by Bill Heavey
The Price of Marriage Award
Edwin Nichols was a little too focused on the flying carp for his own good. At least that’s what his wife, Vivian, would say. The two were on the Missouri River with a friend last summer when a silver carp leapt from the water and whacked her in the face, breaking her nose. While her husband and the other man were whooping it up, trying to grab the thrashing windfall, Vivian fell back across the center console, blood streaming from her nostrils. “They didn’t realize I had been hurt,” she said. “They were saying, ‘I can’t believe this fish jumped into the boat!’ I’m going, ‘Hey, guys!’” No word as to which couch Edwin slept on that night.
The Let Me Show You How It’s Done Award
Stalking wary whitetails requires three things: patience, stealth, and a sibling who agrees with you. Gregory Moss, forty, and his brother, Charles, thirty-five, were hunting private land near Zanesville, Ohio, when they found themselves in less than total agreement about how to proceed. The discussion turned into an argument; the argument became a wrestling match over who got to carry the shotgun; and the wrestling match caused the gun to discharge. Gregory was treated for a head wound at a local hospital. He declined to press charges, saying the shooting was accidental. There was no word on whether their mother had grounded them.
The We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat Award
Intrepid Floridian Sherridan Bouges, forty-seven, was fishing with live shrimp on Lake Harris last February when he hooked an unfamiliar critter that caused him great trepidation. It had sharp, spiny fins, a menacing mouthful of teeth, and what looked like heavy body armor. Who knew what a fish like that could do to a man? “It scared me,” he later admitted. Fortunately for Sherridan, his mother was in the boat. “He was afraid to bring it in,” crowed the elderly Esther Bouges. “I told him to pull it in with a net.” The fish, all twelve inches of it, was identified as a Plecostomus, a sucker-mouthed scavenger that feeds primarily on algae and is therefore common in aquariums. Nancy Tucker, manager of the nearby Animal World Pet Center, said somebody had probably dumped this one into the lake from a fish tank.
The Everything I Need to Know I Learned
from the Terminator Award
As president of the Tift County, Georgia, school board, Richard Golden knows that it’s not enough to say the right things; you have to follow through with deeds. Otherwise kids will see that you are not sincere. That’s why when he discovered Derek Pettiford, twenty-two, fishing on his property, he not only threatened to kill him—he also shot up his car. Pettiford said he saw no posted signs along the pond off U.S. 319 but admits that he should have realized the land belonged to someone. “But I didn’t feel like I was causing any dangerous harm,” he said. Golden, ever mindful of his position as an educator and role model, begged to differ. He used a shotgun to discipline the car in the radiator, windshield, hood, and trunk. He pled guilty to pointing a firearm at another person.
The You Can Arrest Any Citizen if You
Try Hard Enough Award
The owner and the manager of Bellar’s Place, Indiana’s largest private deer-hunting preserve, were just trying to make hunting less troublesome for their clients. But try telling that to overzealous federal officials. Russell Bellar, forty-nine, and Hinds Jones, thirty-six, are facing more than thirty felony charges just because they let hunters measure a buck’s rack before the selected deer was tranquilized, led into a pen, and “hunted” for as much as twenty thousand dollars. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, since 2001 the two men have conducted more than fifty of these deer . . . hunts. Authorities said their investigation also found illegal weapons, unlicensed hunters, and the use of bait. Bellar, a developer, denies that he charged hunters huge sums to kill particular deer, saying they had merely paid bed-and-breakfast fees. He dismissed the case—each of the thirty felonies carries a potential five years in prison or a $250,000 fine—as a political vendetta by the state department of natural resources. “This is all political stuff; that’s all it is,” said Bellar on the day of the raid. “They are against anyone that raises whitetail deer.”
