I didn't go deer hunting this year. I went once, once, some time ago. All told, it wasn't a bad experience, since I fell in with a native professional deer hunter who, so to speak, took me under his gun and did his best to get me a deer.
"Be ready at 3:30 a.m.," he said on the day before deer hunting opener. "I'll pick you up for hunter's breakfast."
Wait a minute, I wanted to tell him. The last time that I got up at that time of day, it was to throw up with the stomach flu. Hunter's breakfast, I asked him?
"Yeah. At the GossipBox Café in town." He added: "It's traditional. 3:30."
I wasn't sure about the etiquette of all this, so I had to ask: Do we wear guns and stuff to breakfast?
ADVERTISEMENT
Silence. A look. Then, "We'll put our stuff on later, at 4:30 a.m. That's when we use our flashlights to go out and get in our stands."
I won't need a flashlight, I wanted to tell him. Neither one of my eyes will be open. I didn't say that. Instead, I emitted what I thought was an appropriately masculine response--I grunted. Apparently, even though it resembled sounds I usually make when I have the stomach flu, it worked.
The GossipBox was, early the next morning, a surreal scene, one peopled with orange-garbed figures like a dream. Like a dream one has when one is usually sleeping at 3:30 in the morning.
In this weird dream, I did what they all did. I ate fried potatoes and eggs and sweet waffles, and stuff in a pile that I didn't recognize. "Traditional," said my guide between mouthfuls. There was a lot of hacking and belching and other guy sounds around me.
Myself, I began to experience some sort of physiological meltdown, due to having donned all three sets of long underwear that I owned so I wouldn't freeze to death up in some tree in the forest. None too soon, four of us left the café and moved dreamlike out to my friend and guide's four-wheel-drive truck. I was sweating profusely. I thought it was because of all the clothing I had on. Two miles out of town, I began to think maybe it was because of that last waffle. My stomach reminded me that the only thing it usually did at this time of the morning had to do with the stomach flu. I began to worry about that waffle.
I had been perhaps too worried about freezing to death, and not worried enough about breakfast. I hoped I'd make it to the woods before the waffle declared revolted.
We stopped at the edge of a huge swamp, and got out. At least it was cool outside. I put on some more clothes while my stomach made gurgling noises so loud that one of the guys with us looked out into the trees and said: "Did you guys hear that big buck rutting out there?"
"Here," my friend said, "stuff a bunch of these in your pockets." He pushed toward me a huge handful of chocolate bars. I had so many clothes on I couldn't bend my arms very well. This hunting dream continued while someone stuffed several of them in my pockets. Some here; some there.
ADVERTISEMENT
This was beginning to look less like a deer killing trip and more like a gastro-intestinal suicide.
I already had a lot of stuff in my pockets. They insisted that I take all the ammunition I had brought with me, like, forty rounds. And to be on the safe side, since I hadn't known quite what I would run into out there in the wilderness, I had already put in spare socks, a roll of toilet paper, extra gloves, a scarf, two knifes--one could saw in case I had to build a cabin or something--a compass, two kinds of matches, string , (I didn't say anything to anyone about the string, but I thought that in a worst case scenario, I could use it to mark my path back to reality.). I also had binoculars, and six of those little chemical packages that, once squished, heat up like little furnaces.
I could barely walk. "Don't load your gun until you get into your tree stand," he told me.
They all loaded their guns. Then we walked side-by-side in the predawn darkness, our foot steps crunching crisply in the corn-starchy snow, like four desperadoes going to rob a train, and I knew how the Erp brothers must have felt on their way to the OK-corral shootout.
To be continued.
