Hunt club
Hesitating to pull the trigger, an experienced huntsman learns a lesson about family, camaraderie and togetherness
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| Photo by Brad Bedoe |
There is blood on my hands. My thumb has a smear of rusty-orange/red along its inside surface and beneath my fingernails little crumbles of congealed crimson have lodged. My pants, too, are stained, gore intermixed with cuff-mud and burdock stickers adorn their hem. Most days this would be cause for alarm, but I’m not worried. Opening day of deer season is not the time for guilt.
Every year, for as long as I can remember, my father’s ritual of the opening day hunt has taken place on a 133-acre patch of land in Marathon, N.Y. Charlie Yaple, one of his old professors at the State University of New York, Cortland, owns the land. He bought it in 1977, moved his family there, and my dad and he have hunted it almost every season since. Charlie calls the land Hermit Hill; we just call it “Charlie’s.”
There’s a regular crowd that shows up at Charlie’s on opening day; four visitors, although the number used to be higher. At 4:30 in the morning we start to roll in, one at a time, cold air blowing through the opened door, past the blasting wood stove as we peel off layers of clothing. Charlie is always up waiting for us, a fresh pot of coffee and a box of donuts sitting on the table next to him.
His two chocolate labs, Brandy and Ally, lay next to the radiator, thumping the floor with their tails, noses on paws, staring up beneath their eyebrows with soulful brown eyes. Charlie doesn’t hunt anymore; he putters around with his old trucks and tractor instead, hauling wood and harvesting Christmas trees, or working on his pet project, a nature center a few miles up the road. He says he just got tired of it, didn’t feel the need to get out in the cold and sit for hours when he could be out taking care of the land and the house. He still likes to hear the stories, though.
Dad and I are usually the first to arrive. My little brother Ben used to come with us, but since the family broke up and he moved to Maine he has been missed. When he did come, the four of us would sit and shoot the breeze until the others got there, catching up on news, talking politics and telling jokes about missed shots and other hunting follies, or just staring out the window at the darkened woods and fields. Now things are mostly the same, but I miss the company of my brother. There is a sadness from his absence in the joking.
Dave is usually next, his white, freshly painted Toyota 4-runner rumbling to a stop next to our old green caravan. He’s a geography professor at Cortland. Never gets a deer on opening day, but he sure tries. He started coming in the mid ’90s and sits in the same stand every year. I always picture him coming up the hill, in from the cold after a long morning sit, his graying, icicled mustache and thin, round-rimmed, semi-fogged glasses framing a dripping, sharp nose and a slight smile.
Doug, Cortland’s director of alumni affairs, is the last to arrive. Fashionably late, he’s a friendly man, always laughing about something. We like to laugh at him too, sometimes, because of his penchant for getting lost. The joke is that he should hunt near Dave, the geography professor, but Doug says that then he wouldn’t ever see any deer. Ben used to hunt with him a lot.
Doug really shouldn’t be getting lost; the land isn’t that hard to remember, and 133 acres isn’t that large. From Charlie’s house on top of the hill you can look out over most of it. Southward there is an old power-line grown in with thick brush and old apple trees, next to the neighbor’s cornfield. To the north, curving northeast from the western edge of the land, a steep bank covered thickly in low growing thorn apples and scraggly blackberry bushes drops sharply west into an overgrown field. The field slopes gently eastward to meet it; together they form a left-leaning V that harbors a little creek and a narrow, swampy bottomland of red-osier dogwood and high marsh grass at its bottom.
Just past the field the woods begin, stretching northward. Charlie manages them well, cutting, keeping them open, the trees tall and straight. Hickory and beech dominate the higher western side, and where the woods dip to the east toward the curving bank large hemlocks droop their boughs. Beavers dammed the creek along the bank a few years ago, and a large, shallow pond now covers much of that hemlock bottomland. The tall bare trunks of the flooded timber host a heron rookery, and although the big birds leave for the winter their clumpy nests remain.
The deer don’t get lost here. They have a movement pattern we’ve finally figured out, although from the number we kill each year you wouldn’t think so. Muddy trails betray them, leading down the bank from the cornfield and the old apples, across the beaver dams and into the hemlocks. Sometimes they come from the west, out of a thick swatch of brush that marks Charlie’s border. Those trails, too, lead to the hemlocks, although some bypass them and continue across the land’s northern edge toward Bloody Pond.
I like hunting those hemlocks. There is something magical about the way their heavy branches trap the noise; it’s so quiet beneath them. They also trap the snow, and deer love to bed there during cold weather, underneath the snow-laden boughs. I’ve got a favorite spot picked out right where the high ground drops into the bottomland, against a thick old stump that curves behind me like a druid’s throne. I can sit next to it and look down the gently sloping forest floor toward the beaver pond, into and through a stand of the largest hemlocks, and see the deer picking their way from tree to tree.
Last year three small yearlings with characteristic, short-nosed faces, followed a heavy doe right past me, not more than 20 feet away. They were playing, jumping around, kicking their heels and chasing each other. The doe, I’d guess their mother, joined in the play too, and at one point was running directly at me up a little trail. I remember the way her hooves kicked dirt and dead leaves into the air, dark against the fresh snow, the way her fawns’ heads and white tails were shaking and the snorting sounds they made as they bucked and danced in front of me.
I could have shot any one of them, probably even any two of them, during the five minutes of their show. I had a doe permit, my gun was loaded, the safety was off. Yet I didn’t feel the need. I like venison; fawn are the tastiest, and I always get teased by the rest of the crew for never getting a deer, but something about the way these animals were enjoying themselves stopped me.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t about the killing. I’ve killed my share of animals before; I’ll do it again too. For me the hunt and its fulfillment are a connection to our evolution, a cable attached to our instinct and our heritage; a focused process that is valuably unclouded by the cultural baggage of civilization; the bones of our existence. This reticence wasn’t about death—it was something different.
I think it was the family, the camaraderie. Those cavorting deer were, to my anthropomorphizing eyes at least, happy together. The fawns still had their siblings. The mother still had her children. If they were just friends they had them too. They were in the place they were born, connected, living, playing.
Who was I to take a mother, a sibling, even a friend, away from them? When another member of our hunt leaves, like old Marcia Carlson, or Kevin, or Jason, something goes missing. The tradition is diminished, the camaraderie lessened. Deer aren’t people, we don’t know their minds. But it was precisely that reason, that we don’t know, that I didn’t shoot that day.
I’ll kill, I’ll hunt, I’ll be a predator, but my family too was broken once. I know what it’s like to miss a brother, and opening day is not the time for guilt.
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