O.D. and Playing the Wind

I was sitting in one of those old steel lawn chairs, that kind of acts like a rocking chair-- kind of springy and such. Whenever I go to the store, that is the chair I like best. My grandfather used to have a set of them-- paid me $5 one summer to take them back to the bare metal and put a couple coats of enamel on them. There is one just like Gramp's in the corner with its back to the window. It is the farthest away from the stove, and I usually can snag it if I get there early enough. That is, unless O.P. or The Judge get there first. This was my first trip into town since all the kin went home after New Years.

It was a small crew there this morning. Darrel was there. He just comes to smoke and never says anything-- not since he came back from Overseas in '69. The Judge was home sick with what they were calling "the new mown hay." O.P. was late. Just after I got there, O.D. showed up. That's O.P's brother. They'd had a party to go to last night at their folks'. O.P. had broken out their Dad's bottle of Old Grand Dad and they'd drunk themselves sober out on the front porch. O.P. had gotten in trouble, and was going into Cold Springs to get a big bottle of Old Grand Dad to replace the one they'd sucked dry. O.D. gave me a warm-up on my coffee. I'm actually closer to O.P. and their other brother O.T. O.P. is always coming by around time for second breakfast, and O.T. is the guy who does my lawnmowers for me. They're all good company-- sober or not. I put down the paper and we started to talk.

"So ya dint do so well," said O.D. He was still re-hashing rifle season. "That's a shame." Even though it was past New Years, and rifle season had ended over Thanksgiving, he was still kind of stuck there. He would be, until he finally got out in March and started turkey scouting with his brothers. We'd been going over deer season for weeks. O.D. fills his freezer every year, and fills a lot of other freezers as well. Among other things, he is, or at least was an owner of an original legitimate Kentucky semi-automatic muzzleloader. In his day, he could get five well-aimed shots a minute out of it. However, as he's gotten older, "Ol Dick." a full-stock caplock that came from his mother's Grand-Daddy has been seen less and less at the shoots. We think he's switched to his Browning BAR, but no one wants to come out and say anything.

"I don't know." I said. "I got two big doe. They were the biggest I've ever taken. And I'd have had a buck several times if I hadn't blown the shots."

"You're not playing the wind." he said. "Take it from the Old Deer Hunter himself. You're not playing the wind."

"O.D., " I replied, "I was out in all kinds of wind, I was out in all kinds of weather this season. You know as me that all I have is ridges. Ridge-tops, ridge-sides . . . a little bit of creek bottom, sure, but I'm scared the neighbors will shoot me if I go down there. If the deer aren't up on the ridges, I can just stay home."

"It's all the wind." said O.D. "You got to play the wind."

"Okay," I said. "Tell me how to play the wind."

"Now you're talking." said O.D. "They don't call me the Old Deer Hunter for nothing. You got yourself with the Master."

"Teach me, O' Great One." I said.

"Well, first thing is that you got to look at the map." said O.D. "and you got to look at history. This is Dan'l Boone Country, right? "

"Right."

"They all came down here to hunt, because the game was so rich, right?"

"Right."

"Well the reason it's so rich is because you got two natural boundaries here. You got the Ohio River, and you got the Mountains. You got Mountains in the East and Mountains in the South, and we're here in this little pocket.

"So far I'm following you."

"Now you got to remember that deer always walk with their noses into the wind."

"I've heard that," I said. "But growing up in Ohio, I could never understand how that worked. If it worked that way, a south wind would drive all the deer from Michigan down into Ohio. I asked the guy who was explained it that way, and he said Toledo and the Indiana border stopped 'em."

"It doesn't work that way, " said O.D. "This is where you take a little bit of knowledge and make it dangerous. See, you're not thinking. Lookin' at it that way, all you got is an old wise tale. You got to use your head. What do we have just north of us? "

"The River."

"Exacta-mundo."

"I don't get your point. What's the Ohio River being ten mile away have to do with it."

"What Boone and his buddies figured out from the Indians was that the KAIN-tuck was like a big natural deer trap. The winds are just right to get all the deer from this side of the Mississippi blown into this little pocket between the river and the mountains.They go North when fall comes and you get northern winds, then they get blocked by the Ohio River and have to spread East until the mountains so they don't get all bunched up at Paducah."

"Is that what it is?" I asked.

"Sure thing. " said O.D. "That's why the Indians liked this area to do all their hunting. It just naturally blew the elk, the buffalo, the deer into Kentucky, and then they'd all get piled up going into the mountains. We're like. . . what? 25 miles from Blue Licks, another 30 from Big Bone Lick. This is where all the game would go after the wind died down.

"So are you saying I should put out a salt block and wait for a calm day?"

"No. That's silly. What I'm sayin' is that you want. . . let's get scientifical: how far can a deer travel in a day."

"I don't know. Twenty miles?"

"Okay. That's good. How far is it to the mountains?"

"Real mountains or just the first hills? "

"Whatever."

"I'd say five counties or so. Maybe a hundred miles."

"Twenny gozinda a hunnred?"

"Five times." I'm still amazed at the difference between growing up in Ohio and growing up just a few miles south of the river does, on even such mundane matters as mathematics. On the north side of the Ohio, we learned The New Math. Down here, they were learning their Gozinda Tables.

"So five days of North East wind?"

". . . sucks?"

"Blows all the deer from five counties over into us, and backs all the others further up against the river and the mountains. Then we get a shift and get a few days of south wind?"

"The. . . the deer all start moving back towards us?"

"You got it. All you got to do let a north wind or and east wind blow the deer into the trap, and then go out when the wind shifts and catch them on their way back out."

"I never thought of it that way."

About this time, O.P. showed up. You could feel the cold coming off his coat as he came past and sat down. He bummed a smoke off Darrell and then complained about traffic on the Double-A. O.D. put another oak split into the stove and we got to discussing UK basketball and the Bengals. We mostly talk about the Bengals when Darrel's there, because even though he never talks, you can tell he's really interested and looks at us instead of staring at the stove.