A Hunt To Be Thankful For

Within a hundred yards the blood trail had suddenly thickened and then gone cold. I had just lung-shot a spike buck on the meadow side of a ridge, and he had disappeared down the steep wooded backside of the mountain. He wasn’t much of a buck, but he was the first one I had ever dispatched in a non-vehicular fashion and I was disappointed to lose his track. Judging by the pattern of the trail it seemed that he had bolted and then bedded down a short way down the slope and then fled again as I drew near following the blood trail. I spent the rest of the day tracking him down a steep mountain side and through the meadows and creeks at the base of the ridge, but he had disappeared. I was sorry to lose him and was dead set to do better at the next opportunity.

The next opportunity wasn’t that far off. One afternoon a few weeks later I was out hunting a creek bottom tucked between a steep wooded ridge of oaks and laurels on one side and a hill that rose gradually up out of pinewoods into a meadow on the other. I was nearing a point where the creek disappeared upstream off the land I was hunting and onto a neighbor’s property, so I decided to follow a deer trail ascending the ridge to the right. The leaf covered trail went straight up at a steep grade though thickets of poplar saplings and low scrubby pines. As I scrambled and rustled up the path on my hands and knees, I heard a loud snort and a rush of breaking branches in a clump of pines immediately to my right. A moment later a fine eight-point buck strode out across the path no more than fifty feet ahead of me. I quickly unslung my rifle, aimed and fired as the stag bounded off unharmed through the straight rows of the hand-seeded pinewood planted along the crest of the ridge.

I watched him depart with regret, a figure to fleet and distant to chance a follow-up shot. I followed him into the pines disappointed, but not discouraged. Walking on the soft needles of the forest I began to strategize how I would take that buck.

Before dawn the next morning I climbed up the far end of the ridge about two-hundred yards from where I had spooked the deer and made my way silently through the soft carpeted needles beneath the neat rows of pines along the ridge crest. The orderly columns of trunks and boughs left a vista through the wood where one could see a hundred yards ahead and behind beneath their branches. I stalked the pine rows multiple times throughout the remainder of the season, but I never saw hide nor hair of my buck, nor any other deer.

When the next autumn rolled around, my brother-in-law and I took advantage of early squirrel season to start scouting the ridge. I was certain that the strategy I had implemented the previous year was sound; we climbed through the darkness and rustling dead leaves of the oaks and laurels at the far end of the ridge before the sub-horizonal sun began to soften the early morning sky. Upon reaching the pinewood at the top of the ridge we paused and waited in silence for sunrise before we began stalking along the ridge crest towards the far end where the buck had disappeared the previous year. About a third of the way along the top of the ridge there was a slight saddle in the terrain that paralleled the transition on the lower slopes of open oak wood to close dense thickets of poplar saplings. As the two of us made our way through the coniferous mountain hall, out of the density of the slender poplars appeared two does and a fawn, completely oblivious to our presence as they browsed through the saplings. It astounds me with what perfection our Lord has camouflaged the deer. One would not think its tan and white coat would blend as well as it does, but every time I see a deer in the wild it is movement and shape that I notice first and then color, and generally the color is a near perfect match to the pallet of sun dappled forest floor, especially on the fawns. We sat quietly and watched them for a moment before they saw us and nimbly trotted over the far side of the ridge. Closer inspection revealed the saddle was lousy with tracks, coming and going over the ridge from either side.

The first weekend of bow season found me on the ridge top an hour before dawn, leaned up against a tree where the land first started to fall away on the backside of the ridge. Around dawn a fair-sized doe came through the saddle headed for the stream, but she immediately started and ran when I rose to draw my bow. I hunkered back down and waited, looking over the crest towards the opposite side of the ridge. It was quite for a while, but somewhere between dozing and dreaming I had the distinct feeling I was being watched. I opened my eyes and there twenty feet in front of me was a pair of antlers and the head of a rather puzzled eight-point buck quizzically peering at me over the top of the ridge. He stood there staring intently for a moment before stepping behind a tree. The white vapor of his breath drifting skyward out from behind the dark trunk of the pine. It seemed as if he and I were transfixed there for an interminable moment, opposing and unmoving on either side of the ridge crest. Slowly I began to rise and draw back my shaft, maneuvering for a shot, but with the first motion he bolted back down the slope and disappeared into the thickets.

I saw him again the next weekend, fifty yards down the ridge, gallantly strolling after a pair of does that had spooked when they had seen me a few moments before. But not him. He was completely smitten and blind to peril, though the peril I presented was negligible, as he was completely outside bow range, at least as far as I was concerned. He soon disappeared again into the poplar thickets on his romantic assignation.

