T. Edward Nickens

Field & Streamville: Finding the Soul of Turkey Hunting in Bolivar, MO: Part II

Sarah Smith — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:50:06 -0400

Yowser, it’s hard enough to keep your knees from knocking when one fired up gobbler shows up in front of your shotgun bead. But check out first-time turkey hunter Mark Ester when no less than four tom turkeys come roaring in.

This is the second in our two-part little ditty we’re calling Field & Streamville. Part Dirty Jobs, part Planet Earth, part Man vs. Wild, we’re thinking this might be a very cool way to feature small towns across America where hunting and fishing are a vital part of their very identity. We’d all like to live in a hunting-crazy town like Bolivar, Missouri. Think you folks would like to see even more?

Field & Streamville: Finding the Soul of Turkey Hunting in Bolivar, MO: Part II

Sarah Smith — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:50:06 -0400

Field & Streamville: Finding the Soul of Turkey Hunting in Bolivar, MO

Dave_Maccar — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:29:36 -0400

Folks in Bolivar, Missouri, don’t mess around when they talk about bringing their kids up to love hunting. On a single April Saturday, a National Wild Turkey Federation chapter puts close to 200 young turkey hunters in the woods. Each gets a guide, a big celebration in the local school gym, and a patch of Missouri hardwoods where they tangle with ol’ tom. Check out this first video of our visit there.

We’re calling this concept Field & Streamville, and we’ve been kicking it around for a while now. The idea is that there are places in America where hunting and fishing is the heart and soul of small rural communities. Places where opening day for pheasant season or deer season or, heck, even squirrel season, ranks just barely behind Christmas. We’re convinced there are lots of towns and rural crossroads out there where the town spirit looks pretty much like a page out of Field & Stream. And we’re wondering if something like Field & Streamville might be a super way to tell their stories. What do you think?

Field & Streamville: Finding the Soul of Turkey Hunting in Bolivar, MO

Dave_Maccar — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:29:36 -0400

Mr. Mac and The Bushytail Gang: A Squirrel-Dog Revival in South Carolina

Online Editors — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:26:12 -0500

Ode to Joie: Hunting the Cajun Way

Online Editors — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:20:10 -0500

I didn't want the knife. When I first called Kody Landry about hog hunting behind his beloved Catahoulas and pit bulls, the Cajun hunter was fired up—until I mentioned a rifle. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, low and gravelly. “Nobody’s ever shot a gun over my dogs.” He hesitated. “How we do it down here, you are right there on the animal, and you see the eyes go black and the life go out of him, and then you know what hunting is about. You not pretending. So you gotta tell me, Mr. Eddie: How do you feel about the knife?”

Twenty-four years old, clean shaven, and wrapped in muscle from work on Louisiana’s offshore oil rigs, Landry is about as Cajun as they come. He’s a descendant of Catholics expelled from Acadia, a French colony centered in Nova Scotia, by the British starting in 1755. Thousands of these Acadians made their way to New Orleans, where Spanish officials outfitted them with grain and salt pork, hammers and axes, muskets and lead shot. They were then turned out into their new home: the Atchafalaya Basin, a 1.4 -million-acre mosaic of bayous, backwater lakes, swamp forests, and river and marshes that sprawls just west of the Mississippi River, between present-day Lafayette and Baton Rouge and down to the Gulf. Over the next 350 years, the Cajuns made a home from the basin’s woods and waters, fishing, hunting, trapping, logging, gigging—whatever they had to do to make a living out of a part of America most Americans hardly know exists.

Today the basin remains the heartland of everything Cajun—from gumbo to zydeco music. It’s where Cajun French is still heard in the country butcher shops, where opening day of squirrel season is celebrated by entire families, and where I have a week to hunt hogs, deer, and ducks. I can’t claim a single drop of Cajun blood, but I hope to experience the basin that the Cajuns see—a place that has kept their culture alive and rooted to the swamp come hellish hurricanes and high water.
Which brings me back to the knife. I had no desire to kill a hog with one—a method that seemed to me to be more about machismo than the respectful pursuit of a wild animal. But five minutes into my hunt, my Cajun baptism is at hand.

