You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  Don’t tell the professor, but a strange and not altogether disagreeable sense of anticipation came over me as I completed my order for this decidedly down-market equipment. It might have been called happiness.

  SNOOP

  Most nights when it’s not too hot or cold, Snoop and I head up the old railroad-turned-bike-path behind the house for a short walk. As in all the best man-dog relations, both sides benefit. I get my butt off the sofa long enough to miss the parade of senseless cruelty that passes for the ten o’clock news, and Snoop gets one more chance to break her personal best of twenty-two scent markings in a mile-long walk (set the evening my wife Jane left an entire pot of chicken soup to cool in the mudroom).

  One night about a month ago, Snoop winded an unfamiliar critter in the underbrush and veered off to investigate. There ensued a tremendous two-part caterwauling, and Snoop exploded from the bushes with a terrified what-the-heck-was-THAT-thing look on her face, snapping the frayed leash required by local law. “Dammit, Snoop, that’s a raccoon,” I told her as I trotted up the path to where she had stopped to collect her wits. “What’d you expect it to do, kiss you?” As I tied the leash ends, we looked back to see the raccoon, clearly illuminated by a full moon, calmly walking back up its tree.

  Snoop, as you will have guessed, is not what we humans refer to as a working dog. She cannot, for example, point birds, herd sheep, or follow a scent trail that crosses other, more interesting trails. She will retrieve a thrown ball or Frisbee, but only to come back and taunt you as she perforates it. Her other favorite game is Escape, which involves tunneling or leaping the backyard fence and then trotting around to the front door to stand—for hours if necessary—until let in. She derives immense satisfaction from Escape. She is about one-half of a guard dog, threatening great violence upon meter readers and repairmen as long as she can’t get at them. Once they are inside, she retreats silently to her command center beneath the sofa in the den. After they leave, she resumes barking. Snoop is, in short, a mess.

  This is not entirely my fault, as the family adopted Snoop six years ago, when she was already grown. I remember the first time we saw her among the other dogs at the Humane Society—a slender animal, just over knee-high, a mixture of beagle, hound, and God only knows what else, with heavy mascara around her eyes that made her look particularly soulful. It was Saturday, the day of reckoning at animal shelters. On Saturday, the lucky dogs—the puppies, the purebreds, and the ones who’ve somehow picked up the art of charming humans—get a new home. Many of the remaining dogs, along about Wednesday or Thursday, get a short appointment with a long needle.

  My stepdaughter Molly, guided by the infallible radar that children possess for a few years before the world drums it out of them, positioned herself before the dog sitting quietly and alone at the back of the cage. Molly’s fingers tightened on the chain-link fence. “That one,” she said quietly. I asked why. “Because,” she said, “if we don’t take her, nobody will.” Molly was nine at the time, but nobody’s fool. And so this descendant of the wolf came to share our cave.

  Some people say otherwise, but I think Snoop knows exactly what we saved her from. Every so often, for no apparent reason, she will rise from her bed beneath the mantel, walk over to my chair, and press her forehead against my knee for a few long seconds. There is something about these moments that can move me to tears. It’s Snoop’s silent acknowledgment of how fragile life is, how mysterious the mechanism by which we intersect the beings we will love during our brief time on Earth. It is as eloquent as any words ever spoken by a poet. On the other hand, if it happens to be around ten o’clock, it’s just her way of telling me that it’s time we went for our walk.

  PARADISE LOST

  Every so often in a man’s life, paradise comes calling with a bright red apple. Sometimes there’s a worm in it. The knock came last week in the form of a phone call from a guy I’d hunted deer with a couple of years ago. “I’ve come across the most incredible piece of property on the Eastern Shore. And I’ve been hunting Maryland the better part of twenty years . . . oh, hell, I guess it’s thirty years now.” He described a pie-shaped tract of 750 acres between the Blackwater River and Raccoon Creek with a mile and a half of riverfront, incredible duck and goose hunting, loads of deer, turkeys, and about twenty coveys of quail.