A shot never presented itself through the rest of bow season, but I wasn’t too concerned. As a scouting exercise the season had been a success; I had found a path up on to the ridge which allowed me to quietly position myself in the pines within easy rifle range of my quarry. When firearms season opened a few weeks later my .308 GSR Scout with a new 4x Leupold was sighted in and ready and I was on the ridge an hour before dawn with a clear line of sight through the hall of pines on the long axis of the ridge top. Naturally, nothing stirred all morning and the next morning was more of the same. The following weekend wasn’t any different and by the second Sunday I was beginning to worry that someone else had got my buck.

The following Thursday was Thanksgiving and I was sitting on top of the darkened ridge praying silently to stumble across something to be thankful for that morning. At sunrise I was posted up at the base of a pine with my back to the trailhead where I had first seen the buck almost a year before. I could see a hundred yards out to my front, with a clear view of the saddle through the ordered rows of trees planted along the crest of the ridge. It was a chilly morning, but I was comfortably snug, sitting on an old army blanket and wrapped up in a hooded alpaca-wool poncho that my wife had given me that week as an early Christmas gift. The coffee-brown poncho blended well with the boles and needles of the pinewood and I was confident that as long as I kept still I would not be noticed by any deer crossing through the saddle forty-yards to my front.

It is often the case that things don’t go exactly as planned and yet still seem to go exactly as they should. That Thanksgiving morning, I sat looking down the long axis of the ridge towards the saddle where I expected my quarry to appear and watched and waited for two hours for something to stir. The morning hunt was beginning to look like a bust and I was just getting ready to pack it in when I heard something behind me. It is difficult to see anything clearly out of the corner of one’s eye and it is even more difficult when what little one can glimpse lies outside the periphery of the lense of one’s glasses. Hard to my left I saw what seemed to be the tan hide of a deer cautiously treading through the pines, the slightest rustle registering as he made his way through the pine needles and low dead limbs.  I could just discern antlers as my eye strained to its extreme trying to perceive the world immediately to my left. As the deer continued to quarter away from me, I saw it was a buck, but it was hard to say much more about him as he was constantly obscured by the pines. He seemed smaller and younger than the one I was hunting, maybe just a six-pointer, but at that point I wasn’t feeling terribly picky. I slowly pivoted to the left and with the greatest caution began to raise the rifle to my shoulder. The deer’s pace quickened, and he stepped behind a large pine. I led him as he emerged and fired when his shoulder cleared the trunk. The explosion of the shot transferred to a burst of energy in the buck as he leapt, bolted and disappeared down the backside of the ridge into thick low brush.

With regret, I chambered a fresh round and made my way through the pines to where I was certain I had missed hitting him. I cussed at rushing the shot, and I cussed at having my back to the trail I had first scouted, and I cussed that I had probably scared off the eight-pointer I really wanted, when, looking down by the base of the pine, I saw a tuft of white fur and drops of red blood. I grinned. It was a faint track and I followed it with meticulous care, afraid that I would spook the buck if he had bedded down close by, like the one I had lost the previous year.  The drops were small and spaced out on the needles and leaves every few feet. I momentarily lost the trail where he had suddenly veered right to follow an old logging road, but as I made my way through the brambles, grass and scrub pine that had reclaimed the old road I saw where the blood began to flow free and thick and it wasn’t long before I found my quarry. It wasn’t a small buck and it wasn’t a six pointer. It was the fine eight-point stag I had been hunting for the last year, shot clean through the chest, dead on the ground not ninety yards from where I had fired.

He easily weighed near 200lbs on the hoof and was still around 150lbs or so once I had field-dressed him. It was no easy task getting him out over a quarter mile of typical south-west Virginia terrain, but it was worth it. In the end, the hunt had not gone exactly as I planned, but it had gone well. My quarry had followed the patterns I had observed the year before but then forgotten. The ground he covered when I shot him was the exact path he had used to evade me when I had first seen him there on the ridge. As I came home later that morning with my fine eight-pointer I was proud and thankful that the Lord had blessed my endeavors and my hunt had finally been a success.

A Long Delayed Return

It has been nine years since I last posted on this blog and for better or worse much has changed. In the wide world the general arc of things has been grim, but in my own life God’s blessings have surpassed anything I could have imagined a decade ago. I’ve been married to a beautiful intelligent gem of a bride now for six years and the Lord has given us three children with a fourth on the way. Our home looks out over the blue ridge mountains and there is music everywhere in the rural county we call home.

I feel I need to start writing again, though I don’t know for whom. So much madness has descended upon us in the last three years that I feel it is important to leave some record that not all of us were mad. We were not all muzzled like sheep and slaughtered. Many of us resisted and continue to resist, in small ways and in large ways, each of us doing what we can to fight the madness as our unique situations allow.

