Father Water, Mother Woods

by Gary Paulsen

  Arrows were a problem as well. They cost so much to buy “factory-made”—twenty-eight cents apiece—that buying was simply out of the question. Six, seven, even ten arrows could be lost in a day while hunting, and to lose that much wealth in one day was inconceivable.

  A hundred cedar shafts could be purchased mailorder for two dollars and fourteen cents. Nocks to take the string were half a cent each, and for points it was found that empty .38 special-cartridge cases slid perfectly and glued on the wooden shafts and made as good a blunt—the best point for hunting small game—as could be purchased from archery suppliers. The police department had boxes of empty .38 special cases from target firing and would always part with twenty or so when asked.

  Mail-order feathers were expensive, but they were always slaughtering turkeys down at the hatchery by the railroad tracks, and they would let boys stand as the turkeys were hooked up to the overhead track and pull wing feathers off as the turkeys were sent into the killing room. One afternoon would give enough feathers for a whole year.

  The feathers could be held between two thin boards and the spine sanded off to make a base to glue to the arrow in just a few moments. Ben Pearson Archery sold a clamp-jig to put feathers on three at a time for two dollars, and it was guaranteed to last a lifetime no matter how many arrows were made. Duco cement was used to glue the feathers on, and they could be cut into a streamlined shape with sewing scissors as long as a mother didn’t know it.

  The arrows wobbled a bit and sometimes broke easily, and often—almost always—missed, but they only cost four cents each, and if by a miracle they were brought onto the target right they got the job done.

  The sleeve out of an old leather flight jacket left over from the war made a good quiver, held on with an old belt over the shoulder, and as many as twenty arrows could be carried into the woods for hunting.

  Hunting was different with a bow.

  With a gun anything was possible, ranges could vary, targets as well. Once the initial excitement was over and aiming could be accomplished, the little .22 single-shot became deadly anywhere from point blank to pushing fifty yards—using long-rifle cartridges—and it would take anything from grouse and rabbits to a deer or bear (those larger animals cannot be legally taken with a .22, but have been killed that way, as well as moose and elk). For many years the .22 was known as a camp gun or work gun and was all many woods-runners—trappers, guides, lumber-sealers—would carry, using it to get camp meat as well as for protection. But the gun removes the animal from consideration in a way, makes the activity less hunting and more killing, and makes it possible to hunt an animal without knowing as much about it as bow hunting requires.

  Hunting with a bow changes all things, even the way to move. With the bows then used, and the crude arrows, twenty yards was a long shot, an almost unheard-of shot on grouse or rabbits. Fifteen, twenty feet was more realistic—and closer was better.

  To get that close to game it is mandatory to know the game, to study it, to know that rabbits come to the edges of clearings in the early morning or late afternoon or that grouse will move toward gravel (for their gizzards) in the evenings before they roost so they can digest their food while they sleep. Hunting with a bow it must be known that having a dog will make grouse jump up sooner but they will land in trees to avoid the dog and might give a good tree-shot; or that a dog will run a rabbit but rabbits are territorial and hate to leave their usual area so will run in a circle, and if you stand and wait they sometimes will come back around and might give you a chance for a running shot—difficult to hit but challenging to try.…

  The real beauty of hunting with a bow is that there is no noise. A shot doesn’t scare all the game in the area, and even the animal being shot at often isn’t startled. Because it is so hard to hit anything, especially something as small as a grouse—smaller yet when it is remembered that it must be hit in the middle of the middle or the arrow will brush through the feathers without hitting the body of the grouse—it is easy to shoot all the arrows carried without hitting the bird. Failure is much more common than success. The area that must be caught by the arrow is only as big as a fist, and if the bird is twenty feet away, sitting in willows or brush, hitting something that small with a wooden bow and wooden homemade arrows, driving the back end of a .38 special blunt into a target that small is close to impossible. Once I shot fourteen arrows at a grouse sitting at the base of a clump of willows not ten feet away, every arrow I had with me, and the grouse was still there, and stayed there while I carefully reached forward, pulled one of the arrows out of the ground, nocked it on the string and shot one more time—this time brushing the grouse enough to startle it and make it fly away.

