by Jay Cassell
From deer to rabbits, I found tracks of both down in the alders and Juneberry bushes along the river. Having already reserved myself to a dinner of tuna fish and boiled potatoes, I didn’t hold much hope of spotting either. And then I heard the ducks chattering out on the water, right back in the slough where I chased them from a couple hours before. The snow was still coming down, falling now as fine as dust. Everything was so crisp, clear, and cold. It sounded as if the ducks were right there, just around the next bend.
But creeping closer, I found them some distance away; surely the same ducks that had been here earlier in the afternoon. The drakes were tipping over one another to get their fill of whatever was down below. I sat hunkered down behind a drift of snow watching until it was clear they didn’t have any intention of coming closer.
It was a long shot, but a makable one. And in less time than it takes to write it, I picked out a drake in the middle of the paddling and let go an arrow. But by the time it got there another duck had climbed over the back of the one I wanted. At first it appeared as if I had missed all of them. Up and away I watched them, not quite believing that I’d missed. And as it turned out I hadn’t.
One of them faltered and went limp and fell just before they cleared the trees. It splashed down on the edge of the slough and I set off running along the bank to intercept him. A drake: a beautiful greenhead. The killing shot, a small gash on his neck where the broadhead passed an inch or so under the bill.
After that, I felt damn near invincible walking back to camp. I tried to take in everything: the soul- quieting snow; the heft of the mallard in my hand; the wood rattle of my arrows in the quiver as I walked. Everything. All while knowing it might be quite sometime until I felt this way again.
After plucking the duck clean (the breast skin the color of autumn corn), I found my little hide under the boughs of a cedar tree and there built a fire with the birch bark I’d collected. The flames I fed with snow-covered limbs that hissed and popped. The duck cooked at a miserably slow paced, only to come out a little dry—and a little burnt, too—when it was done. But in spite of that it tasted as good as any duck I’ve ever eaten.
It’s dark outside as I remember all this to paper. I put a candle lantern up on the underside of the canoe seat, and I’m lying here now packed in by down sleeping bag barely able to see the page under its dull glow. My quarters are tight, though wonderfully comfortable. For warmth, I wrapped in a towel a stone from the fire ring and stuffed it down into the foot of my bag. Before going to sleep I will take a look outside just to make sure it hasn’t stopped snowing.
I hope it snows all night. I hope to be covered over with the stuff by morning.
Saturday, November 22
Cold this morning and wakened every couple of minutes or so because of it. But in spite of that, I felt strangely refreshed—alive—when I rose from my snow-covered tomb this morning.
The sun was just coming over the trees, but it was miserable cold out in the air. A cup of coffee would have tasted fine, but I hadn’t had the foresight to bring any. So I settled for a cup of river water, which was so chilly going down it made my throat ache.
The snow stopped sometime during the night. But so much of it had fallen that a passerby would never have noticed my camp. Even the fire pit was covered over, and my tracks all but obliterated.
While getting my gear together, I ate a couple handfuls of granola from the bag I had ferreted away in my pack. Then I set off across the slough to retrieve my arrow that had killed the duck for me last evening.
The sky this morning was powder blue and streaked with clouds the color of fire. All the trees along the banks were bent over, their branches hanging down, laden with snow that everywhere glowed with a soft pink light. The arrow stuck in the riverbank, only its fletching showing, I pulled it free and then paddled in close to shore, paddling slowly, languidly, watching for deer, for squirrels—anything that I might arrow for lunch later that afternoon.
The river below the Brown Bridge impoundment runs faster than above. Almost too fast for hunting. Past the first bend, I surprised another paddling of mallards . . . 25, 50 . . . too many to even begin to count. They all lifted up from the water, a literal wall of mallards, and were gone so fast I didn’t even try to reach for my bow.
I drifted tight to the shoreline, veering away only when a log or fallen tree—a “sweeper”—got in the way, spooking tiny trout that darted under the boat and disappeared in the black water midstream.