Last night my father, sister, brother-in-law and I reminisced about the informant tip lines that sprung up during the holiday season of late 2020. They were set up by the authorities so snitches could report on their neighbors that had dared to gather with family to celebrate Thanksgiving. We flooded the tip lines. My brother-in-law told us how he had called in masquerading as a turkey to thank the police for all they were doing to preserve the life and liberty of turkeys throughout the nation that year. At my house we self-reported our “super-spreader” event and passed the phone from one person to the next until more than a dozen souls had wished the “communist bastard” authorities in a certain mid-Atlantic state a happy Thanksgiving.

Christmas was more of the same. No one was supposed to travel, but after ten months of the insanity the farce was wearing thin. Employers threatened their workers with two week lay-offs if they traveled or met with others outside of their “bubble group”. Masking was an obsession. My employer at a safety meeting reminded us how letting our nose hang out the top of our mask was just as disgusting as allowing our dick to hang out of our trousers. The human face had become obscene.

There were many evils that were visited upon us that year, not least among them was the closing of the churches. Easter 2020 was a strange celebration. There was no mass we could attend. My wife and I and our two children sat out on the front porch and sang old time gospel hymns as loud as we could so the rest of the imprisoned neighborhood could hear us and maybe join in. It was all madness.

It is imperative that we remember and record what happened. We must not forget the injustices and deceits that were visited upon us during the late unpleasantness. Write down what happened to you and share it with others. The gaslighting has not ended, is not ending, and will not end anytime soon. Telling our tales will remind us that we, the sane, are many and we are not alone.

Limerick as Epitaph (or Why Rhythm is Important)

We three hundred with King Leonidas
Held our ground against all who defied us.
It was a battle hard fought
Until dead we were caught,
Killing Persians in front and behind us.

On a Mother’s Gift

Mother Mary, immaculate born
To bear the Son of God;
In thee a new Eve, between night and morn,
When dawn is born of sorrows.
Ever virgin, who bore all in faith,
Ye laid thyself bare before God.
Emptied there He filled thee with grace,
from the fruit of thy womb all grace flows.

Mourning Our Nations Decline

My country where is she?
Buried by diversity, bled dry by thieves.
Our fathers would have cried,
To see the day she died,
as I flee to the mountains high,
I weep for thee.

A Faux Pas

When conversing with a lady
There are some things a man should never do,
Like comparing the shade of her eye shadow
To an oyster shells green hue,
Especially if the exquisite beauty of a coppered emerald shell
Was an aspect of the oyster she’d never seen or knew.

A Limerick

A buddy of mine posted a random picture of a tortoise eating potatoes, without explanation, so I wrote a limerick. The picture was worse than my verse, so I decided not to repost it.

There once was a cute little tortoise,
Who ate taters and knew he was gorgeous.
He’d gorge there all day and then crawl away,
Crawlin’ slower than advanced ‘rigor mortis’.

That is all. I’m sorry.

A Bit Of College Doggerel

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek sonnet I wrote in college. Thanks Mikey for showing me how to do the stress thingy over the ‘e’. It didn’t work, but I was able to cut and past yours, ha. Improvise, adapt, and overcome!

To Elizabeth, (Upon the Gift of a Box of Matches)

Elizabeth, bright light of my life and my pipe,
A fairer match nare have I spied.
You’ve kindled a flame that’s brought to ashes the tripe
That, for a time, I let be and abide.
For your sweet self I do feverishly yearn
And for your blessèd sake I do fervently burn.
For your radiant hair and complexion so fair,
My heart is aflame and lights my world like a flare.
Oh, what’s in a flame? Myself, seared and blinded;
Wounded by love, though I haven’t much minded.
Pierced by arrows of Eros like a pincushion on fire
I stand a martyr for loves blazèd sake.
‘Pon the grill and the embers of glowing desire
I lie and for you learn to bake.

A Revolutionary Anthem

The logic of the revolutionary is based upon two imperatives. First, there must be masses. Then, they must be liberated. While the latter of these is obvious, not much thought is given to the former. However, it is this first step which is the most important, for without the discontented crowd at his back the revolutionary is nothing more than an irritable lonesome crank. Unfortunately, the progressive revolutionaries have done a smash-up job of creating a seething disaffected sea of individuals cut loose from tradition, doing their diluvial damnedest to sweep away the courtesies and institutions that have formed the West.

Jean Rohe’s song “National Anthem: Arise! Arise!” is typical of the propaganda of the Left in its inordinate fixation with the darkest corners of America’s past. To hear Miss Rohe sing it, our nation’s history is nothing more than one long litany of slavery, genocide, labor exploitation, and botched back-alley coat hanger abortions. Class struggle is the name of the game as the protagonists of her anthem come to America “with hungry hearts and hands” to be exploited, “at the auction block or the darkened mill.” They came to our land only to struggle and die in the factories and fields, in rooms with a coat hanger, on the trail of tears or in the electric chair. They came here to die under the oppressive hand of the United States of America.

