A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  I'm lucky enough to have had no serious or chronic medical problems, but like anyone else, I've had episodes of compromised health, from an occasional flu to a self-inflicted chain saw gash that required a hundred stitches and a hundred staples. In those times, unable to do the physical things that are my life's sustenance, I've felt my spirits sag, if I may euphemize. And whenever I recuperate, I give myself the same familiar lecture: Count your blessings; don't forget what it's like when they're suspended. Like anyone, alas, I soon forget my own admonition, sound as it doubtless is.

  All of this makes me think that the events and reflections I've recorded up to this point are, for the most part, a bit beside the point. In several ways, though, I do partly owe whatever may be worth saving from them to the pointer I praise—and to my awareness of what my brother-in-law and others have been through in the past few years.

  On our last day in Montana, I went afield after breakfast, which for me had consisted of an unbuttered slice of toast. I still felt queasy, and the weather was dispiriting: a stiff east wind full of drizzle, and a sufficiently warm temperature that the prior day's dusting of snow had started melting. The mud underfoot transformed itself to what locals call gumbo, clay so heavy that early homesteaders used it to construct their houses. With every step, the clot of earth on my boots fattened, and it wasn't long before I wore what looked like gumbo snowshoes.

  I'd been tired even before I left the ranch house. Under these conditions, a single hour had me pretty well played out. It was less some vestige of foolish male pride than an urge to keep Pete's nose into game that kept me going just the same, though the pheasants had gotten skittish and scarce since our first few shoots.

  But something wondrous ensued.

  I needn't even close my eyes to see what I saw about an hour later. There's a certain low mesa about a mile north of the ranch, the creek running tight to it but with a ribbon of CRP grasses, perhaps fifty yards wide, flanking its eastern side. I stop and lean against a lone cottonwood in the middle of that field, as beat as beat knows how to be. My legs are anchored by fatigue and clay. Raindrops seep down the back of my neck. We haven't moved a bird, or at least none close enough to shoot at, let alone for Pete to point, in some time.

  Still, a palpable wave of gratitude washes over my body and soul. I contemplate my young dog, bold white against the gray mesa and the tawny grass, quartering with so much energy and enthusiasm you'd think we'd been finding rooster after rooster.

  I love the way a pointer moves, enough so that even when I'm shooting over someone's superb setter or Brittany, I feel something has been left out of the movie. That's neither indictment of nor condescension to other breeds; I've seen and even owned some real go-getters without an ounce of pointer blood in their systems. I'm talking only of a sort of spiritual energy that charges my psyche. Head up, chest mighty, sinews rippling throughout his frame, for me Pete seemed an embodiment of physical perfection. What drive. What agility. What bodily intelligence in his every gesture. To see all that was to feel that life was more than worth living.

  Like Wes II and all his much-mourned predecessors, Pete will probably be gone before I go (though a late sexagenarian should govern his certainties). Meanwhile, if death is the mother of beauty, sickness seems to mother some blessings too.

  Peter Woerner, my oldest hunting partner, and I with bird dog Pete and Montana sharptails and ringnecks.

  Daybook, November

  In the very middle of the day today, a muskrat—for some unfathomable reason—attempted to cross the common in the very middle of our village.

  Three men kicked it to death.

  Had they extinguished the little animal by way of trapping it in season, I mightn't feel as sick as I do, even if to bludgeon it to death with a boot may in actuality have been less harsh than letting it drown in a water set.

  Trapping taxes my morality to begin with, though I trapped 'rats myself as a kid, and with gusto, in the little Pennsylvania brook that fed my uncle's pond and, unbeknownst to its owner, a brook that fed a neighbor's.

  I wouldn't do so now, yet I remember the care with which I checked toggles and cocked tines, the fastidiousness with which I skinned the little orange animals, salted their hides, and tacked them hair-side-out onto shingles in the tool shed. I recall that a hired man had put up a poster there. It showed an exhausted Native American man sprawled before a tent, from which peeked an equally cartoonish but beautiful woman. Underneath the picture was the puzzling caption, "A Buck Well Spent."