Not long after the ducks, I came upon the mouth of Swainson Creek and what remains of the old bridge. “October 1907” is etched upon one of the crumbling cement trusses.
The bridge seemed a good place to stop and hunt for a while. I fished here this summer and had twice walked up on deer bedded down in the red diamond willow and switch alders.
The wind this morning was perfect, blowing right out of the North. So after stringing my bow, I slipped on my waders and started still-hunting my way along the riverbank.
The gurgle of the river made for quite walking, and the snow was piled so high on the banks it was like peering over a wall to see if anything was hidden on the other side.
I hadn’t gone far before spotting a deer, a doe, deep in the alders. I saw her ears first, then the soft curl of her back. She was close and looking away but in too tricky a spot to manage a shot.
One step on the bank and the snow packed down underfoot sounding exactly like it does when you sit down in a leather chair. She sprung to her feet and bolted. Then more deer appeared, flashes of them, making off ahead of me through the alders like rabbits. They left a half dozen empty beds, one much bigger than the others and standing over it I could smell that sweet, mucky scent of rut. A buck, no doubt. And a big one, judging by the size of the tracks, the old October rubs on trees I found as soon as I started following their trail.
The tracks led into a stand of white pines. I followed, not because I thought I could ever catch up with them but because I would have liked to have just gotten a glimpse of that buck standing there in the snow. But the tracks never did stop running, and finally I gave up on the trail and headed back toward the river.
I will eat a can of tuna fish before shoving off again. And maybe a potato, which I’ll wash in the river and eat raw.
A grouse! A big gray one. Rounding a bend I saw it just glide across the river—so close I could see its black beady eye—then set down right inside the trees on the riverbank close to shore. I dropped anchor, taking one arrow from my quiver—one shot—knowing I probably wouldn’t get even that.
It landed on the other side of a sweeper—a big fallen maple that looked as if lightning had blasted it into toothpicks in the middle. The entire crown of the tree was hanging in the water and made for a perfect bit of cover to sneak up behind.
But this grouse was a wary one. He went up and out of there like a clap of thunder without me ever getting so much as a glimpse of him.
I crawled up on the bank and found in the snow where he had been sitting. And where I knelt down to get a closer look at the track, another grouse flushed from a deadfall to my left. I got a good long look at this one; perhaps too much of one, as another grouse flushed then from the same spot. Expecting another, I looked for another grouse in that tangle—trying to separate brush from bird . . . staring as hard as I have ever looked at anything. And when I was positive they’d all gone, I took a step and another shot out.
I paddled hard through a long stretch where it seemed as if around every bend was one vacated summer home after another. But the river would again find its way back into the woods, and once there under the cool of the cedars, the snow-covered hills rose up from the water from either shore.
The rest of the afternoon I still-hunted the top of a ridge, finding only the old tracks of deer, trails leading down toward the river into a bowl-shaped hollow, dark with cedar and white pine.
Tuna fish and boiled potatoes for dinner. And a restless night in cold, wakened regularly by thum
ps on the canoe from a snow pack falling from the branches above.
Sunday, November 23
The deer you see while float-hunting are almost always bedded down. And sometimes they are sleeping, which to me is one of the most unnatural things to behold in the world. I mean, human hunters just aren’t supposed to see things like that. Only rare that we ever get a glimpse inside.
Stalking along the river, I once crept upon a deer kicking and twitching in its dreams like a dog. This morning, the one I find is cloaked in hoarfrost. Still as stone. Even as I sit here writing it, looking at what’s left of her sprawled in the canoe at my feet, it seems impossible, as if the past couple days have culminated in a dream.
When I woke this morning, I had been in fact dreaming of the past couple days. Dreaming of what’s real. Seeing myself and reliving the hours and postcard visions of a world covered in snow. I never understood that feeling of being outside oneself until this morning.