Release the Hounds

Landry and I pull our trucks deep into the morass of wet woods in St. Martin Parish, just south of Butte La Rose and west of the serpentine Atchafalaya River, and are barely out of the vehicles when the dogs go off. The jump comes so quickly and the hogs are so close that the Catahoulas forget the rules. Catahoulas are glassy-eyed Louisiana-bred beasts that locals say developed from a cross between red wolves kept by Native Americans and Hernando de Soto’s war dogs, the mastiffs, bulldogs, and greyhounds the Spanish explorer brought to the region in the 16th century. Catahoulas are jump dogs, and jump dogs don’t typically catch the hog but chase it, nipping at its hocks to make it turn and fight. That’s when Landry unleashes Major, a Kevlar-vested “American boar terrier” (Landry’s term for a pit bull) that has yet to meet a pig worth fearing.

The other Catahoulas hardly have time to pee before Stanley, worming through a dense tangle of box elder and fern, jumps a pig not 20 yards from the truck, and suddenly wild hogs break in every direction. I twist around to get the .30/30 up as a black shape blasts away through the tangled mess, but it’s hopeless. With three dogs close on their tracks, the pigs are hoofing it.

Soon, 75 yards up ahead, the dogs’ barking turns frantic, their baying chops throated with menace. Landry yells for me, “Run, Mr. Eddie! Run!” I obey, vaulting logs, bashing through curtains of briers, my gun out front. By the time I get to the fracas the jump has turned into a run-and-catch—the dogs have the hog by the ears and hocks, pinned to the ground. A cacophony of snarls and ear-piercing squeals throbs in my head. Mud, leaves, and twigs are flying. I search for an opening for a bullet, but it won’t happen. There is no chance for a shot. My heart falls.

A few feet from the hog, Landry’s buddy David Braun wrenches a dog off the pig and snaps its leather lead to the trunk of a nearby tree. Landry grabs another. The Catahoulas are out of their minds, swarming over the animal stretched out in the mud, but the chaos begins to take on a sense of order and even calm. Braun never says a word but just looks at me with slightly arched eyebrows, then hooks the lower edge of his waxed cotton coat over the hilt of a large sheathed knife. I shake my head. Braun glances at the pig, then back at me, and holds my eyes with his own. The question answers itself. I lean my rifle against a mossy box elder trellised with vines and accept the knife.

The hog has calmed somewhat, now that only a pair of growling dogs have it tethered to the ground. On my hands and knees, I straddle the pig, my left forearm bearing down on the animal, my right hand holding the knife. Braun removes the dogs one at a time, until I am alone on the pig, my full weight pinning it to the ground. The hog is still frantic and squealing, but its eyes never leave the dogs, as if it isn’t even aware of my presence. I work my way up to the point where my eyes are even with the pig’s eyes—black beads with a glossy sheen that transfixes my own gaze. It’s only then that I can work the knife between the ribs.

Through the steel I feel the hard knot of the heart, and at that moment I understand: This time, I am the bullet.

Then the pig’s panting turns to tremors, the tremors to quivering black hide. In 15 seconds it is over, and we are both lying still, the pig beneath me. There is no rush of adrenaline, no exultant release. All that I feel is my own beating heart. When Landry finds me he doesn’t seem to see the knife, my bloody hand, or my panting. He’s watching my eyes, looking for any sign that now I see the hogs and the dogs and the swamp the way he sees them.

“Now you understand, Mr. Eddie,” he says quietly.

Bayou Brothers

In the middle of it all. That’s the theme of my week in Cajun country. Forty-eight hours after my personal encounter with a wild basin hog, I climb down from an Atchafalaya deer stand after a long stint staring through brown ferns and brown vines and dog-hair stands of winter-brown trees. My headlamp lights the way to the bank of a bayou, where I sit and doze in and out of sleep until I hear the screech of an aluminum boat hull on a cypress knee. That’s my ride.

I had hunted another day with Landry—and put my lever action to work on a pig running flat-out 30 yards from the dogs—then drove east from Catahoula toward the basin’s remote heart, which lies inside the levees that hem in the Atchafalaya River itself. At Happy Landing I met 41-year-old Cajun crawfisherman Jody Meche. We shook hands and he herded me into his crawfish boat, anxious to get me into the woods. Within minutes we were hurtling down the broad, brown flow of the Atchafalaya into what can best be described as America’s Amazon.

Meche calls from the black dark of the bayou. When I step into his boat, he turns a floodlight to a nice 8-pointer piled up in the bow. “What you think, boy?” he asks. “He was up in them little creeks where the deers like to hide and never move not a hair till dark. They think they safe, but maybe not so much, eh?” Meche is primed for a coronation back at camp; this is one of the bigger deer of the year so far, and there is nothing a Cajun likes so much as a grand entrance.