  But when it is learned, when the bow is understood and used as it was meant to be used, used as an extension of the mind and within its limits, the bow can be deadly. When shooting a true bow—not a sight-mounted compound with aluminum arrows (really almost a different kind of gun)—a true bow with no sight, it takes more practice, practice, until the fingers are callused from the string and the shoulders are corded with the effort, driving the shafts into hay bales again and again. When it is done enough, when the practice has gone on so long that everything is automatic, a strange thing happens.

  The arrow becomes alive. Without a sight, when it is at full draw and tucked back under the chin, the wood of the arrow sings and it is alive and the flight can be “felt.” Looking down the shaft the center of the center, inside the core of the center of the middle of the target can be seen. When that feeling is right, when the arrow is part of the mind and the mind is part of the arrow and the release comes smoothly and the string takes the arrow correctly, the arrow has no choice but to go to that place, the center of the aimed place.

  Some hunts with bows were disasters. No rabbits or grouse, all the arrows either lost because they snaked beneath the grass and couldn’t be found or broke when they hit stumps, to leave the boys walking home with empty quivers and no meat. Sometimes all the boys would hunt for all the day, and there would be one rabbit, one grouse.

  But not always. There was a time when all the wolves and coyotes and fox had been trapped out by the state—trying to control without knowing how to control. Since the wolves, coyotes, and fox were the only thing really holding the rabbits down, and since rabbits reproduce like, well, rabbits, the numbers became staggering. It was common to walk down a mile of dirt country road in the fall and count fifty, a hundred rabbits just sitting in the ditch or jumping back into the woods. They began to get tularemia—a disease transmittable to humans—and the state decided it was necessary to hunt the rabbits out, or at least take them down to a manageable number. Since almost no adults hunted them, the job fell on the boys, and it came at about the time bow hunting was at its peak. The rabbits were not wasted; after being checked for the disease and found clear, the carcasses were used for orphanages and poor farms. This was long before welfare or food stamps, and all extra or confiscated game was used for orphans and the poor.

  Nobody counted all the rabbits taken, but limits were not checked, nor encouraged, and many, many thousands of them were killed.

  On a day the boys were using wood bows and homemade arrows, in the high time of that hunt with empty .38 special-cartridge cases for blunts—on one single day the boys worked an eighty-acre stand of brush and poplar and took over a hundred rabbits. A hundred rabbits to get and tie the back legs to each other to drape across bicycles and cart back to Eckert Feed and Fur Supply, where old man Eckert paid a dime a rabbit.

  Later there were larger hunts. Later there were days using .22 rifles when three and four hundred rabbits were taken—all carried into town draped over hand-pushed bicycles to be sold for a dime each. The state paid the money through old man Eckert and then gave the meat to the poor and orphans, and it was not until years later that the boys found out Eckert was getting a quarter a rabbit and pocketing fifteen cents a rabbit for himself. And it was not for many years that the boys found out Eckert wa
s rich and owned vast holdings of land west of town, many hundreds of acres, the same acres the boys hunted; not for many years that the boys found out that old man Eckert had lived through the death camps in Europe and now spent almost all of the money he made giving the boys a dime a rabbit and keeping fifteen cents a rabbit—spent all of the money he made helping other survivors of the camps find a life.

  But none of the later hunts with the rifle or even still later hunts for love or hunts for life or hunts in the army or hunts in art equaled the hunt with bows when the rabbits were so many that they filled the woods and ditches and roads.

  The first deer hunt with a bow started almost a year before the actual hunt took place.

  A deer is so big a thing to kill with an arrow, so big and beautiful a thing, that the preparation becomes perhaps more important than the hunt itself, a kind of prayer.

  Sometimes the rabbits died fast when the blunt took them, and always the grouse died fast, but there were times when the rabbits were hit wrong and then the death came not so fast, not so clean, more like a natural death than a hunting death, more like a wolf death or coyote death or fox death or weasel death or owl death for the rabbit—a death to make the hunter think of the animal. And when that happened, when the arrow hitting the rabbit did not end him fast but let him scream in the high-pitched death scream that rabbits have, it made deer hunting seem impossible.