Three days within earshot of a river and all of a sudden to hear the gurgling rush of the current I have to really listen, as if it were the pulse of my own heart or the sound of blood coursing through my veins. All of a sudden, what has come to me is a feeling of belonging to this world, a idea most every hunter entertains: a sense that we could make it out here if we wanted to . . . if everything else went bad and we needed to.
The doe had dug out a place for herself in the fork of a fallen, snow-covered tree. I first thought her a stump. But then the image took shape. A deer! Drifting past, I anchored the canoe downriver and stalked back against the current.
I watched her dozing for a moment, waiting for the wind to carry my scent toward her. She didn’t leap to her feet, but instead rose like a tired old cow. The arrow skimmed over the snow bank between us, and when it passed through her chest a tiny cloud of white air puffed from the hole.
And with that the spell was broken. I found her fallen in the cattails along an oxbow frozen over. She dragged easily back over the snow. And now, as I remember it to paper, I feel an urgency to be gone from here, a sudden revelation coming as quickly as the felling of belonging, that I am not the savage this story suggests or that I often pretend.
I’m thinking of my wife waiting at the railroad bridge downriver and how good it will be to see her. How good it will be to shed these boots and layers of wool, to just sit with her in the warm cabin with the air smelling of orange peels and cinnamon sticks simmering in a pot on the woodstove. Three days, though it suddenly feels as if I’ve been away forever.
Pushing away from the bank, I dig the paddle deep, letting the river take hold of the living and the dead, pulling away on a strong current running the shortest way home.
Forty Crook Branch
TOM KELLY
If you happen to hunt a great deal, or if you spend a lot of time in the woods for any other reason, there always seems to be a half section of land, somewhere, that fits you better than it fits anybody else.
Any number of things can attract you to a certain place. It may be that you killed a particularly difficult turkey there, or you may find some specific bend in a creek to be unusually attractive. It could be an outcropping of rock, maybe a special view, or perhaps a stand of trees; but it seems that you never go to that place without the distinct feeling that you are coming home, that every tree and rock and fold in the ground is an old friend, and that nothing but good things are ever going to happen to you while you are in there.
Almost invariably, you keep quiet about it.
If, by design, you have hunted with the same man for a number of years, he will be aware of this flaw in your character—though he will never discuss it—and will respect your idiosyncrasy. If you are not a wholly insensitive and barbaric clod, you will very likely detect a similar flaw in him and return the favor.
I know, for example, a man who gets distinctly uneasy whenever the area just north of Whetstone Creek creeps into the discussion. He does not fidget, particularly, or shift his eyes rapidly from side to side, or anything quite so obvious. But his face takes on that carefully expressionless look you use when you are being introduced fulsomely as an after-dinner speaker, or when you fill an inside straight. Anytime we hunt near there, I am as careful to go in the direction he suggests—and stay there—as I am to listen to the location of the guest bathroom in a strange house and to refrain from opening any other doors on my way down the hall.
I open no strange doors whatever along Whetstone Creek. I do it to be polite. But even if I were impolite and opened them, whatever I saw might not strike my fancy particularly. I only know that somewhere in there something strikes his. Somewhere in there is something he considers private and wants to keep for himself. Obviously, he has found a combination of associations that soothe his soul, and it would be as inappropriate for me to pry into it as it would be to ask to see the love letters he wrote his wife when they were courting.
Besides, I am not all that interested, anyway, so long as he leaves Forty Crook Branch alone.
I am not really the sole owner of Forty Crook Branch. To be perfectly honest about it, I hold no color of title whatsoever. I pay no taxes on it, run no lines, and have no fences. I know that other people go there. I even know that somebody else hunts it. Some bastard killed a hen turkey in there last fall and picked her at the head of the hollow before he smuggled her out. I found her feathers.
But I have never seen anyone there, and if I am lucky, I never will. On those sleepless nights when I prowl around the house, I take a power of comfort in the hope that perhaps the hen murderer has died of leprosy, or maybe some infinitely more loathsome and disgusting disease I never even heard of.