The Meche hunting camp has clung to a bayou bluff off the basin’s Whiskey River Pilot Channel for more than half a century. There’s a low-slung bunk cabin, outbuildings stacked with net hoops and crawfish traps, and a long shed sheltering two dozen mud-coated ATVs. Behind that there’s little but the basin’s hardwood ridges and brownwater sloughs, miles of swamp and woods, and waters that peter out somewhere near the sunrise.

For decades Meche’s parents ran the family camp. Frank and Loretta Meche were true swampers—basin Cajuns who made a living from the Atchafalaya’s woods and waters. Just outside the levee they ran a small grocery store and dance hall, but they spent most of their time deep in the swamp, crawfishing, trapping turtles, picking Spanish moss to sell to mattress companies, running catfish lines. “To them,” Meche says, “being out here wasn’t making a living. It was making a life.”

We tie up to a sycamore at the base of the camp bluff, and Meche takes long strides up the path from the dock. It’s soon apparent, though, that we’re late for the party. Hanging from a towering meat pole is a stout 11-pointer, lit with the headlamps of four-wheelers, surrounded by a dozen hunters. It’s the biggest deer the camp has seen in years. Meche bounds up to the animal and lifts its hoary head.

“Who?” he asks.

Eleven thumbs jerk in the same direction.

“Steven?” Meche cries, then breaks out in a great bellow of a laugh. “I thought my 8-pointer was a deer to be proud of, but look at this! Look at what big brother has done!”

Steven Meche is Jody’s elder by 24 years, and the brothers bear-hug and brag about each other’s bucks and start spilling the details, arms flailing, feet dancing. I’d been told there’s hardly a Cajun alive who can tell a story sitting down.

But it’s a celebration whose time has come. Three years ago, Steven Meche suffered a horrific 25-foot fall from a tree-stand. Plucked from the swamp by helicopter, Steven still walks with a limp and has a hard time getting around in the Atchafalaya’s tough country. Bringing a whitetail buck like this back to the family’s hunting camp is a totem, of sorts, a way of closing a long, painful circle of healing.

“These deer in the basin, they ain’t what you see on TV, just a-walking here and there,” Jody says. “They live hard and they hold on to life hard. Steven, he deserved a deer like this.” Meche holds up the hoof of his brother’s deer. It is grotesquely misshapen; months of living deep in the swamp woods have melted away the edges. “Look at that,” he says. “That’s a basin longtimer right there, partner.”

The next afternoon I take another stand deep in the heart of the Atchafalaya, scanning the woods on high alert, trying to find a slash of creamy antler in 1,000 shades of brown. All that shows, however, are three does, a dozen turkeys, and a herd of Boone and Crockett–worthy raccoons. “It’s not easy to kill a big deer back here,” Jody had warned me. And for me, over these last couple of days, not such a simple thing to kill a small one.

But I’ve learned enough not to force the big moments. I settle down, content to let the swamp tell whatever story it wishes. As the light fades I can just make out a small flock of cardinals in the cypress trees nearby. Red smudges in the gloom, they remind me of a scene I’d seen earlier that seems to tell the story of the Meche deer camp—and it’s almost as good as a buck in range.

The night before, after the brothers had gutted their deer and the other hunters had emptied the gumbo pot and half the camp was two beers into a raucous Cajun card game called bourré, I walked outside, where the bucks hung from the meat pole like chandeliers. Faint tendrils of steam still rose from the cooling bodies, the cut edges of the hides rimmed in frost. Then my eyes fell to the ground. Scattered across the cement slab were the steps of a dance, Jody’s boot prints left behind as he’d spun and pirouetted and stalked across the cement, reliving his hunt. I could read the story of the Meche camp in those tracks, and the ancient story of man and deer. It was a choreography of the Cajuns’ joie de vivre, their irrepressible “joy of living,” writ in the ink of mud and muck and the red blood of an Atchafalaya Basin buck.

Holding on for Dear Life The morning has been so hard and the ducks are coming so fast and I am trembling with so much pent-up energy that I am talking to myself as I would to a child: O.K., push the shell into the receiver tube. Good boy! Now another one. But then a drake scaup cuts my corner of the decoy spread and the sun catches the green sheen on the black head and it’s all too much. I reflexively shoulder the gun, swing on the bird, and click on an empty chamber. The rookie screwup makes me chuckle, and now I’m -laughing—laughing at the number of ducks overhead, at my kidlike glee, at how quickly our fortunes have turned.

