My Last Hunt............

Myrtle · #1 10-26-2006, 09:51 AM

It was late autumn of 1970 and deer hunting season would soon be upon us in early December. I had been overseas in the service from late ’67 to May of ’70.

It was sure good to be home.

As far back as I could remember as a young boy, every fall I would witness the ritual of the preparation for the hunt. My grandfather, father and two uncles would clean their guns, get all the hunting gear out, and very early on the morning of the first Saturday of December off they would go. A two hour drive later, they would end up in their favorite deer hunting grounds.

My grandfather and his sister came ‘over on the boat’ from Calabria in the late 1890’s. He was 10 years old, and his sister a couple of years older. They traveled with their uncle’s family, and after making their way through Ellis Island and the immigration process, ended up going on to Chicago.

At the ripe old age of ten, grandpa got a job in a slaughterhouse. One day, on his way home from work, he heard cries coming from an alleyway close to his home, and upon investigating, found an older man attacking his sister. He carried a pocketknife with him, pulled it out and killed the man on the spot.

It turned out that the man was politically well connected, and it was necessary for him to get out of town......real fast.

His uncle had a friend ‘out West’, so out he got shipped, to work for the Union Pacific railroad as a blacksmiths apprentice. He traveled wherever the work took him building the railroads, from as far south as Arizona all the way up into Canada into the British Columbia.

As a young boy, I’d sometimes get to hear some of his stories about his life and times out West. He was a man of few words, and occasionally he’d tell me a story or two as we sat in front of the TV. There wasn’t a whole lot of choice back in the 50’s, but if there was a cowboy show on, you could be sure that we’d watch it together, and it would prompt him to tell me about the time he saw Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, or when he learned how to herd steers, or the time he shot a 400 pound mule deer, and the whole crew ate well for a week or so.

I never thought much of it at the time, but as I look back at it now, I find it somewhat bemusing to have had an Italian cowboy as a grandfather.

Every year I watched the ritual of the four of them preparing for the hunt. Some years they would come back with a deer or two......some years they would get skunked. Every year I yearned to go with them, but I was just a kid.

I took to being an avid reader of both Field and Stream and Sports Afield, along with my annual subscription to Boys Life magazine. My favorite author soon became a man called Robert Ruark, who wrote a monthly column in Field & Stream. He also wrote a number of books, the most notable titled The Old Man & the Boy. I still have that book to this day, and looking back on it now, I realize that it had a profound influence on me as I was growing up. I’d heartily recommend it to any reader.

I was a sponge back then, and absorbed everything that I could get my hands on; determined to learn to become the best hunter and fisherman in the world. By the time I was 10 or 11, I had vicariously traveled to the far corners of the world......from hunting Cape buffalo in Africa to fishing for monster rainbow trout in Patagonia.

I was ready to get out into the world and prove my mettle as an outdoorsman extraordinaire.....But I had a bit of a problem: I was a kid, and we lived smack dab in the middle of the city. Not much of an opportunity presented itself in the city forest of 3-deckers for me to demonstrate my newly acquired prowess.

In the late 50’s, we moved out of the city to a small town that was in ‘the country’.....20 miles or so outside Boston.

There was a real river less than a mile from my house. It had native trout in it, and there were miles and miles of woods and fields to explore all around us.

At the time, it was a young boys dream come true.

Life was both good and simple back then.....If I wasn’t playing baseball, I was on the river fishing, or out in the woods exploring.

Back to 1970.................I’m now 23.....married with two children. Grandpa is getting along; he’s now in his eighties, but the tradition of the hunt still had continued in my absence with him, my father and two uncles.

Grandpa was one hell of a tough old man. His hands were all gnarled and as tough as two nuggets of granite. His forearms, even at the age of 83 were still chiseled out of stone, and he had a grip like a steel vise. After he came ‘back East’, he learned the trades of stone masonry, bricklaying and plastering. He worked hard all his life, and his body showed it. Nevertheless, he could get out into the woods and still out walk most of us.

As I said at the beginning, it would soon be time for our annual hunt. Yes, by the age of 15 I had been included in the fraternity, but only for a few years. A little international disagreement called “Vietnam” has managed to create a four year hiatus for myself and most others of my age , thus inconveniencing my participation in the ritual.

For me, some things had changed. I still looked forward with eager anticipation to getting back out into the woods again. However, it was different: I really couldn’t tell you how or why, but it was. Looking back upon it now, clearly some of my experiences of the prior few years had changed my point of view about a number of things.

As the time grew closer, it became apparent that neither my father nor two uncles would be able to break free for the first day of deer season. There was no way that I was going to let Grandpa miss the first day of deer season.

I dutifully completed the ‘night before the hunt’ ritual. Stripped the 12 gauge down, oiled and cleaned it. Made sure I had fresh deer slugs. Laid out all the gear.....boots, gloves, leather hunting pants, wool jacket (with the special smell of the woods permanently embedded in it), thermal underwear and all the other necessities.

I’d be picking up Grandpa at about 3am. It would take us a little less than two hours to get to where we were going.

It’s pitch black that time of the night/early morning. Brimfield State Forest is crisscrossed with old logging roads.

Once you turn of off the main road, it’s slow going down those roads in the dark to get to where you’re going. We were planning to meet up with three of Grandpa’s friends at one of our favorite spots.

Sure enough, I pulled up, and they were already there. It had been a while since they’d seen me, so we spent a few minutes catching up, speaking in hushed tones and drinking warm coffee out of the thermoses that we had all brought along.

