And just like that, it's over.
With one last whimper the 2016 hunting season came to a close today. Two weeks ago, on the eve of Opening Day, I wrote about the feeling of culmination as the months of preparation and anticipation gave way to two weeks of hunting. Those weeks got here slowly but left way too quickly, and have left behind a thick mixture of melancholy, regret, and disappointment....made bearable by the plans and strategy already forming for next year.
Today's hunt was spent with an eye on the future; after ten days of seeing very little deer activity I decided one less eye on the lookout for deer wasn't going to matter much. I again walked out to hunt rather than take a 4-wheeler. Sixteen degrees this morning with no wind, so my trek across the field was much warmer than yesterday. I arrived at a stand I've walked or drove by for two years and have never stood in; today I stopped and spent an hour in a spot I've decided needs to be hunted more. As I stood I began to build a list of next year's needs: stands that need to move, trails that need to emerge, food plots that need to be created, habits that need to change. This was our second poor season in a row - once is an incidence, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern - and I am not allowing a pattern of struggle to emerge.
I walked for an hour after standing an hour, seeing a deer hop out of and back into the woods ahead of me on the trail as I walked. Collected a trail camera at what used to be called the Slaughterhouse and is now known as the Dead Zone. Not a track has been made anywhere near it since the snow ended Friday evening. Walked back out to the fields and made my way through our spruce and pine plantations to an opening that sits above the river bottom. An opening that right now holds little nutrition for the deer but will become a clover patch next year. Sat on a log for another hour, thinking and watching and planning...and then I called it quits. I thought I'd hunt until noon, but at 11:30 I knew I wanted to be done. Two weeks of bad weather, bad decisions, and bad hunting had beaten the desire to stay longer right out of me.
I ended yesterday's post by hoping for one more memory on the final day of the season. Today's hunt lasted only a few hours but they were enough to give me that memory, though it has nothing to do with deer. While I was on that stand (that doesn't have a proper name) to begin the morning my dad came riding across the field to begin his final hunt. He parked at the gate to the hayfield and began to trudge towards the Dinner Pail Road, which was several hundred yards straight east of where I was standing. I knew he'd be coming and where he was going, but he didn't know I'd be where I was. I watched every step this old hunter took, the man who used to fill our freezers with meat every year and most years would put a set of antlers on the wall. He was a little younger than my current age when I first joined him as a hunter, and those were his prime years in the woods. He's long past his prime now - his daily hunting hours have decreased, he doesn't see bucks very often, he doesn't shoot as well as he used to - but this morning he moved like the guy I followed through the woods in those prime years. Or maybe I was trying to see that guy from so long ago, and be that kid, and have those years back. Somehow the seasons have slipped by and turned us both into different versions of ourselves, in some ways better, but in others not so.
As I stood on that stand and watched my hunting hero head north again....it's hard to say how many hundreds of times he's walked that road....I wondered how many seasons he has left, how many walks he'll be able to make, how many of these mornings we'd get to share. Even now, over 30 years after my first hunt, it's comforting to know that Dad is still out in the woods with me. As if called by my thoughts he suddenly looked west and saw me, and immediately threw his hand in the air and gave me a big wave (I'd love to say that three deer took off behind him when he waved because that would be hilarious...but no) which I returned with the same enthusiasm. That gesture, that simple wave, crossed more than distance; it crossed generations and memories to silently symbolize the lifelong connection these hunting seasons have given a father and his son. He resumed his walk, I continued my stand, and in minutes he was gone from my view. Someday he'll be gone from these woods. But I will never forget that wave.
This hunting season has already started to slide into the symphony of yesterdays that plays through my mind. The rifle is wiped down and oiled and placed in the gun cabinet, its home for the next eleven months. Shells are back in the box. Trail cameras sit in drawers rather than hang on trees. A pile of orange and red clothing awaits laundering. And the hunter in me returns to dormancy, allowing the father, teacher, and coach to resume their roles. The greatest days of the year have ended, and though hopes and dreams were left unfulfilled this year the time was still precious. As are the memories these last eleven hunting days have given me. The days end, the seasons end, but the memories live on to connect those seasons and, more importantly, the people who enjoy them.
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