An hour ago I was on my knees behind a duck boat, stuck fast on an Atchafalaya Delta sandbar. Stand up and I’d sink to my thighs in a gumbo of sand and silt. So I draped my arms over the transom, braced my elbows against the Go-Devil’s stern, and knee-walked the boat to a bedraggled old blind of cut willow and marsh cane.
Now, before the sweat has dried from my brow, two limits of bluebills are heaped on the boat floor. I lean the shotgun against a willow and watch the birds pour down by the hundreds, some so close I could sack them with a frog net. For the next hour I wish for a mallard, but it’s hard to complain with a sky full of ducks and the marsh to ourselves, here where Louisiana falls into the sea.

At the end of my Cajun odyssey I’m at the end of the road—for man and duck alike. I’m hunting with Eric DeMent, whose family ties to the marshy terminus of the Atchafalaya Basin go back to the 1700s. The DeMent camp is set on a 10-acre sliver of high ground called Deer Island, down where the Atchafalaya River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Getting here required a 45-minute boat ride through tens of thousands of acres of marsh and island and arrowhead-fringed bayou. Tucked off a side channel draped with Spanish moss is the storied old camp—a maze of docks and wharves and walkways, sheds and barns and a three-room camp house on increasingly precious dry ground.

“My grandpa’s family homesteaded this island,” DeMent tells me. He is goateed and ruddy faced, dressed in blue jeans and an M-65 Army parka. DeMent works part-time for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, but his heart is in the basin 24/7. He hunts deer and hogs and traps nutria on several thousand acres of marsh. Louisiana pays a $5 bounty on the nonnative marsh-eating pests, and the money helps pay for upkeep on a camp that is regularly bashed and buffeted by storms and tides. Back when DeMent’s grandfather fished these bayous and his grandmother worked as a teacher on a basin school boat, more than two dozen families lived on the island. In 1819, a U.S. Navy surveying team recorded live oaks on Deer Island 5 feet wide. “On this Island no mark of the axe appears,” the surveyors wrote. “It is in a perfect state of nature.”

That has changed. The DeMents are watching their island melt away. Oil and gas canals honeycomb the delta marsh, fraying the protective fabric of cut-grass and bulrush. Container ships throw up 5-foot breaking wakes that gnaw at the island’s clamshell bedrock. In the last five years, hundreds of feet of river frontage have simply washed away. Another 15 years, DeMent figures, “and we’ll be standing in the water right here.”

The next morning Eric’s dad, Jack, cooks up biscuits and gravy, then we trundle down to the boats, the Milky Way spangled overhead. I’m amazed at the heavy machinery brought to bear on delta ducks. We take the big aluminum workboat with a pirogue turned upside down on the deck, and pull a johnboat powered with a Go-Devil engine. It takes it all. We stake the workboat out in a pass of open water, then pile into the Go-Devil skiff, prop-chop through the water hyacinths, and shove with pushpoles to hide the boat in the marsh. Once again, a sweat-soaked shirt seems as common on a delta hunt as forearms slashed with cut-grass.

In fact, nothing comes easy in the Atchafalaya Delta. Not the hurricanes, not the mosquitoes, not the searing summer heat, not the winter winds, and certainly not the ducks. “Oh, lord, yes, we get no breaks on the ducks,” DeMent says. “By the time they get to us, they’ve been hammered from Canada on down. Ain’t no margin for error.”

And I can see it: how the single birds circle and circle, looking left and then right, and circle again; how the high flocks flinch and flare at the muffled pops of hunters in some far-off marsh. A half dozen ducks rocket out front, flying right to left and low and fast, dipping below the tops of the marsh, out of sight now, then suddenly above the ochre rim of grass, closer and closer.

“There’s mallards in with them teal,” DeMent says. “They circling now, watch ’em. Watch ’em!”

And he does, for there’s plenty of time to worry about the future and the water and the river that is devouring his island. For now, DeMent is taking the good with the bad, and at this moment, at least, things are looking up. DeMent drinks in every detail, and I see a look in his face that I’ve seen everywhere in the basin, from the hog woods up north down to the Gulf. The Cajuns know better than most that nothing stays the same. Not for Kody Landry, feeding his dogs and wondering if his son will be able to chase them through the swamp. Not for Jody Meche, turned away by more and more NO TRESPASSING signs blighting waters his ancestors have fished for decades. And not for Eric DeMent, hunting the waters that sustained his forebears and wondering when the water will finally drown his own future here.