The Shouldn’t Be Allowed Outdoors Award
Golfer Roy Williamson, sixty, hit a tee shot on a Georgia course that ended up in a wetland area. “I saw my ball pretty much in plain view,” he said. “Unfortunately, it was being tended to by a rattlesnake that I didn’t see.” Williamson said that as he retrieved the ball he felt what he thought was a brier scratch his right temple. Then he saw blood and a rattlesnake he insists was six and a half to seven feet long. His brother, son, and brother-in-law (apparently golfers go out in groups because it’s safer that way) came running to his screams. He remembers their bringing him to the clubhouse, but when he was next aware of anything at all, three days had passed. Although the snake bit him twice, he will live to chase the little white ball again. Doctors’ greatest concern was the bite on the forehead, alarming because of its proximity to the brain, even in golfers.
ON TRACK
I woke the day before Easter to find an inch of fresh snow outside and the house echoing with the kind of silence that means your child is playing with matches, putting epoxy on the dog’s feet, or seeing how far she can stick her tongue into an electrical outlet. Picking up the trail of powdered cocoa on the living room rug, I followed it around the dining room table and into the kitchen. Emma was humming happily and using a crescent wrench to blend equal parts cocoa, skim milk, and maple syrup in a mahogany salad bowl. Busted in midstroke, brown smudges covering the choose a career in lawn enforcement T-shirt that she has adopted as a nightgown, she stared up at me with the pinprick pupils of a girl high on sugar and caffeine. I surveyed the map of maple syrup drippings and cocoa on the floor. The dog chose this moment to rouse itself and shake, filling the kitchen with a fine brown fog. Like a chicken that continues to dance even though its head has been cut off, my daughter reflexively offered an excuse. “I was hungry,” she explained.
Parenting books say that disciplining a child in an altered state of consciousness is counterproductive. They also say that direct contact with the natural world is the only way to convince a kid that the best places to play are not necessarily the ones with the most pixels per square inch. With this in mind, I handed Emma a roll of paper towels and said, “Look at me. Clean this up. Every last bit of it. Then we’re gonna go track deer before this snow melts.”
It took a moment for the fact of her escape to sink in. Then I heard a shout of “Yay!” followed by the slap of wet paper towels on linoleum as I went upstairs. An hour later, we were tramping through a stand of thirty-foot-high bamboo in a pocket park between million-dollar homes in a nearby suburb. Bamboo is not native to North America, but bucks rub it just the same, leaving what look like hastily scrawled notes to one another on this nearly barkless grass. Emma quickly got stuck in the undergrowth of briers.
“You need a stick to beat those things down,” I told her. I cut one of the rubbed stalks with the saw on my Leatherman, then cut a length for each of us. Emerging from the bamboo, we jumped seven bedded deer not twenty-five yards away. They rose and hightailed it across the road.
“Whoa!” Emma shouted. “I saw a buck!” There are, of course, no antlered deer in the woods in April. Somehow I stifled my automatic impulse to correct her. The goal, after all, was to whet Emma’s interest in the outdoors.
“Cool!” I exclaimed. “How many points?”
“Seven,” she said matter-of-factly. “I mean eleven.”
We knelt to examine the beds, dry ovals of compressed leaves. We picked up white belly hairs and released them into the wind. We looked at the exploded dirt and snow granules behind the tracks of their initial leaps. Then Emma took over, finding and showing her student each new print. “Look, another one!” she cried over and over. “Whoa, this one’s huge! That’s the buck!” I was beside myself with happiness. My child was getting hooked on the primal energy of the nondi
gital world, on deer, and on tracking, the world’s first and best game of connect-the-dots. And she was already showing the exceptional imaginative powers, also known as lying, necessary to hunters.
These moments of blissful father-daughter communion, I’ve learned, are as rare as free beer at birthing classes. Sure enough, the drugs wore off minutes later and Emma crashed. I gave her a juice box and cheese sticks, but they didn’t pack the same jolt. She started to cry and said that this whole endeavor was stupid. She demanded to go home. Now. I hoisted her onto my shoulders, removed her pink rain boots to rub her feet, and discovered she had decided to go sockless. Her toes were as cold as ice, so I stuck my gloves on her feet. I looked as if I were carrying an angry little puppet through the woods on my back. She grimly hung on to her stick, which banged me in the ribs every third step as we looped back toward the car.
