Why We Hunt

 

The wall tent is up, tucked snugly into an old corral about 500 yards off the main channel of the Arkansas River just south of Ponca City. The cots are set, mattresses laid, and the good cold weather sleeping bags unrolled for the mice to play in when we’re not there. The tent is fine, tight against the wind, and easy to warm with the sheepherder.

The old sheet metal wood burner is leveled, a stack of fine white ash cut to stove specs, split, and stacked just inside the tent flap away from the rain and snow. We hope it snows, we hope it rains, just to let the world know Brian Loveland and Conrad are on their own hook, warm, dry, and ready for Osama.

The food supply, enough for Cox’s army, takes up two pretty good-sized ice chests and has in it deer meat from last year’s hunt, the makings for ham, eggs, biscuits, two or three different kinds of stew, cinnamon rolls to heat on the wood burner with tin foil, potatoes, onions, you name it, and jugs of milk so cold it will make your teeth hurt. Yes, we drink out of the jug. Don’t you?

We cook on a Coleman three burner and propane and use the wood burner top in a pinch to heat extra cans of sweet molasses pork and beans, spinach (Mom said you gotta’ have something green.), new potatoes or maybe a can of Franco American or tamales. Steaks? Pork chops? Are you kidding? They’re in the ice chests, too, and we know exactly where they are. Come on rain. Come on snow.

Our light is an old Coleman double mantle job I gave to my grandparents down in Calvin 40 years ago to use on their catfishing trips along the Muddy Boggy. It hangs from the ridgepole on a coat hanger bent into a hook, and sways in the wind when the tent does. Without a good light, the copperheads win. When Grandpa died, Grandma gave it back to me. She wouldn’t be fishing without the old man. Sure I believe in ghosts, don’t you?

The country is still wild up there along the upper Arkansas. Somebody sees a mountain lion or two about every third month, and there’s a reason: The deer population. Research will tell you that on average an adult mountain lion will consume one deer a week. Where there are lots of deer, sooner or later a mountain lion will show up. Coyotes? They howl continuously after dark, sometimes distant, sometimes so close you worry about the thickness of tent fabric.

Would a big cat or pack of coyotes jump you in the dark on your way through the woods to your deer stand? Probably not. “Probably” is the most important word in the dictionary when your flashlight batteries go dead a mile from the truck. Wait. Listen! Did you hear that?

I had my back against a huge old hackberry this past Wednesday morning at daybreak down in the river bottom when a baby coon no bigger than a bowling ball walked right by me there on the ground. He wasn’t 10 feet away. For the fun of it, I sucked in air through my clenched teeth and made a high-pitched squealing sound like a wounded bird, or maybe a mouse. Mr. Baby Coon didn’t like that a bit. He sat up on his haunches like a midget bear, tried to make me out, couldn’t, then put it into gear and hightailed it outa’ there. It made me laugh, but not too loud you understand. There would be no cable bill for that bit of entertainment.

The sky in the east was fluorescent pink, then orange behind a black lacework of limbs, and then full of birds, thousands of blackbirds winging their way into nearby bean and corn fields, crows, jays, dozens of them, right behind them.

In front of me not five feet away was a “hog rub,” another hackberry, smaller, with a big muddy smear on its trunk where a wild hog had scratched itself recently. There are wild hogs all over that country. Brian and I had agreed before we left camp that morning not to shoot any hogs until colder weather arrived. They’re excellent eating, but hard to keep when the air is above freezing.

I was looking at that hog rub for the umpteenth time just before eight o’clock when just to the left of it a yearling doe and a mature doe stepped into a little opening not 35 yards away. The yearling had already nailed me, probably when I turned my head to look at the movement; the old girl hadn’t. I froze, and in a moment the yearling relaxed and followed its compadre on out into an even larger opening.

They both stopped, and in a place whereby raising my head I could see 500 acres of harvested corn, and 200 of soy beans about to be harvested, began to nibble greenbriers. With their heads down, I let the sights settle on the bigger deer’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. We would be eating deer meat at least another year out on Baker’s Branch.

That’s the main reason I hunt deer. For the meat. It’s the best. But I could probably come up with a couple other reasons if you asked.

© 2010 Conrad M. Vollertsen