  There was too much animal for an arrow. It was forgotten then that almost all animals had given lives to arrows; that men in armor, men in blue cavalry, men in leather leggings had all died from arrows, died in hundreds, died in thousands, fell in rows to wooden shafts and steel or stone points.

  A deer seemed so big. But then the excitement set in, a boy told another boy that somebody last year had taken an enormous buck—a six-, eight-, ten-pointer that dressed out at a hundred eighty, hundred ninety, two twenty-five pounds; that the buck had been taken with one arrow shot at forty, fifty, eighty yards and the deer just dropped.

  Just dropped.

  Clean.

  That’s how the boy said it—like some are dirtier than others; like there is a clean way to kill, to die. As if such a thing could be.

  Soon it is too much, the excitement, and there comes a decision to hunt deer with a bow.

  Preparation takes time—a year—and money. Practice is vital. The only way to bring a deer down is to get a good shot, a proper shot, a correct shot.

  There are many bad shots. An arrow through the stomach, an arrow through a leg, an arrow through a rump, an arrow across the front of the chest, an arrow across the edge of the neck—all of these could kill the deer, let the deer bleed to death, but not kill it right away. A gut shot will kill but it might take hours, days, and if there is no blood trail to follow, the deer will wander off and die where it cannot be found. It will not be a clean kill.

  There are many more bad places to hit a deer than there are proper places and so, practice. Cardboard cutouts of deer life-size are made and pinned to hay bales and shot at until they hang in tatters. Again and again at ten, twenty, even thirty yards the cardboard is hit, hit properly in its cardboard heart, hit correctly in its cardboard lungs—hit again and again until the cardboard deer dies a clean cardboard death.

  But it is not the same when life is real—not ever the same.

  First there is the matter of the arrow.

  A deer cannot be killed with a blunt that works on a rabbit or a grouse. It takes a special point—a broadhead.

  But broadheads are expensive—a quarter each just for the points—and they bend and get their edges ruined easily, so it is not feasible to practice with them. On top of that, the broadheads used then were just simple, flat two-bladed points that were difficult to mount on the shaft straight. Because they were flat-sided and quite large they tended to “fight the feathers,” and cause the arrow to plane off in strange directions. Tip swore he shot one once that went all the way around in a circle and almost killed him but nobody saw it and almost nobody believed him.

  Because the broadheads cost so much and break so easily and are seldom shot at targets, there are terrible problems with accuracy that make it extremely difficult to get a deer, but still the attempt continues.

  Still the preparation goes on.

  Each broadhead is mounted as straight as possible, glued with melted ferrule cement that dries hard as iron, and is then sharpened, and sharpened, and sharpened.…

  For a broadhead to work it must cut effortlessly.

  Even primitive man knew this. The boys once found a stone arrowhead in a block of dried and cracked clay near the edge of a river. The head was of black flint and shined like new when wet. Wayne held it up to the light and said, “Look, the light comes through,” and as he twisted it to see the sun better, the old edges, buried in clay for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, the scalloped and shaped edges, slid in his grasp and nearly took a finger off with one small slicing action.

  There were none of the razor-blade inserts when we hunted that make the modern heads so deadly, and the flatheads used then had to be hand-sharpened.

  First a small file was used to shape a shallow, gradual edge on each side of the point. Considering that there may be twelve points—if such extravagance can be afforded—and each point has four edge-sides to file, the initial honing down can take considerable time. A week, two weeks can be spent, every spare moment used to file the heads. After the filing there is the actual sharpening, using an oilstone, and since no head is good unless it is as sharp as a razor and can literally shave the hair off an arm, this process may take longer than the filing. (It is, really, never done; Tip and Wayne argue that the points will get dull—lose their fine edge—just being exposed to air and they carry small stones while they’re hunting and resharpen the heads during breaks or sometimes while walking down a road or—once with Wayne—while sitting in church, much to the distress of Wayne’s mother, who hit him so hard with a hymnal he thought she’d dropped a pew on him.)