“It’s just a little piece of ground, but I don’t want to lose it,” DeMent says. “I’ve been in this marsh for 38 years, though. Long enough to know that nothing’s permanent in the delta.” Then he looks into the rosy fire of an Atchafalaya sunrise, where the ducks hang in the sky, suspended in time.

Following Our Father

Sarah Smith — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:54:45 -0500

by T. Edward Nickens

Walter DeSales Witt was in a good place: with his back against a hemlock, green boughs dropped with snow all around, like a half-opened umbrella.

He’d wormed his way under the branches, spread out a burlap sack for a makeshift seat, and now he could watch a deep-woods edge where hardwoods transitioned to a stand of hemlocks. It was dark Pennsylvania timber, just the kind of route a big buck might travel.

It was good to be out of the house. No one would ever forget the big storm of December 1974. The snow started falling the night before the antlered deer season opener. It was a Sunday night, and the Witt family was at Grace Brethren Church, in the small town of Meyersdale, Pa., in their customary pew on the right-hand side, a third of the way back from the pulpit. Eight inches of snow fell during the church service alone. The overnight total pushed three feet. It would be nearly two weeks before anyone went anywhere in Somerset County. And in two weeks, buck season would be over.

The Witts, a family of hunters, weren’t going to let the season slip away without a try. When the roads were finally cleared enough for travel, Walt, 38, packed his red-and-white Plymouth station wagon with his two boys, Dan, 14, and Mark, 12, and his father-in-law, Roy “Pap” Brown. Now the Witt men were hunting together, on family land, on the very last day of buck season. It was an exciting day. Witt’s wife, Cathaleen, had graduated from college just the day before. She was now Christmas shopping with their daughters, Lisa, 9, and Victoria, 17. It had been a tough stretch, raising four kids on $3,500 a year.

For Walt, a ninth-grade earth science teacher and high school track coach, one of the great joys of a few hours in a quiet stretch of woods was the blessing of unfettered thinking. His true calling was sharing his Christian beliefs. In a given year, he might guest-preach at dozens of small Allegheny Plateau congregations. He talked to nearly everyone he met about his faith: the kids on his track team, a lady in the grocery store, a man picking blueberries on a mountain roadside. Tomorrow morning, Walt would speak from the pulpit of Calvary Bible Church in nearby Ellerslie, Md. He’d already started writing the sermon, titled simply, “Heaven.” The passage he’d chosen spoke of heaven’s streets of gold. Of all the blessings of his life, Walter Witt held nothing more dear than the certainty of where he would spend eternity.

Now he peeled an orange, let the rinds fall to the snow, bright orange slashes like leaves curled against the cold, on a carpet of white flecked with the dark needles of hemlock. The day was warming, and as melting snow dropped from the tree boughs the branches would suddenly spring up, dipping and dancing. Each movement would catch Walt’s eye, surely bringing a rush of adrenaline. It was just the kind of thing no deer hunter would miss.

One hundred forty-eight feet away from Walt, another hunter watched from the cover of another snowy hemlock. Something was moving in the trees up ahead. There was a patch of fur. It had to be a buck. For 15 minutes, the hunter watched. Then, in the early-afternoon hours of Dec. 14, 1974, the crack of his rifle split the quiet, dreadful woods.

Homecoming

Walt, “Pap” Brown, and Walt’s sons, Dan and Mark, trudged in near silence by the light of the moon on new snow, in single file, breaking through snow clear up to the boys’ waists. They huffed under apple and walnut trees, past Brown’s spooky cattle barn that the brothers feared even in daylight. Walt dropped his father-in-law off first, to take a stand in the woods, then his oldest son, Dan, and Mark last. Dan hunted near a large sawdust pile where his ancestors had buried their ice blocks. Slightly elevated, with a broad forest view, it was a good spot, and he was wide-eyed with the thought of a deer coming through the woods. Mark was just as excited. This was his first deer hunt. He watched his dad walk away, passing behind trees, growing fainter and fainter in the gloaming light in and out of sight. Now he could see his dad, now he could not.

Walt didn’t hike much farther. A few hundred yards, maybe, and then he could make out the hemlocks just downhill. This was the spot. He didn’t want to be too far away from his youngest son. These were familiar woods to the boys, but with this much snow, well, nothing looked quite right.