The fact that unknown people may go there doesn’t really matter. My lack of proprietorship does not really get into the quick. The core of the matter is that while I am there, I own it; and that is enough.
Now that I have committed the impropriety of discussing the place at all, I cannot tell you exactly what it is that makes it so appealing. God knows I have looked at enough land and timber during my life to be selective, and I have the added advantage of knowing precisely and exactly what my limits are in this respect.
I found this out a good many years ago, when I was assigned to make a critical assessment of the value of a tract of nearly a quarter million acres that had been purchased and was to be divided into five equal parts.
We had a timber cruise, naturally, and had spent some little time poring over stand types and acres and volumes and all the other things that constitute value. But it was decided that a careful appraisal of the property, section by section, made by a single head that had been relieved of all other duties, could best put together an objective opinion of the relative values of the individual fifths.
I began the job on Thanksgiving Day and finished March 1st. Every morning I was waiting in the woods for daylight, and when it got too dark to see, I quit and drove home. With the exception of Christmas Day, when I rested, I spent the entire time, with no distractions whatsoever, in a careful and conscientious examination of a block of land with an excellent road net. At just about the 200,000-acre mark, I made a discovery.
Until then, I could take the map and put my finger on a section at random, shut my eyes, and picture the area in my head with a high degree of accuracy. After that point, old sections passed out of my mind as fast as new ones were added.
Obviously, then, I have a 200,000-acre head.
I have not offered these senile meanderings in an attempt to be impressive, but rather to establish the fact that there is a basis for judgment, that I do have a head full of timber, and that this is not the opinion of a necktie salesman with Grandmother’s eighty acres for comparison.
Forty Crook Branch and its environs are something special. If you draw the line from the upper end of Mobile Bay to the northeast corner of the state, go partway up the line and a little to the right, you will be able to locate it—and that is as complete a description as you are ever going to get.
The na
me of the branch itself no longer appears on the map, and I have no idea who named it originally. Most of our place names in this part of the world, except along the very coast itself, are either Indian or Scotch-Irish in origin. Whatever other abilities the Celts may have, they have a marvelous flair for pungent and distinctive place names and have left the mark of this descriptive poetry on natural landmarks all over the southeast. Names like Burnt Corn Creek and Oven Bluff and Gin House Branch and Goat Hobble Bald, the list is almost endless. The Indian names may be even more pungent but I cannot tell since I speak neither Creek nor Choctaw.
I suspect that Forty Crook Branch was named for the number of curves in it, rather than in any illusion to the companions of Ali Baba, but you never know. At any rate, it is remarkably crooked, and the terrain on both sides of the branch and its tiny feeder streams are as steep as any we have. The most pronounced feature of the area is a single central ridge that runs northeast and has a hollow on either side of it that is distinctly different from its matching hollow on the other side.
The hollow on your left—west—is a mixed stand of pine and hardwood and is almost an even mixture of each. I killed a turkey there one fall, early in the morning, that has the unique distinction of being the only flying bird I ever shot from above. I had missed them on the roost and they were down in the hollow fighting and squalling at one another to work off the ill humors of early morning when I heard the racket. I was able to stay under the crest of the ridge on the east side, until I got abreast of all the noise, and then run across the top and shoot down into the hole. They were all the way down in the bottom of the hollow, 120 yards away, and as they came up, one of them flew up the hill to my right, turned, and crossed along the slope of the ridge right to left and thirty yards below me.
The lead is identical and the swing is exactly the same, but the feeling is decidedly peculiar. I suppose shooting downhill is appropriate for hunters of mountain goats and big-horn sheep, but it is not all that common to bird hunters. Bird hunters get awfully used to looking up when they shoot. Every time I go along that ridge now, I stop and go over to the west side, and in my mind’s eye, watch him cross below me. I usually take a practice swing or two there in the highly unlikely event that the situation will ever come up again. I hope it never does. I am batting a thousand in such instances, and lightning never strikes twice.
