A Pilgrim’s Digression

In West Virginia, Thanksgiving is only partly about eating turkey until you pass out on the couch in a tryptophan-induced stupor. For most people, Thanksgiving is the first day of deer season. Even though the first day is actually at the beginning of the week, for working people Thanksgiving is often still the first day of deer season. In most parts of the state, schools close the entire week of Thanksgiving because of high absenteeism, not only among students but also among teachers. Same goes for Virginia. They don’t call it the Thanksgiving holiday; they call this week the deer season holiday.

When I was growing up, once I reached a certain age, maybe nine or ten, I never saw another Thanksgiving Day parade on TV. We’d spend the night before Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s farm, and the next morning, we’d get up before dawn and go out hunting until about noon or one o’clock. I usually slept on the floor in the living room near the wood burning stove. My Grandma heated her whole house with the wood burner, which means the living room was either comfortable or hot, while the rest of the house was icy cold in winter. So I’d awaken in the morning usually to the sound of men starting to arrive. Someone would put another log in the stove and stoke it up, turn the place into a real sweat box. And eventually I’d drag myself out from under the blankets and get ready to go out hunting. Breakfast was usually just coffee and cereal, sometimes just coffee. Coffee was the only necessity.

I’ve been drinking coffee since I was kid. I can’t even remember when I drank it for the first time, it has been so long. I probably drank it first out in the boat fishing with my Dad when I was six or seven. It’s just such a normal part of the outdoors experience, sometimes it would be the only liquid we took with us fishing or hunting.

So here I am, a nine or ten year-old kid drinking coffee around the wood burner as the men talk about the day ahead.

“I think I’ll head on up to the piney woods and sit,” my Uncle Dan says.

Dad says, “I’m gonna put Matt on a stand up on the old Haines place, then walk out the ridge a mile or so and drive back towards him.”

And Uncle Paul says, “I b’lieve I’m gonna cross the crick and hunt the beech woods this morning.”

“Oh no,” Uncle Dan says. “You wanna hunt them beech woods in the evenings. Deer feed on the beech nuts at dusk because the woods are thinner and there’s more light. They be back up on the hillsides under the oaks during the daytime.”

And so, after all the palavering is done, we suit up. Depending on the weather, “suiting up” consisted mostly of pulling on insulated coveralls over jeans and flannel shirts and putting on our hunting boots. Sometimes if it was especially cold, I’d wear long johns. I don’t remember a Thanksgiving that I hunted when it wasn’t cold as a witch’s titty.

Unfortunately for this year’s hunters, it is going to be especially warm on Thursday. Today, the temperature is going to be in the high fifties, and tomorrow it will be in the sixties. That is not good hunting weather. The morning is cold enough to prompt one to wear warm clothes, but the late morning and afternoon would be downright hot. And if you shot a deer, you’d probably collapse of heat exhaustion dragging it out of the woods. My Grandpa had that experience last year. Shot a doe down in a holler on a warm day in November and spent much of the afternoon dragging it out because it was so hot, he had to keep stopping and cooling down.

In the days I’m talking about, though, back in the late eighties and early nineties, it was always freezing come Thanksgiving. I’d take a thermos of hot black coffee with me to wherever I was going to stand and watch for deer, but I’d have it mostly drank within an hour. I’d eat crackers or whatever snack I had stuffed into my pocket. In later years, I’d take a book with me and read it, much to my Dad’s consternation. After the first time he remarked on it, I hid the book in my overalls pocket and did not let him see it. Once I read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sitting on a rock overlooking a creek that ran through the holler behind my Grandma’s house, my back against an old poplar tree that had grown up around the rock. What a bitter cold November day that was! I cut a finger tip out of one glove with my knife so I could turn pages without taking my hand out of the glove (I told Dad I cut the glove so I could feel the trigger better). So cold! A few dry snowflakes fell out of a steel gray sky like stray atoms from the creation of the universe. The only thing I could hear was the wind in the trees and the occasional far-away pop of a rifle that signaled some lucky hunter was going home early. And I sat there reading Walt Whitman.

Another time, I read an anthology of American poetry I had picked up for a dollar from a used book store. Poetry is the best for hunting or fishing, because you can read a few verses, stop and look around (or make a cast or two), and then read some more. Especially when you’re hunting, you tend to rely on your ears more than your eyes anyway. Leastways I did.

But I wasn’t a particularly good hunter. I had plenty of chances to kill deer, but I only ever killed one in my entire life. Cruel as it sounds, I was better at killing small game. I didn’t hesitate as much. I’d kill a squirrel or a rabbit with a shotgun or .22 and not think of it twice. Deer were different, however. I let too many get away. Then Dad would come wandering by where I was standing and say, “Didn’t you see those deer I drove your way? I kept expecting you to shoot any minute.” And I’d say, “I heard them, but they were over the hill. They never came over on this side.” Lies. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.

Sometimes walking to or from Union Station, I have a little chuckle at the squirrels nutting about the oaks behind the Senate Office Buildings. I could make quick work of those little critters with a .22 or my Browning .16 gauge shotgun. Sometimes I pass so close and they don’t even move, I think I could probably catch one with my hands. I could live on hand-fed, Washington squirrel meat. I wonder what folks walking with me would think if, one day, I grabbed up a squirrel by the tail and hind legs and swung it against the side of a tree, breaking its skull, the way I used to finish off squirrels I hadn’t killed clean when I hunted back home in West Virginia? What would people think?