A place to sit, and watch, and remember why we do this.
[By Kurt Cox]
I FORGOT MY POLAR BEAR. The one printed on the blaze orange side of an insulated seat cushion, right above the words ICE FISHING. HUNTING. SNOWMOBILING. The one whose other side is printed with an antiquated woodland camo pattern and whose entirety is snow-proofed by an oyster of thick plastic laminate stiff and yellow with age.
Eight hours will be a long time to sit on an unpadded, upside-down, five-gallon plastic bucket. But hunting with Tony is sufficient incentive to endure it.
The bucket serves as the seat in a ground blind I call the Fort. The blind is walled with logs and roofed with fresh fir branches laid atop dead branches from seasons past. Today it has a stucco of wet snow that shields my orange-jacketed body from the sodden wind and suspicious eyes.
Despite my frostbitten bottom, I’m optimistic. My father-in-law, Tony, told me a ghostlike eight-point buck had been seen near the Fort. His hazel eyes briefly traded elderly fog for boyish mischief as he gestured uphill with a mittened hand and sent me to the Fort in his place.
This is the fifth Thanksgiving I’ve left the Rocky Mountains and elk country to hunt deer in Upstate New York. Before these hunts, Tony referred to me as “What’s his name.” The only thing we had in common was a fondness for his daughter. Tony’s handy. I’m not. He could build a nuclear submarine with the tools in his shop. I don’t have tools, or a shop. I also have mannerisms and customs formed far from his Northeastern roots. Before I began making annual hunts back East, Tony also called me “Rebel.”
But now that we’re hunting buddies, our differences no longer matter. We share a rapport that comes from knowing how long the other one will sit on-stand before getting up to walk around, what kind of sandwich is in his pocket, which shots he’ll take and which he won’t, how much adverse weather he’ll endure before saying, “Let’s call it a day.”
We had a shaky start. Our first year, I was on-stand and had a 10-point buck standing broadside at 60 yards. I shouldered the smoothbore shotgun, settled a holographic red dot on the deer’s shoulder crease, and triggered a sound much, much louder than the one I make when I release an arrow at an elk.
To my great surprise, the buck was still standing, unhurt, and as disoriented as I was from the shockwave. I fired twice more before the buck realized he was the one being shot at and trotted away.
How was I going to explain the missed shots to Tony, and to his hunting buddy Mike, whose gun I’d borrowed? I couldn’t even explain it to myself. There was no blood in the fresh snow that showed every detail of the buck’s tracks. There was brush in the sightline that the scope didn’t pick up, but none of it cut by slugs.
When we gathered at the end of shooting time, we tried to solve the mystery. Mike hung a single square of toilet paper on a tree 60 yards away. They wanted to know if I could shoot. I wanted to know if the gun was sighted in. Using a tree trunk as a rest, I aimed, fired, and the center of the toilet paper sprouted a greasy black hole the size of a quarter. We all just shrugged and accepted that missing that deer was another one of those unsolvable hunting mysteries we’d all experienced.
Every year my father-in-law’s hunting stories get funnier, or more interesting, or more personal as trust and familiarity between us grow. He’s tickled by my elk stories, especially the ones that involve his daughter. Since our marriage, she’s gone from a nonparticipant to an elk camp manager, a spotter, caller, tracker, field dresser, and pack mule. In quieter moments, I see a sense of loss, of missed opportunity in his eyes. A potential hunting buddy grew up right under his nose, right in his own home. But it never occurred to him that any of his four daughters would or should join the hunt.
By the time we park the car, he’s back to telling hunting stories. There aren’t enough hours in the day for him to recount them all.
My wife, Denise, is now part of our Deer Camp. That is, she joins us at Mike and wife Maria’s house when we come back in for the day. Sometimes we hang a deer in their garage to age. Sometimes we convene in their basement to trim, grind, and package meat. But we always sit around their pub-height kitchen table, so cozy that anything on a counter or the stove or in the refrigerator can be reached by one of us without standing. We tell stories, sip whiskey from a special bottle that lives on the back of a shelf, and eat Maria’s deer stew and Mike’s homemade preserves that he retrieves from his well-stocked root cellar.
The first time Denise joined us, Tony was sitting next to her, huddled over his stew, willing warmth into his arthritic hands. He explained to her that the stories they share are as much a part of the hunt as putting food on the table. Later she told me, “I looked over to my right and saw the daddy I never really knew as a little girl. He worked the night shift. On weekends he was up early to hunt or fish. He’d sometimes take us fishing, but we really couldn’t sit still, so fishing and hunting became his time.”
Tony recently began telling me about his experiences as a 17-year-old infantryman in Germany at the close of WWII, always while he’s driving us to or from the woods, when he has a good excuse to avoid eye contact. He speaks as if to himself, as if he doesn’t know I can hear his thoughts. The stories are of loss, of hardship, of horror and tough choices, and of the relished and rare humorous diversions. It’s his way of honoring comrades, those grown old and those forever young. It’s my way of knowing him better through the events that shaped him.
By the time we park the car, he’s back to telling hunting stories. There aren’t enough hours in the day for him to recount them all. We should probably stop talking while walking to our stands if we expect to see game, but who am I to tell him to be quiet?