  Once my pelts were well cured, I'd load them into the basket of my fat-wheeled Schwinn and ride them to the trader a mile or so down Butler Pike, now the site of a Staples and a Domino's Pizza. These and other dispiriting franchises have spread like wildfire into countryside where I rode my ponies, tied off grain sacks on a combine—and, yes, trapped 'rats. Those who assail the cruelty of trapping might consider if it is ultimately more malign than such utter obliteration of habitat.

  That time I remember is ages behind me. But nowadays I know some people—professional trappers—who live much farther north from that childhood haunt, men I truly admire, even love. And by virtue of their enterprise, they know things about the ways of nature that our Staples-and-Domino's culture is largely unaware of.

  It's also true that, trappers under such attack and their numbers so dwindled, epidemic among the overpopulated furbearers is rampant—mange in the coyotes, distemper in the 'coons, tularemia in the beavers, Errington's Disease in those muskrats—not to mention nuisances to humans—plugged culverts, flooded roads, breached dams. None of this, however, was on my mind as I sat inside my truck, mutely regarding a plain act of savagery.

  Because wasn't it that? Or were these men poachers in the old mode, poor enough that a single small hide might provide some help in getting their families by? Much as I may have wanted to think so, these thugs would have had to be more than merely poor; they'd have had to be morons to believe such a calculation made the slightest sense, especially in a day when, the domestic market having shrunk so, fur must be sent to satellites of the old Soviet Union, and—like every other resource, it can sometimes seem—to China.

  I'm nauseated by the incident because I believe the three killed that animal for the mere sake of killing something. They were a more hideous version of the deer hunter who, luckless all day, turns his rifle on a curious fisher or a careless fox. The 'rat was a bright and glossy novelty, a wild water creature come upland onto the town green, to which the men's response was neither wonder nor delight nor even amusement but imbecile violence.

  The picture of those assassins—none, fortunately, known to me—sticks in the mind many hours later, and I fear it will stick for a long, long time. In my mind I'll watch the trio kick the poor thing back and forth between them like a ball, now and then clumsily hopping to avoid its pathetic efforts at self-defense. They all laugh.

  I'm a hunter. Am I then, despite myself, a spiritual relative of these louts? God save my soul if so.

  I drove off, tires screaming, lest I find that they left that creature right there where it died in panic.

  God Bless Hunting

  This morning, I've been sitting with Joey, one of my dearest friends and a field partner for decades, in the Red Dog diner. It's 6:30 a.m. on an early December day in this small, west Kansas town. After it gets light enough, we two mean to look up the native bobwhite and pheasant.

  God bless hunting anyhow.

  Without which no Joey, Terry, Dave, Landy, Ray, Allie, Creston, to name somewhat fewer than there have been. And without which no Red Dog.

  The place is about full—it doesn't take much—and the clients on a weekend are either hunters themselves, mostly for deer, or farmers. The substantial majority have reached a certain age, and each is male. On entering, a newcomer strolls directly to the coffee urn, fills his cup, and joins companions at a long formica table. All the men wear hats, most showing feed brand logos.

  The minute one fellow takes a chair, several
others say something to him. I'm too shotgun-deaf to hear much over the background buzz, but whatever a particular remark may be, it immediately occasions a salvo of good-natured, joshing laughter. You could cut the camaraderie in this tiny room with a disc harrow.

  No doubt most of my salaried friends, were I to mention my trip to Kansas, would have something sardonic or contemptuous to say. "What on earth could take you there?" I almost hear the question, drenched in condescension, from people who, as they'd admit or even boast, have never been there, people, that is, who are as sentimental and orthodox about their ironies as they accuse these unmet citizens of being about their values, including their religion.

