COLUMNISTS

Death in the forest

— Used to be, every year around deer season, there was a story told in my family. A story about my grandfather. Most of the countless times I heard it, we were sitting around on his farm, 100 acres of southern Indiana land that he worked his entire life. The story wasn’t about expensive weaponry, clothes, boots or gadgets. There was no .22 rifle, no 12- or 16-gauge shotgun, no bow. It wasn’t about rejecting the industrial production of meat or reconnecting with the land. It was about the winter of ’81 coming, and a salary of $8,000 a year.

The day it happened, my grandfather was out horseback riding with my aunt, then 17, in an area of wilderness a few miles from the farm known as Isaac’s. He was about 50 years old then, strong and 6 feet tall, Ward Cleaver hair. They were trotting along the path when my grandfather pulled up and jumped from his horse, restrained the animal, turned to my aunt and whispered.

“Do not say a thing. Do not move.”

My grandfather glided away into the woods and my aunt sat, stone stiff and worried about being left to attend to both horses, unable to see what had alarmed her father. Minutes later, he re-emerged with a chunk of coconut-barked cedar, roots and all. As he stalked through the woods, my aunt finally saw what had pulled him up: a buck just lying there, paying no mind to what was going on around it.

This was bow season; my grandfather wasn’t carrying a gun. And I can imagine, if you didn’t grow up hearing it, that this story is difficult to believe. But I spent years splitting timber with the man, watching him part one log after the next with a single steady swipe of the ax. I can only imagine the hammering force that he wielded down onto that ruminant mammal’s brain pan. Vibrating his onyx eyes. Chattering his teeth.

In shock at what was going on, my aunt sat listening. My grandfather grunting. The deer snorting, then bolting. My grandfather following, bearing down with his war club on its bony skull. My aunt worried the buck could turn, impale her father’s gut on its horns. But then, another whack would echo through the forest.

How long she waited, holding the reins of both horses, she can’t remember. Only that time congealed. Then came the rustle of leaves. My grandfather walking back into view. All of my aunt’s fear and anxiety dissolved. She tells me all she could think was, “Dear mother of God, he’s alive. Can we just ride back home to the farm?”

Winded, my grandfather gasped to my aunt, “I finally got him down. Pulled my pocketknife and cut his throat. He got up again and ran but I can track him now by the blood spots.”

And he told her to get Frank. Frank has that four-wheel drive. Can help me track the deer before some SOB gets him, not gonna let him go. Frank and I will dress it out. Call Frank. Tell him to bring his bow, his tag and a rope. Then came the serious voice. “Tell your mom to get the wrapping paper ready and the buckets and the ice.”

My aunt took the horses and rode back to the house. My grandfather disappeared back into the woods, tracking the deer.

Frank is my father, my grandfather’s son-in law. He takes over the story now. He remembers wheeling down Isaac’s long drive, my grandfather waiting at the end, waving him down a rutted dirt road. My father got out, brought his bow and arrows, his tag, his coil of rope. They walked through the streams of silence, earthly smells of foliage. My grandfather, speaking urgently in a low voice, told of seeing the buck. Not having a weapon, needing that meat for the winter.

They passed more than a few hunters perched among trees in deer stands. Strangers. Trespassers like them. Navigated down a steep hill and there it lay. A grizzly monster of a buck. Its pecan-colored hide a mess of red. Already split open, its weighted and steaming insides removed and tossed off to the side, field dressed by my grandfather.

My father stood, trying to understand. My grandfather just took one of his arrows and jabbed it into the tough hide several times before breaking through. Strung my dad’s tag onto the animal’s horn. Now, if a game warden checked, it was legal.

They harnessed the rope around the buck’s thick neck, knotted and attached each end to the makeshift cudgel, and used this to drag the deer back through the woods. Passed the hunters again on their way out. Loaded the deer into the truck’s bed and drove back to the farm, where my aunt and grandmother had readied the ice and paper.

The men cut and ripped the coat from the muscled frame. Quartered the deer and got the ruby-colored meat cooled as quickly as possible, placing one section after the next into buckets of ice, which keeps the venison from going bad but also from losing its flavor, so it doesn’t taste gamy. Later, my grandparents would package it. Label the freezer paper they wrapped the pieces of meat in for each section’s use: roast, steak, soup, burger - which they ground and mixed with beef fat before freezing - and the best part, tenderloin.

When I hear about people taking up hunting for gustatory or political reasons, or for sheer entertainment, it seems an amusingly far cry from my grandfather’s day. The man was a true hunter who lived from the land. For him, it was simple: man, creature and terrain. He hunted squirrel and rabbit when in season, and coon with a .22 and a mountain cur or Walker hound he’d bred and trained. He wasted nothing: The pelts he stretched and sold so my grandmother could use the money to buy Christmas gifts.

I was raised on that farm. Each night, we sat around a darkly stained table, savoring a home cooked meal of the meat my grandfather had tracked down in the forest. And above the kitchen door, a shillelagh rested: my grandfather’s cedar club.

———◊———

Frank Bill is the author of the forthcoming novel Donnybrook.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 11/23/2012

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