“And I’m never going tracking with you ever again!” she blurted out, as if making me angry might somehow lessen her own suffering. By now my own euphoria had worn off. I strapped my child into her car seat. As I stamped the snow off my boots in preparation for the long and whining road home, I was primed to deny television time if she so much as whimpered again. It was at this moment that Emma suddenly whispered, “Daddy! Buck! Big one. Over there!” I instinctively turned my head. “Aw, you just missed him,” she lied. My heart, almost against its will, softened at the speed with which she could morph from irritant to huntress, and at how easily she could pull me with her. I asked how many points he had. “Sixteen,” she said solemnly. “I’m serious, Daddy. He really did. We have to come back here.”
“We will, monk,” I told her. “I want to see him, too.”
LOST IN THE WOODS
The crossbeams of my world have been buckling lately, and as is my custom in such situations, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods. It’s too early for fishing and too late for hunting, so I’ve been after sheds. This has given me time to think about a persistent problem in my life—the great number of people and things that don’t live up to my expectations. At any given moment, I could name dozens of examples. Here are three: 1) the person who tells me that setting up a digital trail camera is “intuitive,” 2) anyone who brings cranberry-flavored beer to my house expecting me to drink it, and 3) people who get divorced.
I know that divorce, like fruit-flavored beer, is a fact of life and that many otherwise honorable people get divorced. Still, I’ve always believed it was the quitter’s path. The way I see it, if you stand in church before God and somebody’s fat aunt with a video camera and declare, “Till death do us part,” you don’t get out of it before one of you is pushing up BioLogic Full Draw (a proven blend of cultivars that contains an astonishing 38 percent crude protein). And so the fact that I myself am in the midst of a divorce poses a dilemma: I must either admit to being a hypocrite or add my own name to the list of people who, in my personal opinion, fail to measure up.
The details of my marital breakdown are not particularly juicy. Nobody lied, cheated, or tried to become an Amway distributor. If there was anything out of the ordinary, it was the event that finally set the split in motion, which just shows that no one ever completely understands his own heart. In my case, the trigger was the death of my best friend’s father, Lou, whom I’d known and loved since I was a boy. He was ninety-five. He’d lived about as full a life as a man can. His death should have come as no shock. And yet that’s exactly what it was. It turned over something deep inside me as surely as tumblers align in a lock when the right key is inserted. I suddenly recognized what had been staring me in the face for quite some time. The marriage wasn’t working, and despite counseling, I didn’t know how to make it work. I asked for a divorce.
Rattling around at night in a nearly empty rental house, replaying the words I’d slung and those slung back, I felt like a ghost, like a man so lightly tethered to this earth that a good breeze might come along and blow him into the next world as easily as it would a column of smoke. More mornings than not, I’d sit down to a stack of work and find myself unable to focus, unwilling to try, and not particularly heedful about any consequences I might be courting. Then I’d drive until I found some likely-looking woods and walk south-facing ridges and fence lines and deer trails until it was too dark to see. I got cut up pretty badly the first few times.
After a while I also started noticing footprints headed to the same places I went. Hey, I thought, somebody else is getting a divorce, too. The only strategy I could come up with was to look in places others weren’t willing to go. I up-armored myself in Filson Tin Cloth chaps and jacket, long, leather-palmed work gloves, and a heavy stick to beat down the briers. For the really thick brush, I took a machete I’d filed very sharp. I wasn’t finding many sheds, but the few I did were good ones, enough to keep me coming back. More important, the woods were the only place where I understood the rules anymore, the only place my body seemed to regain its weight and substance. Sometimes, after a few hours there, I would remember that millions had been through the same horror and survived. Occasionally I could even imagine being happy, feeling whole again. And every so often, when I stumbled upon an antler and thought of an old, wild buck standing there a week or a month earlier, when I touched that smooth, hard shed, I would feel blessed for a moment. It was like I’d found all the wildness and ancient knowledge of the woods distilled and compressed into a tangible thing. At that instant, the fact that I was alive, that I was able to have a life full of sorrow and loss, joy and experience, was itself a miracle.