  Irony-as-orthodoxy is an odd phenomenon, to be sure. And judgment without inspection, speaking of irony, constitutes the very narrow-mindedness these colleagues claim to despise. Without a moment's reflection, they'd apply the word provincial to men like the ones Joe and I see here in the Dog, suggesting that those men have limited knowledge of the world—by which in fact the ironists really mean the world they themselves inhabit. For the self-styled sophisticates, you see, bigotry and clannishness are vices . . . unless you revile the right people, the ones who don't belong to their clan. Then they're okay.

  Between the Red Dog party and the disdainful party, whose insularity, objectively speaking, is the greater? Whose politics are more cartoonish?

  There's no reason, given my background, my elitist training, and yes, even my own politics, to imagine I'd be any different from the people I challenge here, were I not a hunter. Hunting has provided me entrée to those Kansans in the diner and others like them in a lot of other places. The Red Dog customers amicably converse among themselves, and with us, regarding things we all have our reasons to care about: crops, weather, habitat, game populations, threats to those populations, and so on. If it goes without saying that I'm not one of them, I'm still more or less easy with their language.

  For all those sporadic bursts of laughter, there's a courtliness in the eatery that, not to be smarmy, warms me on this cold prairie day. The Kansans may appear more open-handed, less guarded than the country people of my upper New England, but I'd be shocked if, like them, they don't make the best sorts of friends, ones who value loyalty, who show up, often unbidden, when you're in a bind, who do the things that most liberals mostly just talk about: help their needy neighbors, visit the sick ones, care for children in need.

  I say this in full awareness that generalities are odious, and that if I went often enough to the Red Dog, or anywhere else on earth, I'd surely find counter-examples.

  But I know what I know.

  I know Joey, for instance, as I know few other men. A Vermont farm boy by birth, he started his working life as a carpenter and turned into a very accomplished and successful builder. He put up a house for us in the last town we lived in, and the one in the town where we live now, and will, I hope, for the rest of our lives. These are excellent houses. I knew they'd be that because, from the time he was a mere kid, Joey and I have shared so many outings looking for game.

  People who know what I mean will know what I mean.

  I have had the opportunity to associate with good people like this best of companions, and again, that's because I'm a hunter, by which I mean a real hunter, a claim that does not in turn mean I'm a particularly good shot (I'm streaky is what I am, sometimes hot, others stone cold), nor that my sense of where the game hides transcends the norm, nor that my way with sign or cover or dogs is better than the next person's. Whether I possess such gifts or not is secondary anyway. When I use the descriptive "real," I suggest only that I want my quarry wild, not farm-raised and plunked in some preserve; that I intend the hunt to be managed by me and/or one or more of these friends, not served up by some hiree; that I believe in working for my prey, having striven lifelong to develop the capacities that can lead me toward it.

  Above all, it means that whatever company I keep will see the day's hunt the way I do: as the only mission worth thinking about for the time being. I don't want to stop and talk about political affairs, books, personalities, and so on.

  In this way I may distinguish myself, I'd argue, from those few of my economic class or educational background who call themselves hunters in the first place, and who are in fact shooters. I'll concede that many of them are damned good shooters, several better than I, but they are a different breed of outdoorsman, to call them so. (I'd meant to avoid ad hominem reference to such self-described hunters as Antonin Scalia and the attorney-strafing Dick Cheney, but weakness of will prevails.)

  I would never have had the advantages for which I am so grateful if I had been that sort of sport. And this morning, I reflect that one such advantage is represented by the tatterdemalion and distinctly non-gourmet Red Dog Diner. I've savored the old grease in which my bacon and eggs were cooked. I've relished the wildlife art on the walls, which is not good, precisely; rather, it precisely chimes with the setting, which somehow seems more important.

  And the chatter here is pure music:

  You leavin', Will? asks a beefy guy in bib overalls.

  Yep.

  Now there's a blessin'! teases the fallen-arched, thin-haired older woman, owner and waitress both.

  His buddies cackle.

  We're leaving too. Joey holds the door for a gent named Jack, who inquires how our luck has been. We allow that we haven't been finding many birds, don't know the country well enough, and may not get time to figure things out, given the mere five days we've set aside.

