Hunting Chatter

Parked outside a Native jewelry shop in Cordova, Alaska, two of my hunting companions and I waited in the truck while the fourth member of our hunting party went in the shop to buy a souvenir for his cousin. Black bear hunting had brought us all to Cordova. The idea to cruise the coast looking for bears in our inflatable skiff inspired the trip to town to check the weather conditions from the port. The wind, white caps, and dark clouds of unwelcoming seas relegated our inspiration to the land where nice ideas go to die. We decided instead to head back out of town and cruise the small slough that ran not thirty yards from our cabin’s porch. Traveling down the slough, and hiking across a marsh, we’d place ourselves in viewing distance of a mountain striped by lush, green avalanche chutes and standing rows of pines. In the meantime, three of us sat in the truck and waited, silence eventually giving way to chatter. Nature abhors a vacuum.

“Can I run something by you guys?”

The youngest member of our hunting party spoke up, hoping to draw on the collective experience of his two older companions. At the time, he was in his early- to mid-twenties while the driver and I were each in our mid-thirties. We, of course, obliged — each of us hoping to help, but neither of us having the heart to tell him that growing older doesn’t necessarily mean that a person learns a damn thing. I sat in the backseat, listening as he unburdened himself. His future father-in-law didn’t seem to like him and was showing it by trying to make his relationship with his fiancé difficult. There wasn’t a thing in the world that would change his mind about marrying that girl, but it’s sure tough to join a family without feeling totally welcome. What should he do? How should he handle it?

Taking turns, the driver and I each began talking — hot air escaping from our windpipes. Flapping our gums, we hoped for poignant effectiveness while having to settle for layered advice that approximated something useful. As lifelong bachelors up to that point, neither of us had been in that situation before. Just what in the hell could we possibly know, and specifically say, that would help? Likely nothing. But through the process of speaking, we searched our individual indexes of human experience and relationship knowledge and answered anyway. The outcome was a simple directive: Remember, that’s his daughter he’s giving away. Do your best to make it easy on him without compromising yourself. Was it the right thing to say? Hell, I don’t know. But if it isn’t wise, it’s sure wearing wisdom’s uniform.

There’s an important detail I haven’t yet shared with you about this story — I’d only known each of these guys for a few days, and they hadn’t known each other for significantly longer. How do folks that barely know each other end up discussing a detail that will affect the rest of a person’s life? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s the prospect of taking life together that drives us to better understand the people that we’re doing it with. I, for one, don’t want to kill with someone that I don’t respect. So, we search and probe with every form of conversation to learn about those beside us in the field. Sometimes, however, it could just be the downtime and the vacuum of silence that someone’s bound to fill. Either way, I’ve learned that hunting is a catalyzing agent that quickens human connection.

Some of the first human communication was likely about hunting — hunters telling other hunters where the game is, if it’s dead, and if it wasn’t how they might go about killing it. We hunted like pack animals, making communication necessary. Now, our chatter has evolved to fit the complexity of being a modern human. The English language alone has 170,000 words, many existing redundantly alongside each other. While we still enjoy hunting in packs (duck blinds and deer drives come to mind), and conversations about finding game will live on for as long as hunting does, contemporary conversations in the field range and vary as broadly as people do. We’ve evolved this huge, bizarre brain, so wonderful and capable of directing itself toward monumental tasks. At the same time we’re often left wondering how it manages to feed itself every day.

The human mind is rife with complicated machinery but isn’t accompanied by a user manual that guides us toward proper usage. So, we outsource the problem — using other minds to help us operate our own. Drop a line here and there to learn if our jokes are actually funny. State our philosophies to see if we actually make sense or are living somewhere on the other side of the cuckoo’s nest. We describe our problems to mastermind a way through them — or to learn that, sometimes, we’re just going to take life on the chin. There’s solace in knowing we aren’t alone in that. Countless nuances of human life verbally manifest their way into the world to give life color, meaning, and at least a scrape at understanding where the individual fits into this tangle of thorns adorned with flowers. It’s three guys sitting in a truck and giving each other advice on the way to hunt bears.

In 2018, two of my longtime buddies, one of their father’s, and I started a yearly tradition — our Christmas Eve duck hunt. On that particular hunt, we set up a homemade, A-frame duck blind in a flooded cornfield at the narrow end of a valley between two Central Pennsylvania ridges. Waders on, and feet submerged in the frigid mud puddle, we killed ducks as they came to our decoy spread in waves. One duck, however, went rogue, landing thirty or more yards away and far to the right of our spread. The elder statesman of the group was seated at that end of the blind, best positioned to shoot the landed, rogue duck. Waterfowl hunters call such a kill “water swatting” and one could argue its sporting merits. But that’s only because modern folks mostly have the privilege of not being hungry. The buddy seated to my left, the elder statesman’s son, said, “Dad, kill that duck.” And with movements that can only be accurately timed with a sun dial, he snuck his gun out over the top of the blind, rose at a pace that would make a sloth impatient, and shot the duck. Howling with laughter, we immediately dubbed him, “Super Sneak”, and spent the rest of the hunt verbally embroidering him with his new moniker.