  Much was not understood then about hunting deer with a bow. It is known now about camouflage, about hiding and hunting from stands. But then most people just walked quietly through the woods until a shot presented itself. Those who could afford them bought soft leather moccasins to make the walking silent—or as silent as it could be on dry leaves and grass—but most made their own moccasins from patterns found in magazines and books.

  But even then the need for silence was understood, and the boys practiced walking constantly, feet straight ahead, weight down on the ball of the foot to step slowly, carefully, silently ahead, stopping every three or four steps to look into, into the inside of the woods, to look for a line, a curve, or a slight motion that could mean a deer.

  It often never comes.

  Days can be spent walking through woods, the bow held in the left hand with a broadhead nocked to the string, one finger holding the arrow against the bow, walking and looking and smelling and listening—waiting.

  Waiting.

  And sometimes if movement is not right or the boys aren’t lucky—sometimes a whole season can be spent looking, waiting, hunting for nothing; nothing except walking through the beauty of autumn days in the thick forest, moving through color and clean air and the soft light of a million dappled leaves while the act of hunting forces all the things seen, all the beauty into the mind, but it is not until later, until years and a life later, that it is understood. When it becomes known that the reason for hunting is not the deer, never has been the deer, never would be the deer; the reason for hunting is just that: to hunt.

  To hunt the sun, the wind, the trees—to hunt the beauty. In time, in memory, it all becomes more important than the deer, than the quarry.

  Than the kill.

  When it comes, it is not so much, and still it is more than anything before it and makes a sadness that will not go away even with life, even with all of life.

  Everything, every aspect of it is remembered for all the rest of the time there is; everythin
g.

  It is early morning.

  It is early morning and there are no clouds so the sun comes cleanly up in the east and filters new light through the chill air to make everything seem overly defined, almost to having cutting edges. Leaves are not just part of trees, part of the forest, but jump out in the morning air like small paintings, each a work of art alone. A rock catches light and becomes alive, seems to move; a tree limb stands out against the sky like an etching, caught and held in the new sun.

  It is early morning and cold enough so the air sticks in the nose and sounds seem more clear, sharper than they do at other times; a grouse moves, leaves rustle, and it could be anything—a moose, a bear, a deer.

  There is a deer, but not yet.

  First there is the woods.

  It is an eighty-acre patch of poplar. At one time it had been cleared land, a part of a small hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead, but the farmer who cleared the land had been driven out by the Depression of the 1930s. He had built a log house with two rooms and a loft and had tried to keep a family alive and happy on a hundred and sixty acres with eighty acres clear and eighty in brush and woods. But there was no market for anything the farmer grew, and he could not make enough for taxes, and so it went back to the state. And then back to nature. The poplars grew fast, and by the time of the hunt the trees were thirty feet high and the ground covered in hazel brush about waist high. The eighty acres can’t be walked through in a straight line. The hunter must weave around the clumps of hazel, and it is hard because the ends of the bow snag and catch and the arrow shaft keeps banging against poplar trees, rattling and making enough noise to scare away any game within miles.

  Any game but a deer—this deer, this special deer. But not yet.

  There is the boy.

  He hunts alone this time. Many times he has hunted this stand of woods with the other boys and taken grouse and rabbits with the blunts, walked through the woods in a line abreast. But this time Tip is sick and Wayne is on a trip and this has happened and that has happened, and he decided to come alone. He sometimes liked to hunt alone because he was alone so much of the time when he was in town because of his parents. He tries to have the right clothes, the right equipment, but there is no money, has never been any money, and so he must make do. He wears an old field jacket, so ragged it hangs almost in rags, but it is military green and seems to blend in and he thinks it is his lucky jacket because he was wearing it the day he got a shot at a twelve-point buck. He missed, but still he saw the buck, and though the shot went wide and missed he was of the thought that when hunting with a bow a miss was almost as important as hitting because actually hitting a deer seemed impossible—something in Sports Afield articles that always happened to somebody else.