I’ve found dead ends and clear openings. Discerning all that it might
mean is like bushwhacking through dense undergrowth. Sometimes
I get faint glimpses of a deer trail.
It is hunting season and we are sitting on the porch of the
cookhouse at Onondaga on a hazy October day. The leaves are
smoky gold and fluttering down while we listen to the men tell
stories. Jake, with a red bandanna around his hair, gets everybody
laughing with a story about Junior’s never-fail turkey call. With his
feet on the railing and black braid hanging over the back of his
chair, Kent tells about following a blood trail over new-fallen snow,
bear tracking, and the one that got away. For the most part they’re
young men with reputations to build, along with one elder.
In a Seventh Generation ball cap and a thin gray ponytail, Oren
gets his turn at a story and leads us along with him, through
thickets and down ravines to get to his favorite hunting spot.
Smiling in recollection, he says, “I must have seen ten deer that
day, but I only took one shot.” He tips his chair back and looks at
the hill, remembering. The young men listen, looking intently at the
porch floor. “The first one came crunching through the dry leaves,
but was shielded by the brush as it wove down the hill. It never saw
me sitting there. Then a young buck came moving upwind toward
me and then stepped behind a boulder. I could have tracked it and
followed it across the crick, but I knew it wasn’t the one.” Deer by
deer, he recounts the day’s encounters for which he never even
raised his rifle: the doe by the water, the threepointer concealed
behind a basswood with only its rump showing. “I only take one
bullet with me,” he says.
The young men in T-shirts lean forward on the bench across