Hunting

In the pale inky darkness my eyes catch a tiny bit of movement in the field about 100 yards in front of me. There’s a sliver of faint pre-dawn light along the eastern horizon, which provides a hint of light on the meadow.

Peering through my binoculars, I can see the form more clearly – a single deer moving across the open field in the darkness. It moves like a doe, but the fact that it’s moving alone leads me to believe it’s a young buck – either looking for trouble or trying to stay out of it.

The rut seems to be peaking this week, and the growing energy in the woods has me amped with the hope of strong activity today. Tomorrow is the full moon, so this little sliver of morning is the only real darkness the deer have seen tonight. Typically, a full moon tends to bring the rut to a fever pitch, and the electricity in the air is nearly palpable this morning.

As the light builds, I hear a doe off behind my left shoulder snorting. She could be warning her group of a danger, or trying to get them back together into a group before daybreak. I hear the footsteps of deer in the woods back over my right shoulder, but am unable to see anything when I crane my neck and watch over that shoulder. I suspect that there’s a doe that’s split off from her group, interested in gaining the attention of a nearby buck. That would explain the snort a few minutes ago as well – the dominant doe trying to bring her group back together.

I rattle a bit with the antlers I’ve got up in my stand with me, seeing if I can attract the attention of any bucks in the area. By the time the sun is rising, I’ve rattled 3 or 4 times, and have watched 3 different bucks flitting nervously around the area. My rattling is almost meaningless, as the group of does close by has all the attention of the bucks in the area.

I hear the prancing footsteps of deer over my right shoulder again, and this time I can see a lone doe, with a decent buck chasing her. She ducks down into the creek, about 75 yards to my right, and I see the buck head down that way.

It’s interesting watching a buck chasing a doe in heat. He spends a good deal of time with his nose down on the ground, following her scent. Even when she’s in sight right in front of him, he’ll drop his nose to the ground as he moves – snorting that pheromone drug off the ground as he moves toward the object of his lust. This is what gets so many of ‘em killed on the highways this time of year – they’re completely oblivious to the world around them – focused completely on that object of lust leaving a trail for him to follow.

This morning, his object of lust is in the mood, and anxious to be caught. Occasionally, he slows down too much for her – spending too much time sniffing in the leaves after her – so she stops and waits for him to catch up a bit. I see her at the edge of the creek bank, having climbed the other side now, and waiting to make sure her buck sees where she heads. He apparently does, so she gallops off to the hedgerow where I’m sitting, stopping 20 yards from me to look back over her shoulder again.

I suspect she catches some scent from me, because she doesn’t wait long before jumping the fence beneath me, and scampering up the lane a bit. She stops there 30 yards from my brother-in-law, who’s tucked back into a cedar tree, and looks him square in the eye for a few seconds before heading up the hill.

Meanwhile, her suitor has stopped beneath my stand, and has his head up looking for that which he is pursuing. He casts his nose just a bit to catch the scent of her direction, and bounds over the fence and after her. He, too, will stop and look at my brother-in-law from 30 yards away, before heading up into the woods in pursuit of the object of his passion.

This dance won’t go on long. She’ll let him catch her, and nature will run its course. Afterward, she’ll go find her group and settle back into the routine of survival. If nature didn’t take its course, and she’s not pregnant, then she’ll likely go through another estrus cycle in a month or so. More than likely, nature will take its course, and she’ll drop a fawn or two into spring litter on the forest floor.

And next year, this little enclave of deer in this little corner of the universe will have evolved through one more generation.

I’ll look forward to sitting in this stand again next year, watching the frenzy of the rut as it develops. I’ll carry with me the lessons I’ve learned on this hunt, and look forward to lessons waiting for me still.

It’s counterintuitive, but focusing inward to quiet yourself opens your mind and senses more fully to the world around you.

I’m reminded of this each time I sit a treestand while hunting. I’ve isolated myself from human connection by retreating into a secluded spot in the woods. I’ve taken pains to enter the “space” of my treestand in a very slow and quiet manner, blending with the space around me as best I can. I’ve taken up a still and quiet posture in the treestand. I’ve focused a good deal of energy inward, on making myself as unobtrusive as possible. I want to become part of the space around me – to blend – rather than standing out as anything individual.

My body quiets and cools. I always need to dress warm for this, as my heartbeat drops to 50 or 55 as I focus inward on stillness. Vision and human language are the inputs our brain depends on the most these days in our evolutionary journey, and in the treestand, I’ve eliminated both of them. Even when the light is good, my vision is generally limited to a couple of shooting lanes close to my stand.

In this state, I tune much more keenly to the sounds in the space around me. As the pre-dawn darkness gives way to faint light in the east, the sound of tires on the highway several miles away becomes more common. I hear the squirrels roust from their nests, and hear their claws on the bark as they move through the trees around me. When they’re on the ground, I can tell exactly how many are down and where they are as they disturb the leaves they dig through.

