Throughout the night before, I’d listened to them laugh and talk on subjects unique to the little boy world. Toy trucks and airplanes and things seen in cartoons, how fried rabbit tastes, where ducks sleep and how long forever might be. Too many to follow or even count.
They were first-graders having a spend-the-night, and the term “sleep over” definitely does not apply. The next morning they were the first ones up and wearing camo.
They were up long before the sun and their discussion never faltered. Chatter continued through breakfast. Pancakes and scrambled eggs fought their way past talk of baseball games, deer they had seen and where the moon hides out during the day.
They were still smiling as noon came and went, and as we walked semi-quietly through the woods. They were smiling as we loaded into the truck and headed home. How they could have been ready to hunt or last as long they did without sleep I don’t know, or maybe I’m just too old to remember. They did remind me of other times, though, and of things that make all the difference.
We signed in to Chickasaw WMA just after sunrise, dropping the short half of the registration card into the slot, then drove along a dirt road and stopped well off by ourselves, letting the other club members pass. The rest of our loosely-confederated squirrel hunting band trickled by, wishing us good luck and offering what information they could about what lay over the next rise.
I wanted to make sure we were sufficiently remote so as not to disturb other hunts with our racket, but I needn’t have worried. The two young boys made less noise than a lot of grown men would have, certainly less than one in particular did.
We walked as quietly as we could through deep dry leaves, up and down hills, over deadfalls, across a small stream or two. We picked our way among briars and paused often, looking and listening as we went.
There’s an art to following someone though the woods. You either need to be close enough to take the leader’s handoff of small, green limbs bent out of the way, or far enough back to let them spring from his hand and snap back harmlessly in front of you. The inexperienced seem to hang out in the la-la land that lies between, which makes the flip of every limb an occasion.
When you’re hunting as you go you also have to stop when the leader stops, move when they move and talk only in the lowest of whispers. The boys did these things as a matter of course, as if they’d done them learning to walk. Of course, maybe they had.
We heard geese coming and going from a watershed pond nearby, watched for squirrels, listened to the wind. We moved from ridge to ridge, sitting for stretches to let the woods get quiet, hoping a squirrel would stir, but not too concerned about whether he did. They picked up hiking sticks when we walked and pulled moss from sodden stumps when we sat.
At length a crow spoke up nearby. I pulled out a call and answered and, pretty soon, provoked a group of four or five crows into flying a high circle around us. The boys liked this and, when we got back to the truck, asked to have a go at the call themselves, which they did with all their might. Eventually, squirrel-less but not disheartened, we called it a day and headed home, dropping the long end of the yellow card into the WMA box on the way out.
Driving back, we talked about all the critters available to hunt on public land and how the seasons run, about why we hunt turkeys in the spring and deer in the fall, about why furbearers are protected and why wild hogs are generally bad for everyone’s business. For a while I was a part of their club and they a part of mine, and I remembered the freedom of just being, which is what they’d enjoyed, and what I’d been looking for all along.
I often see laments that modern kids’ schedules don’t leave room for hunting. That comes close to the point, but still misses. It’s their mentors’ schedules that don’t leave time for the woods, for the things in them, for the peace and racket that follows us there. It’s easily fixed, though. It’s all a matter of priorities.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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