This happened to me just last week. It was my turn to have my daughter Emma the next Friday, which was forecast to be balmy. We had already planned our first cookout at my new place. When I got home from the woods, I called Jane and asked if she would like to join us.
She seemed taken aback for a minute, but we talked for a bit and at last she accepted. “Bill?” she said as we prepared to hang up. “Thank you. Really.”
I put the shed, a five-pointer, on the table with the others. And felt good about myself for the first time in a long while.
STALKING THE HIGHLANDS
I’m no stranger to unusual stalking situations, but this is definitely the first time I’ve had whortleberries in my pants. I am crawling down a 50-degree slope right behind my guide, Niall Rowantree. Right on my heels is gillie Steven Grant, eighteen, dragging the padded rifle case behind him. We are low-crawling through the heather or gorse or whatever the hell you call the wet, tundralike stuff covering the Scottish Highlands, trying to keep from getting busted by the dozens of red deer scattered across this mountainside. I don’t know about the others, but I’m doing more sliding than crawling. To stop, I have to stiffen my arms and shove them into the ground before me while flexing my toes to vertical and dragging them like anchors.
Meanwhile, the farther we travel in this manner, the more vegetation finds its way into my clothes. Every time Niall (pronounced “Neal”) stops to assess our progress and the disposition of the surrounding deer, we rear-end one another with all the precision of the Three Stooges trying to burgle a house. I use these occasions to retrieve handfuls of herbage from my pants.
We are sneaking on a big red stag, an eight-pointer, lying on a bench several hundred yards below us. At least I think he’s still below us. The weather was glorious this morning, when we were glassing the hills from the road below. Since then, curtains of mist and pattering rain have begun moving through from the southwest, reducing visibility to eighty yards.
A Land of Myth and Legends
I have come to Scotland on the advice of my dentist. He told me that for the price of an outfitted elk hunt, you could fly here, sleep in a clean bed each night, eat like a king, hunt the legendary Highlands, and almost be guaranteed success on red stag. These deer, the largest land mammal native to the United Kingdom, are smaller cousins of the American elk.
For a long time, the beasts were reserved for royalty and lan
ded gentry. Today, they attract English, German, and Scandinavian hunters, as well as an increasing number of Americans who, like my dentist, have discovered that red stag offer a challenging and satisfying hunt. I searched on Google, asked around, and eventually found Corrour (Ka-RAH-wer).
My first impression as I leave Glasgow and drive north into the Highlands is one of disbelief. Given that the whole of the United Kingdom is a little smaller than Oregon, I figured the Highlands would have the character of a good-size American theme park—you know, a few castles and golf courses, deep-fried Snickers bars (a national specialty, I’ve been told), and tacky little shops selling plaid T-shirts. Wrong. The “road” from the highway to the lodge and cottage where I’m staying, for instance, is twelve miles long and takes forty-five minutes to navigate. One false move and you’d end up four hundred feet below in a stream gushing along like a loose fire hose.
The estate itself is fifty-two thousand acres and more isolated than you’d imagine was possible in Europe. Before the access road was finished in 1972, the only way to get here was by train via the tiny Corrour rail station, the highest and most remote in Britain.
It’s not hard to see why. Big, stark, and strangely compelling, the countryside is nearly deserted, with a population density rivaling that of Papua New Guinea. This place zeroes in on your psyche and grabs hold. What I’m experiencing is not déjà vu, the sense of having been here before, so much as the feeling you get when you meet another person and intuitively sense that you already know each other’s stories. Maybe it’s ancestral.
This is, after all, the WASP Mesopotamia, the place from which my forebears and those of millions of other Americans were cast out or fled when the Highland clans, the last vestiges of the feudal system in Europe, collapsed in the eighteenth century. Niall says that nobody lived here year-round in the old times. The winters are too brutal. It was only in 1899, when the wealthy classes created by the Industrial Revolution took up the gentlemanly sport of stag hunting, that a grand estate house was built, complete with four stalkers’ cottages.