I hear the beat of my heart in my chest, and the whoosh in my ears soon after each beat. Thu-whoosh, thu-whoosh. A slow and steady beat.

I hear a small flock of songbirds as they fly overhead, the sound of the air under their wingbeats giving me a good guess as to what birds they might be by how they’re beating their wings. A large flock of 30 or 40 birds sounds as loud as thunder as they thump past 50 feet above me – I hear the sound of their wings for 100 yards before they reach me, and 100 yards after they pass.

Mid-day on a nice day I hear a tiny scraping in the leaves not far away. I watch intently but see no movement. A mouse maybe? Training my binoculars on the spot, I eventually make out a small garter snake pulling himself out of the leaf litter into the warm sun.

The footsteps of deer around me tell me a good deal about what they’re doing even when I can’t see them. Are they nervously poking about, or calmly grazing? Are they talking to each other softly, or snorting a warning?

The movement of air becomes something my ears perceive in a way my eyes can’t. I map the movement of tiny gusts of air through the bare branches of the woods around me by the path of its sound, and am able to predict when I’ll feel it in my tree based on how my brain perceives the arms and reach of the pockets moving about.

I hear individual dry leaves bounce off branches as they flutter to the ground.

I smell the shift in the wind. The smell is damp and musty when the air moves across the creek and the forest floor before it gets to me, while it changes dramatically to grassy and dusty when it comes to me from the open field on the other side of me.

There’s a Chickadee who comes around in the evening, about the same time each day. I can hear Chickadees throughout the woods around me, flitting and buzzing, but this one seems to follow the same pattern on the same branches around the same time each afternoon. He’s very curious about me, often stopping on branches only a couple feet away from me and watching me before moving to another branch.

After a few days, I come to be able to recognize what kind of bird is fluttering through the woods by the sound of the air beneath it’s wings – the wingbeats of birds are sometimes quite distinctive.

Of course, when deer that might be prey come close, my senses zero in completely on the prey. But 99%+ of the time, I’m focused on remaining quiet and unobtrusive. Doing so opens me completely to the input of the world I’ve immersed myself into.

As my mind absorbs the space where I sit, my heart and soul become part of the Place where I sit.

The dance between Venus and the Moon first became visible to me at the horizon as the first hints of dawn began to warm the eastern sky. By that time, I had been sitting in my tree-stand for long enough to feel the cold in my toes, and the site of Venus and the Moon helped me to feel some added warmth begin to move from my soul into my body. I had begun my morning well before dawn, letting Colin out for a quick constitutional, and putting him back in the camper for the morning. After slipping into my hunting clothes outside of the camper, I picked up my bow from its special place, and began the slow and silent walk toward my stand. It was less than a mile to walk to my stand, but in the deep darkness of a night with no moon up yet, and with my desire to move silently, the walk probably took 45 minutes or so.

There is a path that I follow to that tree-stand when it is dark. It isn’t the most direct route, but it is the most quiet. The soil is sandy, and it is possible to pick out the lighter sandy path from the darker prairie grass even on the darkest of nights. As I had moved along the path – walking slowly and quietly – I enjoyed the absolute stillness that is so magical about that time of the day. The path follows an old tree-row for most of the way, and I could hear small movements within the tree row – sometimes a leaf falling through the branches, sometimes a tiny twig beneath the foot of a raccoon.

I rarely use a light in the darkness. An artificial light in the wilderness just screams to the wildlife that a human is present. If I used a light, by the time that I arrived at my hunting spot, every animal within half a mile would be notified of my exact location. In addition, the light from the flashlight would prevent my eyes from adjusting to the darkness, so that when I eventually did turn the light off, my eyes would need to take the time to adjust before they were of any use at all to me. In case of emergency, I have a light that I can use, but I don’t recall the last time that I used it when moving through the nighttime wilderness.

There is a greater reason, though, that I don’t want a light at night. It has to do with why I am even here – why I am walking across the prairie on a chilly morning, carrying a bow, walking softly and quietly. It has to do with why I take such care to control the human scent that is part of me, why I choose to spend this time with solitude on the Prairie.

Many people equate “hunting” with “killing something”. Most non-hunters do this I think, but frankly, I know hunters who do this as well. For me, it is certainly likely that the hunting process will result in meat in my freezer, but this is not why I hunt, and the “killing” is not where I find my joy.

For me, the hunting process is my surrender to my rightful place in this earthly ecos. It is about becoming part of a balance that is much older and much wiser than the technically advanced, climate controlled, risk reduced world that generally surrounds me. It is about coming into a harmony with where I have been placed in this universe, and from that place of more perfect Harmony, I can feel myself more completely within The One.

