On Home Ground
There is a place of trees . . . gray with lichen.
I have walked there
thinking of old days.
—Ezra Pound, “Provincia Deserta”
ALTHOUGH THE CABIN IS TRANSFORMED INTO “DEER CAMP” for a couple of weeks each November, my nephew Charlie Sewall and I are driven yearlong by a strong urge to return home. This urge for our annual migration may reach a peak in November, but the preparation leading up to it is constant. During the summer, a stroll in the woods with friends and family when Charlie visits is often a poorly disguised scouting trip for the perfect tree to sit in during hunting season. As fall approaches, we begin to exchange weekly e-mails about food and other essentials. When the big day is finally here, it may take priority over other commitments—it’s time to go no matter what, and when we get to camp on York Hill our tradition is underscored with a few sips of whiskey reserved since the previous fall in an old hollow stump with a cover, disguised as a table in our cabin, and with a venison steak from last season taken from the freezer as a “starter” to kick off the first day of this new deer season.
The whitetails are there all year long, but you would hardly know it until fall. Suddenly they are on everyone’s mind. Walk down Main Street or into the Farmington Diner for your morning coffee—walk anywhere and meet a friend—and often the first question is “Gut your deeah yet?” Almost everyone aches to be able to say, “Yup—a nice eight-pointer!” but most will likely respond with “Not yet.” And then you’ll hear about where they’ve seen a recent antler rub, a fresh scrape under a fir bough, or the leaves pawed on a beech ridge.
During deer season in Maine, you leave from wherever you are and go to your “camp.” It’s usually a tarpaper shack on a back road in the hilly woods some fifteen to twenty-five kilometers away. Some of your neighbors will be there, too, and you’ll stay up long into the night playing cards and drinking whiskey and beer, and the main topic of conversation is the deer you remember seeing as a kid, the old deer stories you heard, and the buck you hope to see tomorrow. No matter how long you stay up, you get up before daylight to start the wood fire and to boil fresh coffee. After the briefest of breakfasts you go out the door under what you hope will be a starry sky. You look up to the Milky Way splashed across the heavens directly overhead. You walk in the dark to reach a favorite spot, maybe a thick branch up in a spruce tree, a stump, or a big moss-covered rock next to a spruce from where you can look down a long slope through the hardwoods. In the not-yet-light, and not-still-dark, you listen with senses hyper-alert, and you wonder if the blood pounding in your ears is distant footsteps. You later hear the first chickadees as they awake, and a flock of finches chatter as they fly over. A raven calls in the distance, a jay cries, and a red squirrel chatters and rustles across the frosted leaves. An hour later you see the eastern horizon blaze orange through a lattice of black tree silhouettes.
This is what I remember growing up in the hilly country of central Maine in the 1950s, and deer season hasn’t changed much today.
My childhood neighbors, Phil and Myrtle Potter, were both trout fishermen in the summer and partridge hunters in October. But their real love was deer hunting in November. One of my first hunting trips with Phil, when I was probably fourteen years old, was to his favorite hunting grounds by the Potters’ camp along a brook on a dirt road in Carthage, near the village of Weld. Like most other camps, this one was a one-room tarpaper shack with a bunk bed, a crude table, and a stove made from an empty metal drum. Like every other camp, it was a retreat from civilization; in this case civilization was Wilton, a major town of five thousand people. Having a camp was a foothold in the wild, and going there felt like a return to the tree house or den you had as a kid. The camp was patched together not according to any blueprints or state, town, or other regulations; it was all yours.
Phil and Myrtle’s camp was jointly owned or at least used with “Huck” Williams, also from Wilton. On this trip, Myrtle drove to camp and dropped Phil and me off on the way, so that we could cross through the rugged terrain from Route 156 and trek partly over and around Mount Bald, to come out at camp, at the end of the day if we were lucky. Mount Bald is bare and glacier scraped at the top and has a broad ring of red spruce forest below the ledges. An unbroken forest of maple, beech, and birch covers the slopes all the way down to brooks at its base.