  There were deer stands and duck blinds already built. A decent cabin featured a woodstove, a main room, two more small rooms with bunks, and an outhouse. A working ATV was included to haul out deer, as was a storage shed containing, among other things, three dozen old goose decoys.

  The geography of the place, along with a single gated road providing the only access, rendered it almost unpoachable. The caretaker, a local who’d been there for years, would be happy to stay on in exchange for nothing more than the right to hunt waterfowl. The place was so prime that my friend, Jeff, wasn’t interested in leasing it. He was putting together a group of ten guys to buy the property outright. Eight shares had already been spoken for, mostly by fellows he’d hunted with over the years.

  “Sounds out of my league,” I said. “But tell me the price tag. Just for grins.”

  “Ten grand up front, then four grand a year for fifteen years. After that, it’s paid for. And hunting land on the Eastern Shore will have doubled in value by then. Personally, I’m not in it to make money. I’m thinking I could hunt here for the rest of my life.” He told me there was no pressure either way and gave me directions to the property.

  I hung up thinking it might as well be $10 million. But I didn’t sleep that night. Or the next. I kept thinking about those wide-racked Eastern Shore whitetails. About a place to hunt that was mine. And about straining my back lifting a ten-pointer onto the ATV as the twilight faded to black. Such thoughts quickly transform What if? into Why not?

  I drove down forty-eight hours after talking to Jeff, so jazzed I couldn’t keep the car anywhere near the speed limit. When I finally parked at the locked gate and double-timed it down the gravel road, I saw the place was everything he’d described. Except for one tiny detail: It was almost all salt marsh with just a few stands of pine. It looked like world-class waterfowl country, all right. But deer? I called Jeff half an hour later. “Tell me again about the whitetail hunting,” I said.

  “Oh, hell, there’s not a whitetail on the place,” he said. “It’s all sika deer, tons of ’em.” My heart sank. I knew about these little cousins of the elk. I’d hunted them myself. They were a perfectly fine game animal; they just weren’t whitetails, the creatures that ran through my dreams all year round.

  I got back in my car and started punching the seek button on my radio. I was surprised at how heavy the sadness was. You can’t lose what you never had, I tried to tell myself. Then the radio stopped on a station, and through the static there came an unmistakably nasal and plaintive voice—Bob Dylan, singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He was as close as you could get without being inside. And he wasn’t going to get inside anytime soon. I started singing along.

  ONLY SO MANY

  We interrupt this column to bring you the following news bulletin: It’s now officially November. God knows what you’re doing at the moment. You may have picked up this magazine in the waiting room of the auto service center where three guys with ball-peen hammers are now joyfully working over your radiator. Maybe you’re reading it at home, sunk in your La-Z-Boy, carefully rehearsing how you’ll tell your mate that cleaning the gutters now is a bad idea in light of a new study showing that a wad of tightly packed leaves actually filters the downspout water, resulting in significantly healthier shrubs. Maybe you’re channel surfing, wondering how it is possible to have 328 cable selections and not a single damn one of them worth watching.

  Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Open the window and listen. The universe is trying to tell you something. Wake up, it’s whispering. Get your butt out to the woods. Now, before it’s too late.


  To a deer hunter, right now is Christmas, the Fourth of July, and a big, fat tax refund all rolled into one nifty package. It’s the annual window when the stars momentarily align and otherwise unkillable old bucks decide to go courting at noon. There’s no guarantee that you’ll bag one, of course. The only guarantee is the one a carnival barker whispered in my ear one summer evening several decades ago and that I’ve been hearing ever since: “C’mon, bud. Can’t win it if you ain’t in it.”

