Ghosts of Hunting Past

It's cold and clear.  We park the truck along the river behind a stand of trees and then we quietly walk about 200 yards down river.  The sun is still sleeping below the horizon and the sky is a deep, slate blue.  All the landscape is a silhouette of black against the sky and the churning river.  As we situate ourselves behind our natural blind of dry, yellow river grass and leafless bushes to wait for sunrise, I can hear the squeal of their wings as the golden eye ducks fly high over head.  As I stand like a statue in the cold, I can see my steamy breath escape with each quiet exhale  and I listen and watch the sky as it begins to grow lighter.  There in the quiet of the early morning my mind drifts back to hunting days long gone by.

When I was a little girl, hunting was a big part of our family.  Everyone participated.  Everyone who was old enough that is, and I was not.  But, my dad and my brothers were and so were their friends.  At the crack of dawn they would all gather in my mother's warm, glowing kitchen well before dawn, wearing their matching red flannel shirts hand sew by Mom.  The air was electric with the excitement of the day.  Mom would be at the stove cooking up a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and toast.  She would fill the thermos with steaming hot cocoa and put it in the hunting food box.  This box was unique and always recognized as the "hunting box".  It was a wooden crate with a hinged wooden lid that Mom carefully packed with apples, and cookies, and deer heart sandwiches and....my own favorite, the giant Hershey bars with almonds.  The men would joke and laugh heartily as they discussed the upcoming deer hunt.  I would sit in my flannel pajamas in the kitchen door and listen to their stories.  Oh, how I wished I could go.  They talked of driving up hills so steep that the boys would fall out of the back of Uncle Judd's old jeep.  They would tell of one group pushing the deer through the groves of trees to where the other group would be waiting.  There were great tales of enormous bucks that would run for miles after being shot and the hours spent searching for them and then dragging them back to the truck.  My Dad said that was the difference between venison and deer.  Venison you shot by the road and plopped it in the truck and were home by noon.  Deer you had to chase for hours and then drag for three miles to get to the truck and you were lucky to be home by dark.  I remember stories of snow storms that caused them to have to abandon their kills and return the next day to try to recover them.  Stories of broken vehicles that had to be limped back home.

Soon, they would be on their way.  I would wait anxiously for their return.  Hunting was good in those days and more often than not we ate venison and they were home by noon.  They would come in the house hootin' and hollerin' and smelling of blood, cold, and dirt.  They would pull out Dad's cables and ropes and string the fresh meat up in the garage and I would watch in awe as Dad carefully removed the furry hides that he would later trade for soft, buckskin gloves.

The best part of the entire hunt was going through the hunting box to see what was left.  I knew if they brought home venison instead of deer, there would probably be most of the huge Hershey bar left over and I usually got the spoils as my consolation prize for not getting to go hunting.

As time went by and I finally got old enough to hunt, Dad grew older, the deer grew sparser, and I watched the old days of fall hunts fade into memory.  Three of my boys had the opportunity to hunt with Grandpa and I'm sure those are memories that they will cherish forever.  As I stand on the icy riverbanks and wait for the ducks to fly, I am taking visual photographs of these days and archiving them in my own memories so that some day I can share them with my own grandchildren and they too can enjoy those days long gone by.