Phil carried his 30/06 in his right hand, and I the .22 squirrel rifle I had bought through the Sears and Roebuck catalog with fifteen dollars earned doing Phil’s barn chores in mine. As we stepped off the road and I looked up the mountain, I saw the dense dark spruce thickets near the top through the now-bare branches of beeches and maples. Those spruces seen through a light fog seemed mysterious and distant. As we walked through the hardwoods near the foot of the mountain, Phil showed me claw marks of bears, almost always three or four parallel grooves, on the old beech trees. We saw black, now-healed scratches in the gray bark, and I was excited to see also freshly grooved yellow ones. Occasionally Phil pointed out possible day-old hoof prints indented into the leaves, and then we found an antler scrape on a sapling. A little farther I saw pawed ground where a sprinkling of dark brown earth had been flung back over the recently fallen yellow and orange leaves. In the middle of the disturbed patch of ground was a large clear hoof print. My mind was now aflame with deer. The hours went by and we hiked kilometers, but we saw no deer, nor heard any. Except for the occasional scream of a blue jay, all was almost spookily quiet. I knew, though, that the deer had to be somewhere, if I only looked hard enough through the foggy haze. That evening we met Huck at camp, and we warmed ourselves by the wood stove as Myrtle cooked supper. Stories were told, and it was a day well spent. I had gotten the deer fever if not the deer, and those same woods have beckoned ever since.
I was a sophomore in high school when Phil first loaned me his fallback rifle, a 30/30 lever-action Winchester (which I now own and use), handed me five bullets, and let me loose on my own. I went out across our field in the back to the barn and into the woods beyond. I hunted there for maybe an hour and a half every morning before school, and then again after coming home. I got to know those woods pretty well. They were mostly semi-mature hardwoods sprinkled with a few giant hemlocks. The big trees over the years all had been worked over by pileated woodpeckers. Carpenter ants had eaten out their rotting centers, and some of them were by now mostly hollow. In the fall when the goldenrod and asters were in bloom in our fields, I had followed a strong line of bees into our woods and found a bee nest in one of these hemlocks. Remnants of an old rusted sheep fence braided down the middle of our woods, and next to it grew dense patches of juniper bushes thickly populated with “rabbits” (snowshoe hares). In late November they showed up white, unless the snow was early, in which case they were invisible.
I had dreamed of “getting my deer” for a long time, and when one morning I saw a movement and a patch of brown ahead of me behind the junipers and it morphed into one, my heart leaped into my throat. But I somehow managed to fire and get the deer. All deer are remembered, but the first is most memorable. I told my friends about my deer at school that morning, and they came out into the woods with me after classes to bring it out. My mother snapped a picture, as Bruce Richards, Buddy York, and I—all in crewcuts—posed with it in the farmyard. The snapshot shows me hoisting the front of the pole that held the deer and Buddy the rear. I had succeeded at something that had meaning to my friends and was proud and happy. Now that I was charged with success, the woods were so exciting that I wanted to spend an entire year in them living off the land, maybe even to get a bear.
The most compelling reason to be in the woods, aside from getting a pet crow, was to catch something to bring home to eat. It was hunting, fishing, or beelining. Even if these natural tendencies were soon sublimated by the intrusion of sobering and civilizing cultural influences, they continued to hold sway.
I still hunt the whitetail deer, but now mostly with Charlie, wh
o graduated from Bowdoin College and then got a graduate degree from the University of North Carolina and is now a toxicologist for Merck Laboratories in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is overrun with deer, but he drives the twelve hours it takes to come hunt with me in the home woods where we’ve always hunted.
More seasons than not, Charlie and I don’t “get our deer,” and on those occasions we imagine that there just aren’t any around. A fresh tracking snow usually proves us wrong, though. No small part of the rebuttal to the invisible deer notion is that deer can hear better, smell better, and get around better in thick woods than we can.