  Which leads me to the $64,000 question. How many huntable Novembers do you figure you’ve got left? I’m serious. Forty? Twenty? Ten? Human vanity being what it is, most of us don’t like to consider the question too closely. We don’t like to admit that a November is coming we won’t be part of, and it’s natural to push such thoughts away. But we all live on borrowed time. The only November you have for sure is the one passing through your hands right now.

  I love everything about the month. I love the today’s-gonna-be-the-day hopefulness that suffuses the darkness as I stumble on my way to my stand on the frost-slicked ground. I love the lonesome feeling of watching a leaf that has hung on tight for nine months suddenly decide that this particular gust of wind is the one it wants to straddle for its joyride to the ground. I love the way my heart speeds up when a doe walks nervously into the clearing, glancing back over her shoulder to see if she’s still being pursued. I even love standing groggily in front of the convenience-store microwave at four thirty in the morning as I nuke the sausage-egg-cheese biscuits that my doctor has forbidden me to eat. (He recently told me to cut down on cigars, too. I liked that doctor. I’m going to miss him.)

  I expect to spend a great deal of this November hunting hard somewhere between fourteen and twenty-five feet up. There’s an oak flat about a mile from the nearest road that nobody else seems to be hunting, and I’ve got six trees picked out to handle varying winds. With a doe already in the freezer, I’m now hunting for glory and antlers. If I kill one, it’s going to be a long drag out. I’m looking forward to that particular backache. A man only gets so many Novembers.

  AS GOOD AS IT GETS

  Just when it seems like everybody you know is sharpening their elbows in the great national Race to the Bottom of the Toilet, you run across a guy who didn’t even fill out the entry form. Grayson Chesser lives in Virginia on the Eastern Shore, the narrow spit of land separating the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. Near as he can tell, his people landed a few miles down the beach in the 1600s and never found a good reason to leave. He lives on land farmed by his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

  “You could make a good living here for quite a long time, you know,” he says. “Chesapeake was good for fishing, crabbing, oystering. The soil was rich. And the waterfowl hunting was as good as anywhere on earth.” Chesser went to Old Dominion University, got a degree in business, and was in the process of losing his shirt farming when he decided to go into decoy carving and guiding full-time.

  The decision paid off. Chesser isn’t trading in his twelve-year-old truck anytime soon, but he’s not going back to farming, either. Of the two hundred or so decoys he makes each year, most are sold before he even gets around to carving them. Collectors snap up a lot, but about 20 percent are bought by guys who have the audacity to put them in the water and hunt over them, as does Chesser himself.

  Chesser’s decoys—which he carves in species from teal to ­Canadas—are made of pine, cedar, and other types of wood. (You may remember wood, that hard, fibrous stuff that was once used to make bows, boats, rifle stocks, fishing lures, and countless other needful things. It’s now used primarily to frame town houses on what was recently hunting property.)

  “It’s nice to win ribbons,” he says of the contemporary carving scene. “But it’s nothing compared to watching some bird—that was maybe born up near the Arctic Circle and can go anywhere in the world it wants—cup its wings and come in to the decoys you made. That’s all I ever really wanted out of life, to be able to carve and see that, and to hunt and guide.”

  It’s healthy to do work you love. At fifty-six, Chesser’s black hair is untouched by gray. The lower part of his face is permanently tanned. His forehead, usually shielded by his cap, is as white as milk. His mind is quick but his speech is slow, and his movements slower still. There is about him the aura of a historically misplaced person, someone who one day woke to find himself in the twenty-first century, cut his eyes left and right, and decided the best move was not to let it bother him too much.

  Chesser killed his first duck at the age of twelve over three of his father’s old decoys, including one made of papier-mâché that had a broken bill. “That was it for me,” he remembers. “Hunting over decoys was addictive—like how people talk about their first hit of crack.”

  This was about 1960, just as plastic decoys were replacing wood. The boy began hanging around a number of old carvers, including Miles Hancock, born in 1888, a former market hunter, guide, and all-round waterman. Hancock made a deceptively crude, flat-bottomed decoy that was wonderful to hunt over. “A lot of decoys look good on a mantel but dead once you put them in the water,” Chesser explains. “His didn’t.”

