A Day in the Field

I once said that I learn more about myself during a day in the field than I learn in a year at the office. Those were tall words, especially in the hindsight of over 20 years in business and over 20 years of hunting. Were they true?

Certainly when I said them, they were. There were so many lessons to learn back then. Nowadays the lessons come harder, and the lessons now hit so hard when they do come. It's harder now to lay a fresh edge to the wind and let it lay bare to the cold.

At the office, careers die easy. Somebody pulls some real boner and gets the sack. To the office, they are dead. Everyone does a little grief bit and moves on. It’s easy to be spiritually slack at the office. Nothing is for keeps. If it’s too bad, you just downplay it on your resume when you go to look for the next job. In the field, there is no taking back a bad shot, no telling a gut-shot deer you are sorry. It is all for keeps. Whatever you do in the field may have no impact on the rest of the world, but it can haunt you until you die.

I remember the day we all hunted at a farm beside a man and his boy out for their first bird hunt. I still remember their shotguns—matching re-blued Winchester 1897’s. It was the family’s father/son shotguns that had been lovingly kept up.

We’d get on a pheasant and the bird would go on point and the bird would flush, and the boy would shoot, and it would be a miss. He consistently shot over the bird. We’d all agreed we’d hold off until the boy had one. Finally, we came past a barn, and a pheasant flushed suddenly and the boy threw up his gun. Bang!

BANG! My buddy had had enough and decided to help out. I’m pretty sure the pheasant was dead on the first shot, but my buddy had already committed himself with his Citori. The bird flopped into the grass. The father ran forward to retrieve the bird. The boy just looked at my buddy like he had shot him instead of the bird. He was numb.

The father came up with the pheasant and shook the boy’s hand and hugged him. The boy just stood there like a statue, while the father put the pheasant into the boy’s game bag. It all ended as if nothing bad happened, all you could tell was the life had gone out of the boy’s eyes.

After that, we split up. The boy and the father took off with one of the dogs and my buddy and I went the other direction. I tried to explain it to my buddy, who was oblivious.

“That’s the way it was in my family!” He said, when I tried to explain why the kid had been less than enthusiastic. “You got your shot, and if you didn’t get the bird, it was fair game for everybody.”

Yeah, well. I found out as we walked that he’d had the same thing happen often to himself as a kid. He had had to tote a bunch of birds over the years that really weren’t his, but one’s he’d missed. He'd had to watch someone else take them. It had all been boiling in him while we were walking with the father and son and finally he had acted impulsively. I spent a good while that morning hearing about my buddy’s pent-up anger. When he was spent, it finally sunk in that he had started that whole mess over again in a new generation.

Anyhow, I was by that farm the other day. We hadn’t hunted it in fifteen years. I saw the barn, and I saw the hillside. Suddenly I could see the father, the kid, those re-blued 1897’s, and those kid’s eyes staring off into a great emptiness. I was just a bystander, but it still haunts me.