Since then, I haven’t missed an opportunity to greet him with a handshake and a “What’s up, Super Sneak?” The story lives on in the lore of our little hunting family. When there’s a chance to poke fun, we pantomime his movements, exaggerating them for effect. The joke will continue for as long as we do. And every time we’re in a duck blind on Christmas Eve, one of us will say, “Remember Ol’ Super Sneak…”

I can’t remember a group hunt that hasn’t had hoots, howling, and guffaws. Whether mocking each other’s antics in a duck blind or cackling at each other’s, and our own, misfortunate shots while walking a hillside for upland birds, each has its jokes and laughter. Hunters, by even distribution among the human population, aren’t particularly comedic. Yet we laugh together in what appears to be inordinate amounts, especially given the gravity of our chosen activity. But it could be that gravity that pulls the laughter out of us. The specter of death is ever present as we move among the hills or sit in wait. Maybe, in balance, the prospect of killing bids us to embody the lighter side of the world, as Yang stabilizes Yin. Then again, it could be that there’s an excited energy that comes with doing things we enjoy with people that we like. I can’t help but believe that it’s both.

Belief, and our frequent need to express it, fills pauses between jokes and shots — it offers the opportunity to give and shape our worldviews when the hunting stories end, but the truck’s wheels are still rolling toward home. Sometimes the beliefs expressed are simple. Like my completely correct, and one-hundred percent defendable, opinion that the Turnpike Troubadours are modern country music’s saving grace. Try as anyone may, I will not be convinced otherwise. Sometimes beliefs expressed are simple in another way — shallow but feigning depth. In an echo chamber of those that already agree with us, we talk politics and with each affirmative head nod our bias convinces us that we’re the only ones paying attention. Further, that the world will be shot to shit if it doesn’t take heed to what a group of folks gathered around trucks drinking coffee, and clad in camouflage, has to say.

Then there are times when seated on a hillside, eyeing country 1,000 yards away, that belief takes a grander form — philosophy — and with scalpel-like words, takes the world apart. The intent being to sew it gracefully back together. Gazing far across the landscape with someone that you trust to kill with is a catalyst for accurate introspection. The distance gazed in each direction is often mirrored in direct proportion, while the accuracy of vision reflects the trust one has in the person next to them. In turn, each cuts and sutures.

When we returned to the cabin on that day in Alaska, shot down the slough, and hiked across the soggy sod of the marsh, the four of us were sat on the bank with the water behind us and the mountain in front of us at the distance that evolves belief into philosophy. We built a fire out of whatever dead, dried wood we could find to cook the salmon one of our party caught when we fly fished a glacial lake the afternoon before. In shifts, we glassed for bears and picked fiddleheads to snack on as the salmon roasted. After devouring the fish bare handed in a style reminiscent of our ice age brethren, we found comfortable seats by using our packs as back rests and trained all eight of our eyes through our glass and onto the mountain. Later in the evening we would split, becoming hunting parties of two so that we could cover more ground. But for a while, we were coalesced, four into one and satiated by a wild meal. Words were the only tools in the world that could once again parse us into individuals.

“Do you guys want to hear about my novel?” The leader of our party spoke up. In most instances, especially at parties full of strangers, someone asking to describe their novel is met with a collective, internal yawn and eyes darting for an escape route. But we were in that place where belief becomes philosophy, four as one, and open to understanding how each individual connected to the others. In unison, three of us agreed and decided to sincerely listen.

I won’t share the details of plot and character with you, as an ode to verbal parsimony and because the idea is good enough that it if he writes it well, it will get published. And I wouldn’t want to spoil the story for anyone. When he finished, the eventual author commented, “There are just so many dark and sad novels, I think the world needs more characters like Doug.” The three of us agreed with him about Doug before sharing our takes on his story. Words returned us to individuals. Each statement, whether or not we consciously acknowledged it, was an expression of our philosophies in relationship to a central premise laid at our feet by a character named Doug.

We didn’t only hear the plot of a novel, although we did hear a good one. We listened as a man cut the world apart while simultaneously stitching it back together. In doing that, he showed us himself. But he also showed us that the world could be lighter, and better, and that we could see it that way if we really wanted to. Without the flow of a stream behind us, and a pine striped mountain at the perfect distance in front of us, I don’t know that we would have believed him. Hunting, with the unison it created and the setting it placed us in, gave us all the chance to converse and grow better for the effort.

The primordial hunting conversation, though, is the hunting story. If you close your eyes and search through the collective memory that you share with the rest of the human race, you’ll find yourself clothed in skins with a fire in front of you, listening to a story about a hunt. That same story is still being told. The characters have evolved, and brought a lot of nonsense with them, but the through line remains true to form — game was chased, success was had or was not. The reasons why tend to favor the hunter if there was success and curse the fates if there wasn’t.