But hunting is not just about shooting a deer; it’s about the ritual of being on the land, which is the excuse for the long time spent with generally no obvious practical reward to show for it. Hunting is when you get up at 4:00 a.m.—time enough to fix your breakfast and get out into the woods while it is still pitch black, when everything is still except your footsteps on the frosted leaves. You make it to your favorite tree, climb up, and are in place on a thick limb an hour before daylight. And then you listen. You hear an owl or two hoot and then, as it begins to get light, the churring of a red squirrel, and the chickadees. On one morning of your two weeks of listening and freezing you may have heard in the distance what you thought were footfalls of a deer, perhaps. And your heart pounded because you recognized that sound as different from others you’ve become familiar with—a mouse in dry leaves, a grouse walking, a red squirrel scurrying. Chances are you never saw the deer. The sound faded, or stopped. But you’ve seen chickadees and maybe kinglets from up close. You’ve contemplated every moss and lichen near your perch. You’ve walked kilometers, and slowly, very slowly, you have become familiar with “the place.” Whether or not you hold title to it, it becomes home simply because you get to know it.
Deer come and go, but the experiences of them, seen and unseen, leave memories more lasting than the taste of venison. One of these was when I brought Charlie to camp in 1989. He was then about the same age as I was when I got my first doe, and I took him into the same beech ridges where Phil and I had seen the bear claw marks and buck’s pawing prints on the ground under an overhanging spruce branch, and the antler rubs on nearby young trees. Charlie and I had been hunting all morning and gradually working our way up Gammon Ridge, the next rise over from Mount Bald, to check for activity under the red oak trees that grow on the top. When we made it to the ridge top near noon, we sat down to munch on some snacks. We were sitting under the oaks on a shoulder of the hill, at the edge of a boulder-strewn slope. We could see the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the distance, but rock obstructed the view directly below us. The leaves were dry and rustled easily, and after we had been sitting quietly for a while, we started hearing possible footsteps in the distance below. Their rustle in the dry leaves was coming closer. We tensed with excitement and hunched down, frozen into position, and waited. Suddenly, a buck stepped out from behind a boulder, perhaps only nine meters in front of us. Two shots rang out as one from our already-lifted rifles, and we raced down in excitement to find our buck. We gutted it and spent the rest of the day dragging the eighty-kilogram deer out of the woods. Charles Senior, Charlie’s father, had the head mounted as a memento. It is now at our camp and reminds us of that day.
Years later. I had hunted until the very last day of the season and still had not seen a deer, when suddenly a big buck jumped up in front of me, and in my surprise I did the unpardonable—I was careless and the one shot I managed to make only wounded him. There had been heavy rains in the past several days before a snowfall, and the brooks had become raging torrents. I had no problem staying on the buck’s track because I saw blood on the snow. But then he headed directly for and then into Alder Brook. I took off my boots and all my clothes, held them and my rifle aloft, and waded through the swirling icy water. Chilled through and through when I got to the other side, I dressed quickly and again picked up the spoor. I spooked the buck again, and he headed back to the same brook. Again I undressed and crossed behind him. Only then was his misery ended in death, although my relief in delivering him did not cancel my disgust at myself for wounding him.
Every year is different. The day after Thanksgiving in 2007, the flu hit me the day we arrived at camp. That night the sky was lit up brilliantly, and I saw a shooting star. I saw another one as soon as I stepped outside under the moonless sky at 4:30 the next morning. Then it clouded over, and we hoped for tracking snow. But at 4:00 a.m. the next day, when our alarm clock again jangled and we jumped out of bed, we heard rain—pounding, gushing, and pummeling rain. Still, Charlie and I were out in the woods and in place on our favorite stands an hour before dawn. His is a flat moss-covered rock under a red spruce tree overlooking a long rocky slope, mine a fir tree with thick branches in the notch between two hills.
