The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

by Christopher Scotton

  The path circled halfway around the lake, following the sandy beach through a stand of trees. The air was cool and the sound of the peepers and crickets echoed over the still water. Pops stopped at a group of large pine trees and rocks, a fire ring in the middle. He slung his pack down. “You boys get the tent up while I work on a fire,” he said and moved to a huge courtesy pile next to the fire ring.

  We set up the tent on a sandy space between two trees a few hundred feet back from the water. Pops had the early flare of a fire, feeding twigs and pinecones for the stoke.

  “Man, I’m beat,” Buzzy said as we connected tent poles and nylon.

  “I just want to eat and sleep,” I said.

  Pops had the fire going and put on a pot of water to boil. We threw up the tent as he added freeze-dried beef stroganoff to the water. We sat around the fire, eating the piping-hot meal and saying nothing. I felt a fatigue in my bones that I’d never before experienced—a noble exhaustion born of accomplishment and extreme effort.

  We ate the entire pot of noodles, each going back for thirds. It was only ten o’clock, but my body felt like it had been working itself for days. Despite the threat of bears, we left the dirty dishes and crawled into bed and fell immediately asleep to the sound of a frog calling a mate across the cool black of Glaston Lake.

  Chapter 28

  THE WHITE STAG

  It rained most of the night, and I rose just as first light was coloring up the morning. Pops and Buzzy were asleep on top of their bedrolls in the tent. I quietly unzipped the flap and stealthed out to take in the lake and the mountains. Workings from last night’s dinner were piled in the ashes of the fire ring. I collected them and walked down to the water’s edge.

  Verdant hills, topped in granite, hugged the lake on three sides. At each end and next to our camp, huge rock outcroppings formed cliffs that ran straight down into the water. The lake was a blue mirror and a hawk flew from above and dove low over it before rising and winging out to the trees. There were a few stars in the brightening sky, but not a wisp of rain cloud. After the tornado of life in Redhill, it was the first moment of absolute calm I had ever experienced. I quietly laid the dinner accessories down on the soft sand so as not to alter the fabric of the morning.

  I heard a slight rustling of leaves behind me and turned to the woods. A huge, blizzard-white deer was standing still in the old-growth pines—an albino buck with a gigantic rack of antlers. We were both statues, assessing each other in the new light. The stag shook its head and neck, as a lion tosses his mane, then walked slowly to the water. As he bent to drink and his muzzle touched the water, it sent out rivulets on the perfect plane.

  I was fifty feet away and took a small step toward him; his head immediately jerked up, regarded me. I took another small step forward. He went back to the water with one eye watching. I slid silently his way, taking short, careful steps. We were twenty feet apart when he brought his head up and squared his body to me. I stopped and we gazed at each other for half a minute.

  The stag’s chest was high and strong, its shoulders and thighs rippling with sinew. I stepped toward him. The buck didn’t move. The base of his antlers was thick as my wrist, and the rack, splayed into eight branches on either side, was covered in soft brown velvet that rounded the tips and made him seem much younger than his years. I took another step and put my hand out. He sniffed at the air and stepped to me. My heart pounded as I moved ahead slowly.

  We were ten feet apart now. I took a tentative step forward, then another. He brought his chin up and appraised me, raised his left hoof for a moment, then stomped it down.

  When I was two feet from the stag, I slowly reached my hand out to touch his powerful neck. His fur seemed to stand on end, inviting my fingers closer. I expected his eyes to dart wildly as I came so near, like a stallion’s, but instead he locked his with mine. They were moist and pink, which gave them a strangely intelligent mien—kind, sad eyes that seemed to carry with them the secret wisdom of the earth. Just as my hand brushed his fur, stirring in the tent and the rip of a zipper on the door flap. Buzzy popped his head out and blinked bleary-eyed at our surroundings.

  The stag jerked away and bounded off into the undergrowth. He stopped at a safe distance and turned to look at me. We stared at each other again for a few seconds; then he spun and disappeared into the woods.

  I ran up to Buzzy. “Did you see him? A huge white deer with antlers like tree branches! And he let me walk right up to him. Did you see him?”

