small, yet remarkably enduring against the broad, encompassable earth. Across the road the remains of a cornfield, small predators scurrying within the maze, seeking prey. To the east, the sun pulls itself up to the horizon, as the stars above melt into the liquid night. Off in the distant, a small rise of hill behind an old farm, pine trees bunched up a tilted slope, hidden and expectant.
Early mornings are nothing new to my family. Dad loved to go fishing and would get up at three in the morning to get ready and make the drive to where the deer and the steelhead played. Mom would get up with him, make him a hot breakfast and then go back to sleep until the kids awoke.
A friend heard that story and said "my wife won't get up early with me" before his hour and half commute each way to the city. One day, twenty minutes out the door, he realized he forgot something and went back, expecting the house to be dark and quiet. But the kitchen light was on, there were shadows of someone in the kitchen, there was the sound of laughter. He walked in, not knowing WHAT he'd find and there she was, his wife of 22 years, frying an egg. . . for their Labrador Retriever. He said "you don't get up to make me breakfast but you get up early to make the DOG breakfast?" She said, "well, he likes his egg in the morning".
But not every one is a "morning person". Some, even with chances to go to bed early, finding they need a pot of coffee and perhaps a taser to get them moving in the morning.
As a youngster, I'd gone bird hunting a few times, and whitetail hunting when I got my first shotgun, but my experience with large animals as I dove into adulthood was limited to some of the livestock I'd have to drive around when traveling on missions in strange foreign lands.
Many of you have been in such places, countries where livestock roam freely and you soon learn that although you can maneuver through a herd of three dozen goats and not put even a small (it'll buff out) dent in one, you can NOT drive through a cow. A cow refuses to give way and nothing will make them change their mind, not horn honking (the Hindi brake pedal), swearing loudly in Norwegian or having the natives whack at it with brooms "Oh blessed, scared cow, please remove thy self from our lane of cheap antiquities, yes we take American dollar". That cow is NOT moving, until you swerve to avoid it, at which point it will drop down into the lane directly in front of your bumper faster than Tony Stewart.
It seemed my life was one frantic journey to such places as that, a beeper drawing me out of sleep in the middle of the night, life a constant flurry to keep moving, because if I sat still, if I had a moment in the silence, I would see and hear the things I knew I didn't want to know.
But I wanted to go hunting again someday even as I knew back then that my spouse would never let me, leaving me alone to work when he did such things without me. But given my life, the demands of old family and new, and taking care of a small farm when I wasn't off flying all over, taking any overtime or hazard pay I could get to keep the wolves from the door, it's not as if I had time. In the end, the call of a loon was nothing more than a deep keen that would be released from my soul in sleep, the sound sometimes awakening me.
Years later, all I had of those days was his old business strongbox. It held no sums but only the empty record of talents misapplied; gifts abandoned and betrayed, until there was nothing left to destroy. I had no one telling me I couldn't hunt any more. I had no one really saying much of anything, no one really knowing what to say.
But then, a lifetime later, it seemed, someone said "do you want to go hunting with us?" It began with friends that somehow made me part of a gathering that began unexpectedly and ended around a campfire Even being a rather motley band of brothers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, we were serious in our hunts. We scouted and built blinds and checked for rubs and scrapes, long before the season started. The night before, we'd have a meal and perhaps a cocktail. Most imagine the meal before the hunt as being gentlemen sipping whiskey outdoors in front of a "bed of glowing embers" on which a pan of trout gently sizzles, like something out of a Hemingway novel. I have to tell you from experience, "bed of glowing embers" is as elusive to the average hunter as that 14 point buck.
No, for us it was running through waves of heat to fling a few burgers on the roaring conflagration that was our "gently glowing embers" from at least ten feet, then retreating, hoping that rum cocktail that someone "whipped up" didn't spontaneously combust. The dinner was sometimes burned, it was sometimes raw in the middle, but if you could cut it without the chainsaw or poke it and not have it fight back, you figured it was good to eat. But we had friendship and we had stories. and we told the stories that the naive and the young don't know, but hunters tell, myself simply listening, as I thumbed through the old photos of previous generations.
In those photos of the men from generations past, faded and dog-eared from time, the pride is clear on their face. They look leaner and more of the woods than photos I've seen in some fancy hunting catalogs now. Men who counted on their hunt to feed their families. They look into the camera with eyes a hundred years old, there in the glare of the camera bulb, the courage, the restless heart, too strong for the indoors. There it is, captured in that brief flash of light, then disappearing into the darkness, home with their kill.
The men in the photos were all dead and gone. But at least they weren't dead and gone while still drawing breath, trapped in thickets of suburbia, all the instincts of their fore bearers watered down to tasteless existence. Food from the store, health from a tanning bed, and dreams trickling down a drain in a house that saps all your money and energy.
We sat up until the fire died down, an ember jumping free of the flame and lighting on one of the old photos. I quickly jumped to brush it off, realizing too well that a 1/4 inch cinder is longer than time, and the flame it can start is larger than remembrance or grief. I've found out the hard way that burning wreckage is, unfortunately, stronger than both courage and will.
Sleep was a sleeping bag on the ground. Everyone else could roll their up until it was the size of a loaf of bread. No matter what I did mine was the size of a round bale of hay. But with the fire finally winding down and deer camp quiet, I slept, dreaming of hunters long ago, a toast to their days, peace to their ashes.
The alarm went off so very early and we were on our way out well before it got light. I'd given up perfume weeks before and I had an assortment of hunter friendly products to wash up with. I could go out with a body wash that smelled like "dirt" or unscented. I went for the unscented, headed outside, dressed and ready, my eyes bright from excitement, not from a eyeliner pencil or a pot of glittery shadow.
