|
|
The trail went through the woods, and although a white-tailed deer used it once in a while, it wasn’t a deer trail because it started from nowhere and because the woods were even and not special and not habitat, which was a concept I was learning about.
In five minutes, you were deeper in the woods and the truck was far behind and the dirt road was only a road in the map in your head, and by that age I had become pretty good with maps in my head and pretty bad already at other things in my head.
Then the woods opened into tall grass and a muddy basin in the sun and the trail cut through the grass and over Myhr Creek, which in September did not flow but only settled in the muddy grass. That was before 3-wheelers or 4-wheelers or ATVs, so the trail was narrow and hard-packed generally and even hopping over the depression of Myhr Creek there were no ruts or Hovland mud or standing water.
After a little while we came to a cut in the woods going downward to the right and upward, less clear, to the left. This, my father said, was an old fire lane, which at the time I took to mean maybe a fire break or maybe an old track for the water trucks in case of a forest fire. Already all those years ago it couldn’t work as either, since it had partly overgrown with young trees and brush which, way back then, I could not name.
So, we turned right – Southwards – down, in the direction of the great Lake Superior.
We were my father, who I mentioned, and D’Artagnan and MacDuff, meaning my younger brother and me, neither name being stuck to either of us. Except that the one who went first was named with either “Lead on, MacDuff” or “Onward Noble D’Artagnan.” Most of the time that was me because I was the older and because I was supposed to be, some glorious day in a golden future, the Great White Hunter.
Down the cut now there was a gametrail winding a bit between tufts of grass and bare rock and blueberries. The wolves hadn’t returned yet, so it was a deer trail, or a fox trail, and since I was becoming a fox trapper that year every trail in the woods or grass was a fox trail to me. The coyote hadn’t arrived yet either. The woodland caribou were gone just a few dozen years before, unless my leg was being pulled. The moose we weren’t sure of. So, it was a deer trail and, like I said, a fox trail.
I carried my .410 shotgun, single shot, break action, with 5 to 10 finger sized red shells. That was my first gun, and it was a Christmas gift from my grandmother Egan the winter before, December 25th, 1981. My father had the stock cut down so it could fit better in the crook of my shoulder. That was my partridge gun for some years, and it has also been used as a duck gun and rabbit gun and even goose gun – not too successfully – when my brother and me were young.
Probably my brother carried the old single shot, bolt action .22 with a scope. That was the gun we used when we learned about guns and how to shoot back when we were six or seven years old.
And probably my father walked at the end without a gun. He was good like that. Except I guess if my brother missed too much with the .22. Then my father, who liked a fresh dinner of partridge or any wild game in the freezer more than just about anything, would get impatient and shoot the birds. And I can definitely remember once – and possibly twice – him taking the .410 from me and using it for all those reasons. You know, when I missed too much.
The path south and down came to a “Y” and the old cut of the fire lane veered right, and “to veer” was a new word I had just learned because we were running the veer offense back in Pop Warner football and I was the wing back. My brother and father took to the right – the fire lane – and we were to meet back here in 40 minutes.
So my path was just a deer trail and the woods were stunted pines and blueberries because now I was on the bedrock of the first ridge over the big lake, the ridge that created the falls on the Brule and Kadunce and the cascades on the Cascade, and eventually there, straight down the deer trail through the old stunted turning birch and green pine, was the shimmering waters of Lake Superior some miles off under the blue sky that was endless.
Then my father and brother heard three shots, the second coming in the time it takes to break the action and pop out the empty shell smelling sweet from gunpowder and to load the fresh one and point and shoot, and the third coming in the time it takes to reload again, and look and wait and listen and follow the cooing of a partridge hidden behind the trunk of a big spruce and point and shoot.
That was September, 1982. 40 years ago.
I’m acquainted with a couple cliques of thirty somethings – millennials – around town, kids that weren’t even born yet back then. The gang at square dancing, the youngsters from the art co-op across the road, the young ladies in Hovland. They just weren’t born yet. They don’t have any memory of that September day, or of my brother or father or our two guns, or the sun on the yellowing birch leaves. That’s all right. But what makes me despair is that they don’t understand it. Or don’t care.
Leave a Reply