On a hot June Sunday afternoon, Dan Witt and I pull off Pennsylvania’s Highway 160, 5 miles east of Meyersdale and a few hundred yards from the site of “Pap” Brown’s old farmhouse. Rolling ridgelines unfurl to the horizon, checkerboarded with forest, farmfield, and pasture. In a dirt parking lot, Mark Witt and Ron Askey, the Pennsylvania game warden who investigated the shooting of Walter Witt, lean against Askey’s truck. They greet us like old friends meeting at the edge of a dove field. Askey is built like a fireplug, with a heavy jaw and gray locks over a ruddy forehead. Mark is wiry and bald with a mustache. He shares Dan’s dark eyes but not his laid-back demeanor. Dan describes him as a jokester and prankster and a bundle of energy, but if he has the jitters today, I can’t blame him.

In the last 37 years—and in particular over the last half decade—the Witt brothers have experienced a remarkable journey of healing and redemption. Since 2004, Dan and Mark have spoken about their father’s death and their personal stories of spiritual renewal at churches and church-sponsored sportsmen’s dinners from the mountain hollows of West Virginia to the plains of Alberta. They’ve written about how losing their father in a hunting accident impacted their growing up, their approaches to hunting, their marriages and family ties, and most emphatically, their relationship to God. Without ever seeking the opportunity, the brothers have found themselves on a path whose turns and ultimate destination they each view as an unfolding miracle.

But there is one thing they have never done: return to the woods where their father died.

A few miles away from Walt’s line of hemlocks, along the lower flanks of Wills Creek Mountain, four hunters gathered with their own buck dreams. Two of them had a special reason to celebrate a Pennsylvania hometown sunrise. Twenty-four-year-old Johnston Cutler1 was just three months out of a two-year stint with the U.S. Army. He’d grown up hunting and fishing in the Allegheny woods with his dad, but between his college years and military service, the pair hadn’t hunted together in six long years. Now the woods were waking up around the father and son. The plan was to drive deer to a couple of standers, and the young Cutler was happy to be on the shooting end of the arrangement. He slipped into the woods, looking for deer.

For Dan and me, it had been a five-hour drive from his Virginia home to his native Pennsylvania, and despite our chatter about the upcoming deer season and Dan’s training regimen for a backcountry elk hunt, the interludes in our conversation had grown longer and more solemn. We wondered if we could find the woods where Walt took in his last view of bare winter trees, where he sat with his back to a hemlock, watching for a buck, listening for a shot that would tell him that one of his boys had downed a deer.

After nearly four decades, nothing would look the same. Askey was 31 years old at the time of the accident; now 68, he has bad knees but plenty of grit. He was astonished when I first contacted him about this story but never hesitated about returning to the scene. By triangulating the memories and recall of the three men, we thought we could get close to the piece of ground where Walt sat. We wondered if we might even find the tree.

After handshakes and small talk, we douse ourselves with bug dope and drop off a long, flat ridgetop into the overgrown fields and woods below. Askey is chatty and avuncular. Mark spins good-natured jokes about his boyhood memories, a broad smile appearing under his aviator sunglasses, but Dan grows somber as the trail falls off the ridge into a mosaic of tangled fields and woods. The brothers point out a few apple trees that still remain from the family orchard. We skirt the site of the old barn. Soon the path enters a grove of birch and maple and locust. In 1974, this would have been open fields. “Corn, mostly,” Dan says. “It was great for rabbits.” There are bear droppings and deer beds. There are long, quiet moments.

I first met Dan a month earlier, at his home on 21 acres of rolling Blue Ridge woods outside Lynchburg. Married for 25 years, and with two grown boys, he’s the assistant town manager of nearby Altavista, a town that reminds him of Meyersdale. “It has that small-town feeling,” he says. “The folks are extremely resilient.” It’s also a location with plenty of access to deer woods, and despite the nature of his father’s death, Dan remains a serious hunter. A few days after the funeral, in fact, Dan was up before dawn, dressed in his hunting clothes, heading out for one of the last of Pennsylvania’s doe days. His mother stood in the doorway, shaking with fear.

“I lost my husband,” she’d said. “I’m not losing a son.”

But Dan never lost his desire to hunt. “Mom hated hunting and didn’t want us in the woods,” he tells me. We’re sitting on a sofa in the small living room he’s just built for his mother-in-law. “But I’m an introvert. I didn’t have a lot of friends. Out in the woods is where I felt I could be me.” After Walt’s death, Don Imhoff, a family friend who had once run track under Walt’s coaching, took Dan under his wing. The pair hunted and fished, ran a trapline together, and took up bowhunting with a shared passion. When Dan started college at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Imhoff moved down with him to take a few college courses. It was a healing friendship.