In many ways we’re different from the prehistoric hunters that incited the beginning of our lineage. But beyond the evolved languages, technological comforts, and weapons that could create a millennium of winter, there’s one simple difference that alters our stories. They were nomadic and we, mostly, are not. (Although, many of us do our best to mimic the nomadic past by way of modern transportation. We haven’t evolved past the need to see the unknown.) Animal hide shoes guarded their feet as they navigated the frigid, Pleistocene landscape. Insulated boots warm ours as we park our trucks at our consistent honey holes.

It’s the consistency of place, constrained by limited land access, along with contemporary life’s monopoly on our time, that dictates the opening line to many of today’s hunting stories. They begin, “Last time we were here…” Because we don’t have many other places to go. The good news is that the animals don’t seem to either. So, we all keep showing up. It’s the showing up that begets the cycle of story, beginning with the last time we were there. And that story is told regardless of the fact that everyone present now was present then, because from that recent past we derive our current strategy. That strategy becomes the hunt that becomes the next story.

During the last few days of the goose season that ended a few months before writing this, the son of Super Sneak and I set up our single-person blinds in a pasture adjacent to a small stream in that same Central Pennsylvania valley where Super Sneak earned his name. The land belonged to a welcoming Amish farmer and had been a consistent, productive haunt for us that season, with many geese falling to our shotguns and their breasts transformed into pastrami. Their legs braised into barbacoa. The conditions seemed to be right, so we expected a productive day. Problem was, the last time someone was there, it wasn’t us. So, we were reliant on a buddy’s scouting report rather than seeing the truth with our own eyes. The story cycle was distorted from its normal formula. But the real truth is that a hunting story’s plot is always controlled by the whims of the wildlife. Our scouting reports are guesses at reality designed to comfort the human psyche with the illusion of control.

As the sky to our left turned pink with the sunrise, we heard geese honking out notes of their peculiar music overhead, expecting that they’d feed and then come to the stream to loaf. They did no such thing. Two large groups passed over us and made their way to the other end of the valley, leaving us to guess at their plans for the day and giving us something else to talk about. The pink sky dissolved into a bright, blue bird day — the same kind of day that the geese had chosen to loaf in this particular spot, according to all of our previous scouting reports, the most recent included. On we sat as the morning grew brighter, talking between our blinds and recounting the season as it wound down in an apparent anticlimax. The company was good, so we decided to stay a bit longer while hoping that the fates would reward our patience. Although the geese would come, it wasn’t only them that kept us there. Excluding the birth of a child or the day that you marry your love, there are few moments more precious than those sitting in a blind talking to a person you’d call brother if it weren’t for the inconvenience of being born to a different set of parents. Sometimes you call him that anyway.

The music returned from somewhere over the hill behind our blinds, my partner played goose notes of his own to call them into our spread. Appearing over the hill, three geese circled downstream, staying high and taking a good look at what was going on below, all the while notes were falling from the sky and rising from the ground. Losing altitude, it looked as though they’d drop perfectly into our spread, but at the last minute they pitched two-hundred yards across the pasture, and over a fence, landing in a barren ag field. Amused and perplexed, we had more to talk about, although in more hushed tones. We sat low in our blinds, our hope-derived logic telling us that they might feed in the field for a few minutes and then come to the stream to relax. So, we waited and talked, relegating ourselves to the fact that we don’t know a damn thing about geese. They never came to the stream.

We decided to pick up and head home. Like a cup holding water, one setting can only hold so much chatter before folks need a new place to look at each other while opening their mouths. Rising out of the blinds and heading toward the decoys, the music returned once more. “Back in the blinds!” my brother exclaimed, still managing a hush. The music of a lone goose fell to our ears as our hearts thumped from hustling and gave backing rhythm to the music. Circling and dropping, circling and dropping, the goose working down as the music played in both directions. Fearing that the goose would only give us a brief concert before gaining on the sky and leaving, my brother dropped his call and said, “Kill it,” offering me a left-to-right crossing shot at about thirty yards. Rising from my blind, and leading the goose, I did as I was told. When I squeezed the trigger, the goose folded and fell dead on the stream’s opposite shore.

The morning hunt had all the makings of a good story. On the bank of a meandering stream, in view of an ancient ridge, two friends hunted with anticipation, finding that they were wrong more times than right. But the hours talking bonded them closer and grew them in character. Weathering the disappointments, they stayed steadfast in their efforts, and just when it seemed that the fates would disregard their perseverance, success befell them at the eleventh hour — and they were happy for the lot of it.

Soon after leaving the hunt, we pulled into Super Sneak’s machine shop and told the story. We’ll keep telling it. Despite the only moderate success, it’s one of my favorites. Maybe it’s because of that.

Maybe, though, it’s because I spent the morning talking with someone dear to me — hunting, as it always does, providing the setting for the connection. It was the opportunity to tell stories to each other as we created a new one, to joke and laugh with each other, to talk sincerely about how we’d take the world apart and put it back together. Eventually, all of the last-times-we-were-here will lead into a final time we were anywhere, and hunting will always give us a chance to talk about it.