But, lest we lose all heart and faith in our home land, bright-eyed Miss Rohe lets us know that all of this will be set right on that glorious day when the oppressed peoples and classes of our great nation arise to form the “more perfect union” and the “tyrants bow to the peoples dream, and justice flows like a mighty stream.” All this after the completion of the revolution, I suppose. Miss Rohe presents us with the harsh dichotomy of the revolution, either stand for justice with the oppressed masses or be counted among the petty tyrants to be brought to heel.

The genius of the revolution is in its formation. It does not have a positive identity except for the image it projects of itself as a champion of the oppressed. Because of this, the revolution is incredibly malleable in the forms it assumes as it forges a common cause with just about any group that claims it has been treated unjustly. In this manner the revolution creates a coalition which is constantly in a state of flux but is consistent in its political and cultural struggle against the perceived oppressor. Over the years this coalition has shifted and grown from workers struggling against their employers, to blacks rising up against unjust and discriminatory laws, to women fighting for equal opportunities in education and employment. In recent years the revolution has gathered homosexuals and gender confused individuals unto its bosom to fight for their right to be socially accepted as homosexual and gender confused individuals.

Some of the causes championed by the revolution have arisen out of truly unjust conditions. Many other causes are mere fronts and fabrications. Whether the injustice is real or perceived is not important. All that matters is that the cause disrupts the institutions and traditions that are set against the revolution. In Miss Rohe’s anthem, it does not matter who the disparate disenfranchised individuals are as long as they can be coalesced into the masses that march under the revolutionary banner. All are summoned to join in the struggle, African Americans and Native Americans, factory workers, the mothers of unwanted children and the convicted felons on death row. All are called to take to the streets as guardians of liberty marching to loose the waters of the river Justice that it may flow forth and baptize with a spirit of freedom the unwashed and undefined masses of the modern state.

For reference purposes only, here are the words to Miss Rohe’s song,

National Anthem: Arise! Arise!

Atlantic and Pacific floor,
The Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico,
The land between sustains us all,
To cherish it our tireless call.

Chorus: Arise, arise! I see the future in your eyes.
To one more perfect union we aspire,
And lift our voices from the fire.

We reached these shores from many lands,
We came with hungry hearts and hands.
Some came by force and some by will,
At the auction block or the darkened mill.

Chorus

We died in your fields and your factories,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,
With an old coat hanger in a room somewhere,
A trail of tears, an electric chair.

Chorus

And our great responsibility;
To be guardians of our liberty,
Till tyrants bow to the peoples dream,
And justice flows like a mighty stream.

Songwriting: Birdsong and Melody

Some thoughts I had on melody and songwriting taken from correspondence with a friend,

Some more thoughts occurred to me this morning while I was listening to a mourning dove outside the kitchen window. As I listened to the bird’s song I started trying to mimic his call. The more I imitated him the more I noticed the subtleties of his song. It was intriguing to discover the depth of his variations upon one or two themes(or perhaps there were two birds).
Later, I was discussing with my father how I’ve been beginning to find inspiration for melodies within the natural world. I demonstrated what I meant, first whistling my approximation of the bird call and then riffing a melodic structure from musical intervals within the call. The result was a satisfactory fiddle tune which borrowed from the bird song and melodic devices I’ve heard in other tunes.
I don’t listen to as much music as I used to; when I’m working I prefer quiet and solitude since it allows me the space to think about music and words. It occurred to me that a hundred years ago it was still fairly easy to find peace and quiet for there was far less droning and racket in the world. There was space to hear natural patterns and no doubt these patterns readily imprinted themselves upon the mind of the songsmith; a veritable treasure trove of melodic intervals and rippling rhythms. The old songs are mined from this stock. They resonate with the inherent melodies of the world around them. When the fiddler gave his melodic nod to the mourning dove’s song his audience would recognize the reference, just as we recognize when a guitarist pays homage to an older hero with a riff or lick. The old songs spring naturally from the soil they were formed in.
In our generation, and for a number of generations before us, we have become so inundated with recorded music that it has become our only melodic reference. The best music nowadays comes from those who recognize that there is something fresh and alive about the old songs, even if they don’t know what it is. The worst music stalely rehashes old trick and trinkets clumsily ripped off of better men.
Of course, at it’s most basic level music will always be shaped by the world it emerges from. Ours is a mechanical industrial world. Flawless and unvarying repetition forms our soul. Gone is the subtle variations of the mourning dove’s theme. In its stead is the chicca-chicca-clank of the steam engine or the machinegun-blast of a guitar and drums. There is very little space for the old songs to grow.