  Buzzy blinked in disbelief. “I dint see him. All I saw was you lookin at the woods.”

  I took him down to the water to show him the place where the buck drank and pointed to the spot in the pines where the animal had gone.

  “He let you get that close?”

  “Yeah,” I said smiling. “It was seriously cool.”

  “Damn, I wish I’d had my crossbow ready.”

  “Why? You wouldn’t shoot something like that.”

  “Hell I wouldn’t. How cool would it be hangin that on my wall. Cleo would go nuts.”

  “Buzzy, there is no way you are shooting the white deer. No fucking way.” I squared to him the way the deer squared to me.

  He went silent and looked at me quizzically and a little hurt, unable to parse my meaning.

  I softened. “Look, man, there are some things in this world that just are not meant to be killed. I think that white stag is one of them.”

  Buzzy looked out at the space where the deer had been and nodded as a gradual seep of understanding made its way into him.

  We scrubbed the dishes in the lake water, scouring them with sand to remove last night’s meal. Pops was just waking as we got back to camp. I made a fire and had the coffee water at a boil when he exited the tent, stretching.

  “Kevin saw a white buck,” Buzzy blurted before I could. “He almost let him touch him. Says the sucker was huge—at least sixteen points.” Buzzy spread his arms wide for the dimension.

  “The White Stag?” Pops asked, clearly surprised. “You saw him? How close did you get?”

  I told him.

  “Son, you have seen a rare sight indeed. I’ve been tramping in these woods all my life, and I’ve never seen the White Stag—heard tell, but have never seen him. And you got that close?”

  I nodded and he regarded me proudly. “It’s all that vet training I’ve been giving you. Animals can sense that.” He winked and put the never-lit pipe to his lips.

  “It was so cool, Pops. It was like he knew I wasn’t going to hurt him.”

  Pops nodded. “That stag is the stuff of legend. Folks have been seeing him or his kin for years… but only in glimpses.”

  I brought him coffee in an old dented aluminium cup. We sat around the fire while I recounted the White Stag for the third time and we swapped stories of momentous animal sightings while fatback fried in the skillet. Buzzy told of a black fox he had seen on Skull Mountain. Pops talked of two-headed lizards and Siamese sheep from his veterinary school days. We ate the fatback with hot oatmeal, then cleaned the dishes down by the lake.

  Back at camp, Pops was relacing his hiking boot. “That was the last of our food, boys. This morning let’s get a game plan for victuals. We can’t live on fatback alone. Buzzy, did your grandfather ever teach you how to set snares?”

  “He taught me how to set a rat trap.”

  “Well, that’s a start. Do you understand the concept of bait and trigger?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Now, I’m partial to spring snares, so we’ll need to carve some triggers. Drag snares are easier to deploy but tend to lose game. A good spring snare will catch a rabbit almost every time.”

  Pops chopped half a dozen three-foot-long staves from several straight branches around camp. He took one up. “First thing is to strip the bark, then carve one end into a point. That’s what we’ll drive into the ground.” When all the branches were debarked and sharpened, he chopped off the top eight inches of each stake. “These w
ill be the triggers. We carve a notch into the stake and a matching notch into the trigger, and we’re halfway home.” He quickly cut the stake and the trigger and showed how they fit into each other. “The key to good trapping is to find the trails that the varmints use and set the snare right where they walk. You use a thin wire for the noose and prop it up with sticks about four inches off the ground.” He drew the mechanics of a spring snare in the dirt.

  We carved the triggers and fashioned six nooses from a spool of thin wire Pops had in his pack. “There’s a field of underbrush on the other side of the cliff that’s full of rabbits.” He pointed to the rock face that jutted out into the water. “We’ll get them coming to drink at the lake.”

  We followed Pops over the cliff hill and into a wide thicket of saplings and mountain laurel and briar. He showed us the tamped switch grass that marked the animal trail. “Here’s some fresh rabbit turd—always a good sign.” He chose a ten-foot sapling and stripped it of branches. He pulled the sapling down, set the trigger, and propped the wire noose up with two Y-shaped sticks. “Now we add some brush on either side of the trail to funnel them into the snare, and soon we’ll be eating rabbit stew.”