For the Witt family, there will always be unanswered questions about that day in the deer woods, inevitable appraisals of how and why and what could have led, ultimately, to the firing of the bullet that struck Walt dead. But in the weeks and months that followed the accident, more pressing was the doleful reality of simply rising from bed and making it through the day until it was time again for fitful sleep. This is the story of grief: endless days of dark until slivers of light begin to grow into minutes and then hours, and life becomes life again, never the same, but life with laughter and love where once they could not have been imagined.

As Dan describes those times, those months and years, he sits with his right leg crossed over his left, his foot ticking nervously. The rest of the house is silent; Dan’s wife and mother-in-law and sons have retreated to distant rooms to cede us space and quiet. He wears cuffed khakis and a yellow-striped oxford shirt and a black-and-gray goatee. He has dark eyes—dark brows, dark irises—and they are not unfriendly, but they are unflinching. His was a small-town tragedy, and he got through it by getting on. His mother taught school. People pitched in.

But throughout his teenage years, Dan lived with a rising tide of anger. He expressed his anguish on Somerset County’s winding roads, pushing his 1973 Plymouth Satellite to 110 mph, then 115 mph, speeding “until something started floating around inside the car or the doors were rattling. I can’t tell you how many times I did that. I was daring God to kill me.” Dan remembers sitting in church as the choir sang:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.

“And all I could think was ‘You are the wretch, God, for allowing this to happen to my dad,’” Dan says. “I internalized all the anger. It just built up in me.”

For Dan, spiritual healing was first revealed in a conversation he had when he was in his early 20s, with a former neighbor named Peter Cabin.2 At the time of Witt’s death, Cabin owned one of the hard-drinking bars in Meyersdale, and when Dan questioned God about his father’s death, the question was always the same: Why Dad and not a man like Peter Cabin?

Then one day, while visiting his grandmother, he heard someone calling his name from a nearby house trailer. It was Cabin, and he wanted to talk.

“I knew who he was,” Dan says. “And I was thinking, ‘You’re the one that should be long gone. I should be talking to my dad.’” But Cabin told him an astonishing story. Walt, as it turned out, never passed up an opportunity to share his faith with Cabin, and after the hunting accident, the barkeeper converted fully to Christianity.

“And that’s not all,” Dan says, shaking his head, amazed at the turn of events even after 25 years. “He sold his tavern. He started preaching. He began a ministry in retirement homes because he felt that those people didn’t have much time left before eternity. And for years he helped smuggle Bibles into China. All because of my dad’s death.

“When he told me that story,” Dan continues, “it was like God hit me right between the eyes with a two-by-four. This light came on of God telling me, ‘Dan, if you were in charge of this, if you were God, Peter Cabin would be dead today, and he would have to spend an eternity with no hope. I didn’t make a mistake with your dad.’ It was an epiphany, and the beginning of the healing process for me a decade after Dad’s death.”

It was a needed breakthrough, because Dan carried a particular burden about that day in the deer woods. What he remembers most clearly about that snowy Pennsylvania hunt, what he can recall in the most exquisite detail, are those few minutes when he left his stand and tried to follow his father’s tracks in the snow, to tell him that he was tired and cold and ready to go home.

“I could see where Dad’s tracks turned off into the woods,” he says. His foot twitches. “I followed the trail until it got really steep.” As he speaks, Dan cups each hand, palms facing downward, and pantomimes the struggling gait of a young boy—each step a short, shallow arc in the air, reaching, stretching, searching for his father’s tracks in the deep snow. “It was really hard. I got really tired.” His foot stills. There is no sound other than his voice. “I yelled and yelled, but with the snow…”

Dan can’t count the number of times he has asked himself: What if I had never stopped? What if I hadn’t given up? The answers hang in the air, unspoken and obvious. They would have met and chatted. Walter Witt would have scooted over to make room for his oldest son on his burlap sack. For sure, they would have made a meaningful, warning fuss.

Dan wipes the palms of his hands down the front of his khakis. He uncrosses his legs, and nods his head. He falls quiet, and for the first time his dark eyes glisten.

Walt was a patient hunter. He knew this farm well. He knew that deer liked to slip along the edge of the dark timber on their way to bed after feeding near the apple trees his wife’s grandparents had planted years ago. It was cold, but there was no rush. He ate a sandwich and a candy bar, sipping water from a ketchup bottle he’d washed and used as a makeshift canteen. There was little money to spare in the Witt household, and you had to make do. But now, with Cathaleen’s newly minted education, well…life just might get a bit easier.

