Hail, hunting: It isn't just about the antlers

The hunting season

Date published: 11/29/2008

By Paul Akers

THE Accuweather forecast for Thanks- giving week in Sutton, W.Va., included two daytime highs in the 20s and snow. If St. John the Divine had had a buck license, this outlook might have inspired him to write a new Revelation--about deer-hunting Heaven.

The weather in Sutton, the hub of Braxton County, this week would have been a little less raw than in its encircling hills, which uncles and cousins from my mom's side of the family religiously invaded the three days before Thanksgiving in search of venison and antlers--and other things you can't eat or mount. Three times I went with them.

These expeditions would begin right after church on Sunday, when the clan would stop at Kroger's to buy a half-week's vittles. Then into pickups for a convoy up the interstate to Sutton and a rented cabin to claim a bed and prepare for the first day of hunting.

In recent years, the devoted hunters in my family complained of too-warm hunting seasons, when you needed to wear only a shirt and the deer were lethargic. People who actually experience nature know that something is up with the climate, and are more credible witnesses to geophysical reality than pseudo-scholars who cash checks from interested corporations for the sole service of ridiculing global warming.

In any case, balmy was not the prevailing condition during my days on the Braxton County mountains, which would start well before dawn with the sounds of bacon frying, coffee perking, and Uncle Raymond singing hymns as he cooked breakfast for all of us on the stovetop downstairs.

And I'll cherish the old rugged cross,

A DIFFERENT CLOCK

Uncle Raymond had spent the war years in the merchant marine dodging German wolf packs, running supplies to Allied soldiers through the North Atlantic, and he seemed happy to set back his biological clock to the 1940s when "early" and "late" had little meaning to working mariners on the hourless sea. Most of the pay for this hazardous duty he sent to a house in a West Virginia hollow where it helped feed a widow--his mother--and his five siblings, including my mother.

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Date published: 11/29/2008

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