  He handed me a snare fixing. “Now you two make one.”

  Buzzy and I chose a trail that came out of a coppice of holly bushes. He stripped a sapling with Pops’ bowie knife while I pounded the stake into the ground. We set the snare and Pops nodded approval.

  We set four more, then started our walk back to camp. “We’ll need to check the snares often, so anything we catch doesn’t suffer unnecessarily.” As we neared our tent Pops detoured to an old poplar tree and a faded green tarp held down by rocks. Underneath the tarp was a long handmade dugout canoe and two wooden paddles. “Made this on a Tramp in the midsixties—held up pretty well, I think. Help me with the back end, boys; she’s a heavy one.” Buzzy and I picked up the back and followed Pops to camp. “Now, who wants to learn how to fish?” he asked and pulled two collapsible fishing rods out of his pack.

  “I already know how to fish,” Buzzy protested. “Since, like, age three!”

  “I do too. Mom took me once.”

  Pops dismissed us with a wave. “You may have been fishing, but that’s very different from knowing how to fish. To really know how to fish you need to understand how fish behave. Just throwing worms on a hook with a float may get you lucky, but it won’t get you good. I, on the other hand, will teach you boys to think like a fish.”

  “Can you teach me to swim like a fish? That strikes me as more useful,” I said, hand on mouth to hide my grin. Buzzy wiped a smile.

  “Dang ungrateful pilgrims. I’ve a mind to leave you up here for a few days and see how Buzzy’s rat-trapping experience feeds you.” He threw us each a rod.

  I purposely held the wrong end and mocked a cast to Buzzy. “I got a big one Pops, what do I do?”

  Buzzy dropped to the ground and began fish flopping.

  Pops walked over and peered at my catch. “All you got is a holler fish… better throw that one back.” He took our rods and walked off, satisfied at having got the better of the exchange. He turned at the water’s edge. “You striplings coming?”

  We laughed and ran after him. “Aren’t we taking the canoe?”

  He stood at the rock outcropping next to camp, a daypack slung over his shoulders. “Not today. I’m going to take you to the best honey hole in Kentucky, where we will hunt the smartest, most intuitive freshwater fish in this or any other lake: Micropterus salmoides.”

  “Salmon?”

  “Largemouth bass.”

  The cliff jutted out thirty feet into the lake. A narrow shelf, just wide enough for a sideways foot, ran from the beach to the end of the rock. “A few years back I found a spot where the real lunkers like to parlay. It ain’t easy to get to but worth the effort.” We tightroped out to the end of the cliff, then climbed up ten feet to another ledge, then down again to an undercut alcove two feet off the water. The recess ran sixty feet across the face of the cliff.

  Pops took off the daypack and removed a rectangular canvas folder. He unzipped it and spread it on the rocks. Inside were rows of colored worms, silver lures, gleaming hooks, furry flies, wooden grasshoppers, plastic crawfish, lead weights, extra line.

  “Bass are curious fish by nature, so it’s easy to catch a yearling—they’ll strike on anything that moves. However, the smartest ones learn from their mistakes and become skittish and mistrusting… and big! Catching lunkers is an art, and knowing where they congregate is only half of it. They don’t like the light, so they tend to lurk in the deep or around structure: under ledges, around fallen trees, under piers, in weeds. Under this here ledge is where they lounge during the day.

  “Every time I come up to Glaston with Chester and Lo, I outfish them ten to one—drives em nuts. And here’s why.” He pulled a dark purple rubber worm from one of the pockets in his canvas tackle holder and held it up to the sunlight. “A black grape worm on a Texas rig.” He turned the worm in his fingers to show us the delight of its workmanship, its exquisite coloring. “Don’t tell Chester or Lo, but I’m a weightless wormer. I let the worm drift down slowly right in front of the bass’s nose; then I read the line with my fingers.”