The torrential rains only occasionally let up to a drizzle during the next two days, and our normally tranquil brook soon swelled and became a torrent. As we perched on our stands we heard, for hours, the heavy pounding on the soggy leaves below. We strained our ears but didn’t hear a footstep or a twig snap—but why should we? We couldn’t even hear ourselves walk when we climbed down to wander through the dripping woods. We couldn’t see far through the gloom and thick sheets of rain, either. When we made it back to camp at the end of each day it was dark, and we took our shots of whiskey neat and chased them down with beer. We lit a propane lamp and got a fire blazing in the camp stove to fry up potatoes with sliced kielbasa in a big black iron skillet and hung our clothes to drip and dry next to the stove.
It got colder after the clouds blew off a couple of days later. Our tree stand shook and swayed crazily in the gusts of wind that roared and whipped all around. We became tree huggers, and cold ones at that, until we climbed down to wander around in our heavy waterlogged boots. Deer sign was scarce; we saw an antler rub on a speckled alder stem that showed yellow and orange—fresh! The sign recharged us with adrenaline, but by the end of the week the three cups of strong coffee and two ibuprofens with buttered toast and jam for breakfast were no longer enough to keep me going.
I wimped out. I told Charlie, “You know, we don’t have to get a deer—let’s save ’em for next year.” He agreed. But as I walked down the hill to get in my pickup truck and drive back to Vermont, he picked up his rifle and went into the woods. He stayed for almost another week. Still, the 2007 hunt left Charlie, not just me, without venison. A month later Charlie e-mailed me that he had already bought his 2008 license; he was already counting the weeks until the next year.
A year later, on the 8th of November, Charlie again drove all night from Pennsylvania. He got to camp just minutes before I did from Vermont. We could have spared ourselves a total of thirty hours of driving and gotten deer more or less by our back doors. But that was not the point—this was the Place. Our York Hill. Period.
Charlie unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Scotch, and we had a swig for good luck and good cheer, and then we had just enough daylight left to check for signs. We saw none.
The next day, Sunday, has since colonial times (separation of church and state notwithstanding) been reserved in Maine as a day when “everyone” traditionally goes to church. Since the natural tendency of men is to be enjoying themselves hunting out in the woods sitting maybe on a stump, instead of a pew in church, it was made illegal to hunt on Sundays. Fat chance of us going to church, so Charlie and I planted an oak tree next to the cabin instead.
We were up at 4:30 a.m. on Monday, lit the propane lamp, and got the fire roaring and the water boiling. We had lain awake at night weaving thoughts of our hunting the next day, as spiders weave their intricate webs in the dark. Now we poured hot water through the coffee filter into our cups and sat down on the couch to savor taste and aroma, companionship, and anticipation just before leaving. And like spiders sallying into their webs from their lairs, we were soon ready to walk our favorite trails that are like the spider’s drag lines, because they bring us directly and qui
ckly to our favorite spots far out in our territory, to wait for prey. Out we went from the warmth to walk under a dark sky, one behind the other along the one-kilometer path to the three-notch (all bucks, one about 115 kilograms) big fir tree. I’m the better climber and so elected to go up the tree. Charlie went a hundred meters farther to “The Rock” with the two-notch (one young buck, one doe) red spruce next to it. The spruce’s roots growing over the green moss-covered rock make a natural seat, with the tree as a backrest. So now we were in the middle of our territory, poised and ready.
It was still too dark for me to read my watch dial when I reached my familiar perch some seven meters up, where I could stand on a thick branch and drape my arms over two others, right and left. There was still another branch to sit on, if I wanted a new position. I was in a gulley with potential views up two hillsides. But the view in the first faint morning light was more for the imagination than the eyes. On the other hand, my hearing was magnified. A barred owl hooted in the distance. The raven pair would soon call as they awakened on their night perch in the pines by the cabin.
The Homing Instinct Page 24