When done well, hunting finds me leaving behind all that is human reason, and finding deep within myself the wisdom that is a part of the little sphere of earth that I place myself within. It finds me accepting my place as a predator high on the food chain, and accepting as well the responsibility that comes with that place on the food chain. It finds me spending the time to learn how the other animals move in this little sphere of earth, and how many they are, and how healthy they are. It finds me choosing which animal to take, and whether to take an animal. It finds me realizing that when meat ends up in my freezer, it should end up there as a result of a gift that is exchanged between hunter and hunted, and that taking the meat without receiving the gift and blessing the exchange is a blasphemy.

Surrender – a funny word. Sometimes the path to strength and wisdom can only be found through surrender. In surrendering myself to my small place in this little sphere, and in leaving my human ego back at the doorstep of the civilization that I left behind, I am able to find my Self and my Place. And it feels good and right.

And a flashlight disturbs that goodness and that rightness.

The vastness of the prairie sky at night creates the window into The Infinite with which few people feel comfortable. The stillness required to allow that Infinite to creep into your soul is something with which even fewer people feel comfortable. While we profess to want closeness and connection with G-d, we eschew the very things that could facilitate what we say we want. It seems to me that this is a result of our modern world. I want to believe that when cultures are more comfortable with the magic in the world around them, that they feel more at ease with the Vastness and the Stillness.

This morning, I watched Venus dance with the Moon. It is a monthly dance, occurring in the early morning or early evening hours when Venus happens to be out, and the cycle of the Moon happens to put him somewhere close to Venus. It is a timeless dance – Venus and the Moon.

This morning, Venus and the Moon brushed close to one-another as they took their spin on the celestial dance-floor. I watched them as I sat in a tree-stand before dawn, and watched as the morning light washed the darkness from the night sky. For a while, they were framed perfectly in the cradle of the Cottonwoods above me – smiling at each other as they enjoyed the moment that passed between them…

Few things in the universe can be as vast as a clear night sky flowing without end, spilling over the distant horizons of the western Kansas prairie. The depth of the universe, and your insignificance within it, become starkly clear in the endless sea of stars – stars so thick that they almost feel oppressive. Intellectually, we all know that the universe is a pretty big thing, and that our place within it is pretty small, but resting in the cool autumn prairie evening gives you a window into that universe that you just can’t find anywhere else.

At least I haven’t found anyplace else where that window opens itself. As often as I have been on the prairie and felt that window, it still takes my breath away each time that it happens. It feels as though my soul is reaching and digging for some new set of senses – something bigger than sight and sound and smell and touch – with which to connect through this vast window that opens up out there where the sky is big.

Tonight is going to be that sort of a night – a night that The Universe pours itself into my soul through the window of a vast Kansas sky. It isn’t yet dark, but I can feel the window opening around me. The still November air is unseasonably warm at around 50 degrees. Sitting in an open field, resting my back against an ancient wooden fencepost, I find myself listening again for the Voice of The Infinite spoken in the language of the prairie evening as she begins to whisper.

On my lap, my old dog Colin rests his head, sleeping soundly. It has been an afternoon spent in heaven for him, trotting across the prairie looking for birds to point and fetch. We ended up with 3 quail out of 2 coveys, and they will make both breakfast in the morning, and dinner later tonight if I feel like fixing it. His age is showing, as he sleeps deeply after the workout. But then, I suppose that my age shows just as clearly, though in ways that I am not ready to see yet.

Earlier this afternoon, when Colin and I finished our hunting, we stopped by the camper to put the birds in the cooler, and leave the shotgun behind. We walked out to this spot with a nice view of the sunset, and sat quietly as the day began that quiet transformation – watching the day recede while night approaches through evening.

There are whitetail deer now in the prairie and alfalfa around me. They have moved out of their daytime shelters, and have begun to feed. I watched a group of them standing still at the edge of the field – that place where the shelter of a group of trees meets the prairie. They watched there for a while – assuring themselves that there was not danger in the meadow beyond – then one doe stepped out into the field, took several steps, and started to feed. The rest of the group stayed in the cover of the trees and watched, to see if anything took interest in the lone doe feeding in the field. Once convinced that danger was not near, they all moved out into the field, and began to make their way across the prairie grass toward the stand of sweet alfalfa that they love so much.

Such is the way of that daily transformation of day into night. Things happen slowly, and around the edges, one step at a time. If you aren’t paying attention, you can miss those dainty steps that are occurring in that movement from the shelter of daylight into the meadow of the night. If you aren’t paying attention, you look around, and realize that it is almost dark.

One minute you see an open field, then the next it seems that the deer have appeared out of no-place. One minute it is light and comfortable, then next it is nearly dark, and you feel fearful and uneasy at the transformation that occurred while you were not paying attention.