The Hunter’s Journey

By Ralph Martone

 

Perched atop the old Hotpoint refrigerator at camp is an item that seems oddly out of place. Resting in its place of honor is a section of wild cherry branch. Only about 14 inches long and an inch in diameter, the small piece of wood stands as a reminder that hunting is a sport of inches. Drilled squarely in the center of the branch is a hole from a flintlock rifle.The hole represents one of the biggest bucks I’ve seen while hunting. Each time I take the stick from its spot atop the refrigerator, I relive the hunt, the shot and the sight of that heavy-racked buck trotting off, headed for parts unknown. The small portion of sapling, containing a clean, round hole tinged in gray from the passing lead ball, is important to me. It reminds me that hunting is more than just the sum of your successes; that trophies lie not just in mounted heads or filled tags. Hunting is the extent of your experiences, interacting with nature and becoming part of a whole larger than yourself where you neither control nor dominate. The outcome is the result of your preparation and planning coinciding with the lives and instincts of other equally endowed creatures.

As deer hunters, we watch intently for movement that signals the coming of the buck we expect so much to see. When long minutes turn into hours and the day is wearing thin, our expectations are lowered. The buck needn’t be so big and the horns can now be less than the trophies seen on calendars. We are beginning to accept the worst; nothing will pass this way today.

Then, without the warning or fanfare that such an event deserves, a deer materializes. Looking as if it has always been there, it fits into the surrounding landscape like a long, lost piece of a puzzle. The deer by itself is enough to drain the breath from your lungs. But now that your eyes and mind see the horns, there is no way to regain the breath you’ve lost.

You try to react, but its over and the deer is gone. You stare hard at the spot where the deer once stood. A spot that for a brief second held so much hope. Everything now seems different. At the same time there are both more and less possibilities. As the buck proved, in hunting, anything can happen. Even though the deer is long gone, its ghost remains standing in that very spot. If you look carefully and concentrate hard enough and long enough, you can still see it standing there. Now in your mind’s eye, you raise the gun and fire, ending the hunt just the way you had planned.

It happens in all hunting. Turkey appear suddenly, putt and retreat, only to live on in our memories forever. Grouse hunters approach likely looking cover, ready, knowing what they must do at the first sounds of a flush. And yet at the flush they are left staring at a small hole among the branches where the rising bird has disappeared forever from our sight, but never from our minds.

In the beginning, days afield are measured in terms of games seen, shots taken and tags filled. With time, many hunters reach an understanding about what it means to be successful. As the years pass and the hunter matures, new measures of the hunt develop. Shafts of sunlight filtering down through the forest’s canopy to light up a distance hillside take the place of game sighted. Encountering a red fox hunting mice in a hay field or a goshawk cruising the timber in search of pine squirrels can more than make up for shots not taken. And finally, tags left unfilled are faced without regret as long as friends and young hunters have returned safe and happy from the day’s hunt. Only in one’s dreams does every buck fall before the hunter’s gun, every turkey answers the call with resounding doubles gobbles and each grouse takes wing from the grapevines only to land with a thud on the autumn leaves.

Watching a successful grouse hunter, I often think that it may be the moments just after the kill that are both the happiest and saddest. As the hunter reaches down for the fallen bird there is always a mixture of emotion. Success is blended with awe. The love for the bird as it once was is not easily replaced by the stirring of success. I’ve never seen a grouse hunter pick up a fallen bird that he didn’t smooth the feathers that encircle the neck. Running a large callused hand, scratched and bleeding from the push through the kind of thickets that grouse call home, over the crown of the head and down the back with a touch so gentle even his wife might be jealous.

I never set out to be a hunter, but in the end I can think of nothing better to be. Yes, I have other interests. I enjoy fishing, baseball, and basketball, but in reality, I am neither a fisherman, a basketball or baseball player. In the end, I am a hunter.

By Ralph Martone