Some Twenty Years Gone

This does not have a whole lot to do with deer hunting, but then again it has everything to do with deer hunting. This story has a long set-up too, but then it took twenty years to get to the punchline.

Saturday Night was atypical from the start. We stopped working on chores early, like we were going bow hunting. Then we did not go. Instead, I had my sons gather up all the scraps of wood and poly sheet we had amassed from one of our projects, and I had them pile them all up where the back lawn gives way to the pasture.

Girlfriend had been experimenting with building twig furniture a couple of years ago, and had one of her projects fail due to termites. We found out when someone sat on it. I put the little stool on top of the pile along with a broken resin lawn chair and a few other pieces, and waited for sundown.

The sun went down. Deer gathered in one of the neighbor’s fields. I watched them for a while. Girlfriend went in to start the venison roast. Along about sunset-plus-thirty I torched the pile. It burned.

Girlfriend got a bit philosophical about the whole thing. She likened this to pagan Samhein the holiday on which Halloween is based. I supposed she might be right. I remarked that I felt that we were ending a cycle of something and starting a new one, but I could not quite put my finger on it. Everyone expected me, the shaman, to have something all prepared. The fact was, I did not. This was an event that was unfolding on its own. All I had done was light the fire.

The plastic burned down. Underneath all that and the scraps I had gotten the kids to pile everything on a few old fence posts stacked out in the weeds. It did not look like much of a pile. However, it got dark, and the fire kept building. Girlfriend went in the house to finish the roast. Soon I was being called into dinner.

I ate quickly. The fire was a bit larger than I had anticipated. Instead of enjoying my roast, cooked with Moose’s button buck, I ate fast and excused myself to go tend the fire. When I got back out, it had grown.

It was a good-natured fire, but it very large and still needed watching. I did not want it to spread out into the field. There were still a few old posts at the periphery of the pile that still had not caught. I got a good number of them out and thrown off to the side. It was now getting past Eight, and the fire was growing.

In the midst of pulling posts away, I realized my mistake. This had not been a pile of just a half-dozen old fence posts in the weeds. It was a pile of several dozen old fence posts, left in a small depression. All I had seen was the top layer when laying the fire.

After defining the perimeter of the fire a bit better, I relaxed against a post of the new Anti-ATV fence, and watched. A cold wind was coming out of the North. It stung my back, even though my front was forever getting uncomfortable from the extreme heat of the fire. The fire peaked sometime in the next hour or so, but kept burning steadily onwards into the night.

I was getting a bit dozy when a doe that has been frequenting the near end of Hootin’ Holler decided to come out to graze. She must have been mystified by the vision of the campfire and the lone tender. She snorted, snorted again, and kept snorting for the longest time, growing closer and closer. I caught sight of her once in the firelight, just before she gave up entirely, threw up her flag and ran back to the safety of the hollow.

It was then I realized what I was doing. It had been exactly twenty years. Twenty years ago, Halloween weekend of 1985, I had taken a day of vacation and gone up to bow hunt in Hocking County. Even by then, I was having trouble getting my hunting buddies to get out. I was the only bow hunter of the bunch, so I was camping and hunting by myself. I would arrive well after Eleven from a three hour drive, set up my tent and be up at 5 for a full day hunting. Sometime in the afternoon, I would come back just long enough to gather some firewood. After dark, I would come back and build my campfire in a large tire rut that the farmer had left with his tractor. While the fire was getting going, I’d have a sip of scotch. It always made a good fire; I would feed long limbs from the windward side and cook my dinner over it, and then pull back the grate and build it up for warmth. I would doze off for a while, and then the fire would die and I would get cold. Before retiring, I would take a walk out into the farmer’s apple orchard and look at the sky. I remember that weekend having a magazine with me that told how to find comet Halley. Sure enough, after eleven or so, I pointed my binoculars to a point out past Taurus and found a rather uninteresting fuzzy blob.

That was twenty years ago. Temperatures were dipping down below freezing that weekend, and that was the weekend my host, Gordon, invited me to stay inside in his spare bedroom from there on out. Those next few weekends with Gordon had been good. Gordon was a gracious host and I would spend hours at his kitchen table drinking coffee and eating his sassafras jelly on toast. The next year I had a new girlfriend bowhunting with me. The next year I was married. The next year I was hunting alone again while my new wife stayed home with a new baby on the way the next year . . . Twenty years later, and I still had not camped and bowhunted alone since. I had not sat alone, tending a campfire of long logs in a trench.

Hours later, after numerous pokings and proddings, the fire fell into coals. I had dozed off many times, only to find the cold wind waking me up. At last, it died down enough for me to drag myself to bed. Before I went, I walked out past the fire and watched Orion rising and looked at Taurus and that patch of sky where the dirty snowball had been.