If you’ve never been in the woods at that pre-dawn time of the morning in winter, there is something very special about it. It is so quiet that the silence almost hisses at you. We had not gotten any snow yet, so the leaves were very crunchy and noisy, rudely piercing the silence whenever you stepped on one. The temperature was in the mid-teens; the air is crisp and has a bite to it, and it feels so good just to inhale. Combine that with the special scents of the woods all around us (the tartness of the evergreens......the decay of the past summers foliage), mix in the aroma of the coffee, and the smell of the woolen jackets and gloves....It’s a special time.

We planned out the hunt. These guys have been hunting this area for over thirty years. They know every nook & cranny of the land like the back of their own hands. In the few years that I had accompanied them, I had also become quite familiar with the area.

The terrain is very hilly.....lots of steep up & down ridges and valleys. Most of the trees are hardwood, now bare. There are groves of pine trees here and there. It’s very heavily wooded with some virtually impenetrable thickets. That’s where the deer will lie down during the day, and they’ll be moving back to them as dawn breaks.

My station for today will be the ‘woodpile’. The woodpile is exactly what it sounds like.....an old pile of logs that are a bit off the trail, situated on a gentle slope that flows down into a heavily wooded thicket. We all know where each of us is going to be, and as the sky changes from ink black to that pre-dawn blue, we all begin to make our way to our appointed stations.

It’s very noisy underfoot; the leaves are crisp and make quite a racket. We all do our best, but there’s no way that we can walk silently. As we split up, I can hear the footfalls of the others as we move away from each other.

It doesn’t take me too long to get to the woodpile. It doesn’t seem to have changed much at all since the last time I was there. I chose a spot to sit: the valley directly in front of me, and the hillside sloping upwards.....downhill to my right; going uphill to my left.

Once I’ve settled in, it’s time to be quiet...be still .......and wait.

Dawn breaks to a clear blue sky. The sun begins to peak over the ridge behind me, bathing my back in sunshine. The chickadees begin to make their typical early morning chickadee racket. It’s a fine day.

Some time later, the first gunshot of the morning abruptly shatters the stillness. It sounds to be about a half mile or so away off to the right; close enough to get something moving if it’s out there, so I now ratchet up all of my senses.

Not long after the shot, I think that I hear the faint rustle of leaves in the distance down the slope to my right. I strain to both hear and see, and sure enough, I can definitely hear something, and as the rustling grows more distinct, I can tell that it’s coming directly at me.

Deer are very hard to spot in woods such as this......you more often than not, hear them long before you see them, and in this case, that’s just what was happening.

The racket of the leaves led me to believe that there was more than one heading towards me. I could hear my own heart beating, and then, as if by magic, they appeared out of nothingness a few hundred feet away. First one doe.....then another.....then a third, and they were indeed heading directly at me.

They were cautious, as they always are. They would move a few feet, stop....look and listen for a few seconds, and then move again.

I sat there, as still as I could possibly be, waiting for them to come into range. My gun is an Ithaca 12 gauge pump shotgun, loaded with deer slugs. It’s very accurate at 40-50 yards, and they were almost in range.

Time seemed to slow down.......I had plenty of time to think. I made a decision. I was going to let them pass: There would be no kill for me today. I knew that some of the other guys were uphill to my left. They would get their chance.

The three does inched closer......They were now within 30 feet of me, when suddenly I noticed more movement down the hill trailing them. It was a buck, and what a beauty! At least an eight-pointer, and in his prime, and he was following right in his doe’s footsteps.

The does continued to advance......they actually got as close a 20 feet to me. I am still amazed that they did not catch my scent. They passed me and continued uphill, as the buck continued coming right at me.

He too got about 15-20 feet away, and when he did, I just whispered to him.... “Hey”......which stopped him dead in his tracks. He still didn’t see me, so I moved my head a bit and said.... “Get out of here”, and brother did he! A loud snort (which alerted the doe’s), and he turned, and in a flash he was gone, back down the hill.

The does, on the other hand, ran up the hill, and within a few seconds, there was the ‘blam....blam...blam’ report of the shotguns, and I could hear shouting back and forth.

I sat there for a minute or so......thinking about what I would do next.

It didn’t take too long to figure that out.........If I let my grandfather know that I’d passed up the opportunity for a kill, he’d be pretty disappointed, and that’s the last thing that I wanted to happen.

I waited a few minutes, got up and started walking up to where I had heard the shots. It didn’t take long to hook up with the rest of the party, and yes, it was them who had fired, but all had missed. Shortly thereafter, my grandfather joined us, as he was further off to my right, and had never seen them.

I too, had never seen them, I dutifully reported..........

The rest of the day passed......uneventfully, and at dusk we trudged back to the cars for the journey home.

Since that day I have never been in the woods with a gun in my hand.

The following spring, Grandpa passed........as did my uncle Richie a dozen years later........and then my father ten years ago.

The Ithaca still sits in my closet in its’ case. I take it out every few years and clean and oil it.

I still have the red plaid wool hunting jacket that Grandpa gave me those many years ago, although the smell of the woods no longer remains on it.

It’s now that time of the year again. The first frost has come and gone already. The air is a bit more brisk each morning as I go out to pick up the morning newspaper.

Pretty soon the stream ‘on the back 40’ will begin to ice over and it will be close to time for deer hunting season.

One of these days soon, I will take the old plaid jacket out, put it on and go for a long walk on the woods with the dogs.

It won’t be the same, but I’ll be hoping to capture some part of a long ago memory if a sight, sound or whiff of the scent of the woods is kind to me.

I’m looking forward to that walk as much as I did as a young boy all those years ago........