  The old-time carvers like Hancock were more than teachers to the boy; they were his heroes. “It was like a kid today meeting sports celebrities. These guys didn’t have much book learning, but they’d studied the bay their whole lives. And I thought they were wealthy as kings because they loved their work. One day in his shop, Miles leaned over and said, ‘Grayson, don’t ever do something for money that you wouldn’t do for free.’

  “I’ve never forgotten that.”

  CAMP RULES

  Field & Stream, November 2003

  1.If a camp member should get lost, the distress signal is three shots, with an interval of 10 seconds between shots. This is so members may distinguish between the truly lost and those who are merely poor marksmen.

  2.Nobody over 300 pounds permitted in upper bunks for any reason. One member is still removing plywood splinters from his backside after last year’s incident involving Tiny Binstock.

  3.No lawyers allowed as guests. Ever. Even if he or she is a blood relation.

  4.A dish is deemed clean if the user cannot identify the last foodstuff eaten off of it.

  5.Any hunter observed missing a shot under 150 yards at a standing deer will have his shirttail cut off in the presence of all camp members that evening. However, the “Henderson exception” stipulates that no hunter shall have more than 3 shirts destroyed in said manner per day.

  6.Polypropylene long johns may be worn for no more than 5 days, or until fumes can be seen emanating from them, whichever comes first.

  7.The Saran Wrap over-the-outhouse-seat trick may not be perpetrated after the first week of hunting season.

  8.A member shooting a buck under 100 pounds live weight (or doe under 70 pounds) must leave the animal where it drops. A

  party including the shooter and a majority of members present will then be assembled to retrieve the deer. Members hauling the carcass will express incredulity at the immense size of the animal and voice the fear of injuring their backs. This is intended to promote camaraderie and group cohesion.

  9.A deer taken by a member may gain no more than 2 antler points per hunting year, with a 4-point maximum. To wit, a 6-pointer may be referred to as an 8-pointer the following season, and a 10-pointer the season after, but will never become a 12-pointer no matter how long the hunter lives.

  10.Peeing off the porch is prohibited during daylight hours. Peeing off the south end of the porch after dark is permitted provided no members are sleeping in impact zone.

  11.Any boy shooting his first buck will, at that evening’s dinner, be given the choice of eating either the right or left testicle of the buck. Cook will serve 2 hush puppies of not less than 3 inches diameter each to the boy. After a suitable silence, boy’
s father or guardian will say, “Hell, I’ll make it easy for you, son,” and consume one hush puppy whole. He will then smack his lips and declare, “Now that’s a good testicle!”

  12.All poker debts incurred after 9 p.m. are to be rolled one decimal point to the left. Thus, $100 becomes $10, $1,000 becomes $100, etc.

  13.Cell phones will be confiscated and dropped down the most-used hole in the outhouse, to be retrieved at their owners’ convenience.

  ALL ALONE IN TARPON PARADISE

  Before we head out into the steamy afternoon on Nicaragua’s remote San Juan River, Philippe Tisseaux wants me to pay a visit to the hospital. Or rather, he wants the hospital to pay a visit to me. “Carlos! L’hôpital!” he calls in French to one of the barefoot boys who are always in evidence around the new two-story lodge on almond-wood piles he built here at the junction of the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua.

  Carlos returns with his “hospital”—a wooden box filled with the mangled bodies of large Rapalas. “My wounded,” Tisseaux says tenderly. He is a cheerful expat French businessman and angler who fell in love with this place after discovering that he could catch tarpon up to 250 pounds all year round. A few of the lures are merely chipped or gouged, or have had their stainless steel intestines pulled partway out of their butts, but most have been totaled, the metal ripped from their flanks at crazy angles and twisted into corkscrews.