  "No one's hunted my milo patch yet," Will muses, "and I cut 'er late." He invites us to follow him.

  We thank Jack and hop into Joey's truck, imagining the edges of that field holding quail, and, wide of them, tall grass full of ringnecks. As we trail along, the sun breaches the eastern horizon, revealing the opalescent frost on everything we behold. By God, this part of Kansas is pretty, I think, another notion the aprioristic judges on either coast would likely never surmise. A wonderful terra cotta shade displays itself in the prairie grass; the forbidding plum thickets might have been wrought by a woodcutter's burin; the milo stubble shows reddish, the corn stubble spectral. Through his rear window, I note the deep crosshatching in Jack's weathered neck. It's good to be alive.

  I'm pretty sure Jack thinks so too. Something about the way he sits, half-turned on his seat, taking in views that must be as familiar to him as his wife or his children, but perhaps strike him afresh every day.

  I know the feeling.

  I know as well that it's too tempting and too glib to take this line of thought very far. Generalities are odious, and there may be, nay likely is, as much neurosis and pettiness and inexplicable emotional pain among the folks in this neighborhood as among any. Still there's something salutary, I insist, about being attuned to seasonal and physical attributes of the natural world, something I get, of course, not as a farmer but as a hunter, who, whatever the time of year, finds himself in constant study of the countryside.

  The more "virtual" and disembodied and addicted to gadgetry our world becomes, the more valuable such direct engagement. Or so I believe in any case, even if I may be cataloguing beliefs that sustain me and applying them to other people, whether they're true sustenance for them or not. My mind slips off to my own wife and children. I wonder if the game dinners

  I've served them have meant nearly as much to them as to me, for example. I've always felt some profound rightness in such meals, as if the world's symmetries were ingestible by the ones I cherish too. I know exactly where that flesh we eat has come from, and I relive my time there as we gather at the table.

  But I can only make my own testimony, which has its gaps, I concede. Thanks to the miracle of the very modern technology I mildly slurred a moment ago, before Joe and I walked into the Red Dog I received a photograph from my son-in-law in Brooklyn. It came by cellular phone, for the love of God. It showed his and my daughter's ten-month-old mixed-race twins; to open it up was to feel a positive surge of affection.

>   Which raises the question: how, Mr. Real Hunter, do you construe a continuum between the world that these babies will learn and the world of the Red Dog, of Jack and his cronies, between the glowing milo patch and the Midwood section of Brooklyn? Or, to think randomly of some other thing that heartens me, how to link my abiding passion, honed in college years spent near New York, for certain legends of jazz— Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Max Roach, on and on— to this warm feeling in the cab of a pickup as we trail some sweet old redneck to his dirt farm?

  When I dreamed up this series of essays, I imagined that in one of them at least I'd wrestle these antinomies into harmony. But I need to face it: I just can't. It seems I know enough of urbane sophistications, no matter my suspicions of them, and of rural concerns that I'll never cleave to one exclusively of the other.

  I'd be tempted to justify myself by quoting Walt Whitman on self-contradiction: I am large, I contain multitudes. I might do so, that is, if I didn't believe this to be true of anyone, or if I didn't believe too that my own are modest enough. Lord knows I'm anything but large in any case, at least spiritually. There are times, I confess, when the sense of my radical limitations makes me ponder whether my attraction to the allegedly simple life is not a sort of retreat.

  I'm not the one to answer that. If retreat it be, though, I'm too old in it. Not enough years remain for me to undo these addictions and affections, even if I live to a ripe age. Not that I yearn to undo them, not at all, because I do feel affection and something much deeper than that for the life I've chosen, conflicted though it sometimes may seem.

  Nor is it unthreatened. I've now dwelt forty-four years in upper New England. Rampant gentrification has twice pushed me northerly, the town I first lived in so demographically changed that it's plain unrecognizable to my eyes, and the next rapidly following suit. In the late 1960s I knew all but a very few local families in my town. I'm acquainted with next to none there these days.