  He tied the hook to the line and set the barb inside the worm. “We’ll each take a turn at it. We don’t want too many lures hitting the water at once. Watch and learn, pilgrims.” He plopped the worm into the water in front of the ledge and let it slowly sink. After a half a minute it had sunk out of sight. Pops let out the line by hand, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. His head twitched to the left as if he had heard a sound. Then he jerked the rod up and quickly reeled, jerked again and reeled some more. The rod bent on the weight of the fish. With a few more turns of the reel, a huge bass was flopping on the ledge. “Whoa, that’s big,” I said in a near whisper.

  “At least a twelve pounder.” He removed the hook and laced a keeper cord through the bass’s gill and out its mouth and put the fish back in the water at the end of the undercut. “Let’s change worms and you try it.”

  “Can’t I use the purple one?”

  “You can, but the other lunkers down there have already seen it. I change worm color every cast just so the fish don’t get used to seeing the same lure.” He peered over his sunglasses at us. “That’s one of my fishing secrets I expect you boys to keep to yourselves.” We nodded.

  He affixed the bright-yellow striped worm to the line and hid the barb inside it and gave me the rod. “Just plop the worm into the water; the fish will hear the sound and it will get their attention; then just let the goby sink down past them.”

  I did and watched the yellow worm disappear in the clear water. I slowly unspooled the line just like Pops, until the line went slack. “I think I’m on the bottom,” I whispered.

  “Okay, jiggle the rod to make the worm move just like a live worm. They may be looking at it right now.” I did as Pops said, then again. Nothing.

  “Okay. Pull it to the end of the ledge there and slowly reel it up. We’ll let you try the Black Grape on your next cast.” He set a Lemon Zinger for Buzzy and coached him as he sent the worm into the depths. Same result.

  We fished for an hour in the morning sunlight. Pops caught four more large fish, and Buzzy and I hooked some yearlings, only one of which was worth keeping.

  “We’ve got lunch and dinner, so you boys ready for some cliff diving?”

  I looked at Pops curiously.

  Buzzy grinned. “Sure!”

  “Follow me, then.”

  We balance-beamed back across the ledge. Pops put the string of fish in the water by the beach and we climbed the hill above the secret fishing spot, coming out of the woods onto the sunny top of the face forty feet above the water’s surface. My stomach tingled as I approached the edge and looked down.

  “We call this Jumping Rock—creative, don’t you think? I was about your age when I did my first dive. It was a way to show my brothers I had s
and. But I was terrified—almost wet myself.”

  “It’s a far way down,” I said.

  “Long as you push off from the ledge, you’ll be fine. Just don’t dive close to the wall.” He took his shirt off and stood on the edge, toes curled under. He was ramrod straight; arms leveled out front. He brought them out to his sides, then parallel to his body. He crouched slightly and pushed hard up and out, arching his back, throwing arms out like angel wings into a perfect swan dive to the clear water below. Buzzy and I exchanged impressed eyebrows.

  He peered over the edge. “You ready?”

  “No, you go first.”

  “Naw, I’ll follow you.”

  “You’re older; you should go first.”

  “You’re a guest in my state. Guests always go first.”

  “You’re bigger.”

  “You got brown hair.”

  “What, are you scared?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “But you dove into a raging creek to save my butt. This is nothing.”

  “Then you go.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think I might wet myself.” We laughed.

  “Screw it. Let’s go together.”

  I nodded and we moved near the edge, took running steps, and leaped off the rocks together, yelling all the way to the water. We splashed in with surprising force. I opened my eyes in the clear; Buzzy gave me a thumbs-up and we kicked to the surface, breaking the water as one. We high-fived and whooped our way to the shore. Pops did a few more dives, then took the fish back to camp.

  Buzzy and I cliff-jumped all morning, each leap giving us the confidence to try a few awkward dives. By early afternoon we were swan-diving like Pops.

  After a few more dives we walked back to camp. Pops had gathered various herbs and tubers to pan-fry the bass in a mixture of wood sorrel, wild onions, ramps, and watercress. We ate, changed clothes, and lazed in our hammocks for an hour until he roused us to check the snares.