THE Accuweather
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
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.
After breakfast, out we'd shamble into the cold and dark, sliding into purring pickups that took us to the foot of the mountain, where we parked the trucks and began the ascent. The uncles gave grave admonitions to us rookies to keep open the fronts of our jackets and walk slowly. Don't break a sweat! You needed to be on your "stand" before first light, still as a post. And few feelings matched the misery of sweat freezing on a body unable to move to generate even the smallest warmth.
Squatting on one's haunches on a windswept Appalachian mountaintop in late November could redefine a townie's concept of cold and admit the possibility of a meteorological paradox. Surely the temperature could not have exceeded 25 degrees, yet the precipitation that fell from the morose gray sky refused to follow natural law and be a benign snow. Under a lemony smear of sun it remained rain, and penetrated like rain, but with the coldness of ice.
So your teeth chattered and your body shivered and as the chemical pellets in the "hot seat" on which you sat released their heat and then became inert, your buttocks went from comfortable to cold to numb to amputatable. Thermos coffee helped, but what you craved were hot springs and a snorkel.
But in time the sun dips behind the hill and makes the woods a shadowland. A man hollers. The hunting is done for the day. Down the mountain, into the trucks, back to the cabin. Food. Sleep.
AMONG THE VIRTUOUS
I suppose some hunting trips are glorified booze parties. Not these. There was alcohol around, and most of us partook, but not much. Drunkenness would have compromised the goal at hand, which was dragging a dead buck off the hill, and would have compounded already more-than-ample discomfort with a hangover. Some existentialism even Sartre can't stand.
There was small-stakes poker, punctuated by jokes that you might call "risque" or "ribald" if you were building your vocabulary, but that "dirty" would describe. To Uncle Bob, a railroad man, comedic vulgarity came naturally, hence inoffensively: You would not scold a bird for having feathers, would you? Spying dark clouds churning on the horizon, Uncle Bob might say, "Boys, I have a sneaking hunch we're about to get our a---s wet."
How did all this sit with my God-fearing Uncle Raymond? He tolerated it. But if "Amazing Grace" co-existed with The One About the Farmer's Daughter, there were limits. One cousin inexplicably brought a sackful of porn magazines to the cabin. Someone accidentally knocked it off the second-floor railing onto Uncle Raymond as he was cooking and singing hymns, showering him with paper breasts and derrieres. "Boys," he said, "keep your filth up there."
I can hardly neglect Uncle Les. Childless himself, he fascinated his nephews. He had captured a bunch of Germans in the last days of the war and brought home a Nazi officer's sword, which he let us handle. Uncle Les, who reputedly had Indian blood, treated warts with creek stones and performed other mysterious rites. What boy wouldn't love him? In a voice that was slow and full of solemn import, he always seemed to be imparting some sphinx-guarded knowledge, even if the subject was canning beans.
I felt honored when Uncle Les showed me his special stand and offered it for my use--even when I found he had confided the same information to my cousins.
ANTI-HUNTERS
Some people dislike hunting and hunters, yet I will say this about those high-country excursions: They supplied me with vivid memories of men most of whom are now beyond making more--memories that endure like rock-hard fossils when much else has turned to dust.
And what is the hunt but the old dance of life? In time, death taps every shoulder and demands to cut in. The crack of a rifle echoing through cold hills is not, as the animal-rights people would have it, murder. It is metaphor. It is verve and joy cut short by mortality, which sometimes arrives on a hot slug of lead, sometimes amid a cellular riot inside a pancreas (Uncle Les), in a heart's choked arteries (Uncle Raymond), or by some other means natural or violent. Death rides a thousand horses, and one of them is faster than every man and every beast.
On hunts, thank the Lord, there is little talk of computer software, the S&P 500, the Electoral College, or the perils of down-zoning. And if a day comes when all that sand is swept away, when the BlackBerrys go blank and the Bluetooths mute and designer britches and double lattes become faint and trivial memories, there will be a premium on men and women with guns who know how to use them. And the formerly civilized condescenders, with growling bellies and savages on their heels, will canonize new saints.
It's odd that some proud "multiculturalists," who never saw a Third World custom too bizarre to applaud, can't muster some benevolence for a tradition-steeped subculture in their own society. But I'll tell you this: The many enrichments hunting brings are well worth the carcasses of a few mammals, which also make darned fine chili.
Paul Akers is editor of the opinion pages of The Free Lance-Star.