I was a "probie" when it came to hunting really, it had been so many years. But they figured that out when I took a deep whiff of the "new and improved" Tinks with "what does THIS now smell like?" WHOA! But I could handle a firearm well, I was strong, and I was not afraid of much of anything except spiders, vending machine sandwiches and those ladies in the department stores that try and spray you with perfume, as if you were a mugger, and Chanel was the new mace. I was ready. Or was I ? How would I do out alone in the cold and the dark, the elements around me reminding me again, how alone I really was.
But adrenalin and pride pushed me out the door, eager to rush into something I'd wanted to do again for years, leaping into something I'd known would happen, that feeling that somehow lovers and suicides both grasp in that instant when it's too late. The fact that it was spitting snow with temperatures in the minus area, did not even slow me down. I was with people I both admired and loved, and I was going to hunt if I froze to death trying, I muttered under my breath, a beggar's prayer to the wild.
We weren't carrying any walking talkies or any such gadgets. If I made they heard a shot, they'd send someone, as I would need someone to assist me through the field dressing. If I had to, I could whistle. If I sing, cats gather on the porch but I can whistle like a longshoreman.
From the woods behind us, came a deep seated grunt. A primordial huff from inky nothing, letting us know, that not only that he was there, that he knew WE were there. Deer don't get to be enormous by not being wily. We split into four lone hunters, walking a couple miles, widely spaced on the 500 acres we were on. We walk through trails barely visible in moonbeam, avoiding the deer trails so not to leave scent or sound, taking back brush filled routes into out spots.
I now wait. Alone. This was different than sitting solitary in a home. There I just felt lonely. Here, it was something else, something my Mom hinted at; the not quite believing, not quite awakened sense of isolation that was fully alive; he breathing spell of ancient verbiage of desire and newly found need. Hearing the celestial hush of a world hurtling through space, the small tiny rustle of a tiny creature worrying only if he is prey before daylight. I was up in a mid-level blind, nothing more than a small platform from which I'd climbed up simple stakes set into the trunk. Cautious as to the final silence of night that would envelop me if I fell out if it headfirst, I lean around cautiously, feeling my shoulder hang there just for a moment in space, so I knew where my best balance was, counting my backbone as it lay up against the trunk that was my only support.
The woods came alive. If you hunt or camp, really camp, you know what I'm talking about. When sound by sound you become aware of life around you, the chirping of birds and a chipmunk mocking the deep episcopal purple of the night. I sat, flexing my feet in their boots to keep them warm, clutching my weapon to me like a newborn babe in arms, ears picking up every little sound, eyes scanning my world for what I sought. The sounds themselves flexed, continuously rising, then falling to silence, life, then death, a sharp cry in the underbrush a small joy, or a sudden end. The woods were alive, as am I, a small figure in a tree blind, a wet seed on the hot, seeing ground, waiting for something.
My first ground blind up at the Frank James farm. Not subtle but it worked.
The day goes so fast, yet time passes in slow motion, the woods trembling with shimmering forms that flash before my eyes, glimpsed for only a moment as they blend into green as the dawn slowly melts into view. Leaves caress my check, as a small storm moves in. From where I sit, I can see it for an hour, not encroaching closely enough I needed to seek a safer spot, but flirting with a small spot of land, distant artillery flashes against a the sky slowly bleeding into brightness.
This was a day alone hunting, not boredom or despair but listening to the sound of the world as I dream of gods and mere men, blackpowder and black labs, men in kilts, prime rib and everything in between. I saw no deer but I was occasionally heckled by squirrels including one that was so short and fat he may have actually been a disgruntled hamster. I tried to ignore them, pulling my gun up, finger off the trigger and occasionally saying "bang" at them to see if they'd leave. They did, if only to go harass someone else.
I simply sat and waited, looking upward into the deep veined richness of space. Any lingering doubt I had as to my ability to be in this spot, at this time, stops, as my heart jumps at the shadow on a 12 point buck entering my view.
It was almost dusk when he came forth. From a small ridge line marked by sentient rows of corn, he moves quietly, stopping, listening, smelling. Seventy-five yards away, one movement on my part as he looks my way, and he would be gone before I could pull up and aim. The moment is there in between a heartbeat, a sound, a sixth sense and he begins to dart away. Thinking back to something that came from one of the previous evenings old stories, I put up my fingers to my mouth, tasting the earth, tasting myself, and I whistle. One brief, sharp sound that breaks the lie of silence. The buck stops for just a moment and my shot rings out.
He didn't go far, the bullet going through his heart, one leap toward the heavens and he was down, providing in that moment, a closure of a cycle for both he and myself. With his life, giving sustenance for the upcoming cold winter, I stand in respectful silence for a moment over his body, thankful for what we will have on our table this winter. A prayer of thanks that comes on the edge of a sharp knife.
Soon, someone would find me, hearing the shot, but for now there is only deathly silence, the woods giving up no living sound, the darkness simple an echo of that that went past today, snorts and snuffings, the chatter of squirrels, the smell of warm breath, cooling flesh, scarred hide and strong bones within which there still lay secrets that even the darkness is reluctant to reveal.
I wait for the sound of the vehicle, knowing he will eventually come for me, even as I gave up waiting, the ruts in the road remembering the press of tires, even after a long period of drought
I look up the trail as I wait, looking with eyes hundreds of years old, an esoteric glance, not of this world, but of one newly found. This was the only call I needed this day, the one of the outdoors.
- Brigid