A Brothers' Mission

The field edge where Walt led his father-in-law and sons is now a faint trail in a scrub of second-growth forest, and we wade through blackberry, ferns, and poison oak. Nothing looks like it did, but neither Dan, Mark, nor Askey is surprised by this. “Some of these pines were knee-high back then,” Mark says. “But a lot of these woods were just open fields.” As we descend toward Wills Creek, Askey’s yellow Labrador retriever, Winchester, runs ahead, tail wagging above thistles and briers. He’s the only one of us not on edge.

Within a few minutes, Dan disappears into the woods, calling out deer sign. I follow Mark, who peppers Askey with specifics.

Where did the other hunting party park?
Was somebody else on stand with Cutler?
What witnesses were interviewed?
What did they see?

It’s been this way for a long time. While Dan seems resigned to the ultimate mysteries of his father’s death, Mark has always pushed for more details, more specifics, more answers. A civilian logistics engineer with the Department of Defense in Alabama, Mark is in charge of support details for helicopter crews in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he takes a critical, analytical approach to confronting the unknown. When the brothers speak at events, Dan opens up with hunting stories and a personal testimony of what his father’s death has helped him understand about God. Mark is more evangelistic. He’s a kidder with a big smile, but he closes the talk with a sermon’s defining motif. Mark isn’t satisfied until his listeners grasp his core belief: God presents each person with a decision to make—what will you do about Jesus Christ?

And for Mark, too, anger at God defined his adolescence. For years, Mark wouldn’t even talk about the day and would leave the room in a fury whenever his father’s death was mentioned. “I was raised in the church,” he says. Sweat runs into his eyes as he swats spiderwebs from his T-shirt. “But when this happened, it was like God made a mistake. Because of who my father was, how grateful he was to be a Christian. You don’t let good people die.”

Healing for Mark came years later, when, in his early 20s, he began teaching a Sunday school class for youth. Reaching out to kids who had their own hurts and questions was a turning point, and even now it appeals to Mark’s penchant for directness and absolutes. He doesn’t mince words to his students. “I tell my kids to go home and tell your parents you love them, because you might never get another chance. In a cemetery, you see tons of headstones that say stuff to other headstones: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this… I’m sorry I didn’t say I love you… But it’s too late. You don’t know if you have another moment.”

Mark stops short, and looks up the hill. We can see blue sky winking through the trees, marking the edge of an old field. On that hunt long ago, Mark didn’t last long in those snowy woods. Cold and tired, he headed back to his grandparents’ farmhouse sometime before noon. He was there when he heard sirens, and learned of the accident.

In 2004, a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of their father’s death, the minister at Meyersdale Grace Brethren Church asked Dan and Mark to come home and share their story to a congregation that had never forgotten Walter DeSales Witt. Neither brother had ever considered such a public forum. “We looked at it as an opportunity to just let people know we were O.K.,” Dan says. “We figured hardly anybody was going to be there, but it was standing room only.” He is still struck with wonder at the response. “The setting of being back home was…” His voice trails off to silence. “That night was really emotional.”

Word of their presentation spread, and invitations to speak at other churches began trickling in. The Witt brothers visited a small church in West Virginia, then another church back in Meyersdale, and traveled to wild-game dinners hosted by area churches as an outreach effort to men. “You tell a deer hunting story, and it doesn’t matter who the person is,” Dan says, laughing. “It’s a deer thing and hunters who have nothing to do with church will come out of the woodwork to listen.” From their first story of homecoming and reconciliation, the brothers’ presentation evolved into a testimony of faith and healing and even redemption. “We have a blast telling great hunting stories,” Dan says, “but we always share our faith and the importance of knowing where you are going to spend eternity for this very reason: We know firsthand that you never know how much time you have left on this earth.”

By now the brothers have spoken at perhaps a dozen churches. In the Edmonton, Alberta, area in July, more than 1,200 people came to hear them over a three-day speaking tour. They published a small tract, titled Mistaken Identity, in which they tell of their relationships with both their father and Jesus Christ, and of how, as Dan says, hunting has helped them understand that sharing their faith “is a part of God’s plan for us right now, whether we understand how and why or not.” Their six-panel pamphlet is unabashedly personal and unapologetically spiritual. Word of it has spread with no advertising or marketing, yet the Witts have gone through nearly 3,000 copies. “People call us up to send more tracts, and I’m like, ‘How did you get this?’” Mark says. “I was cleaning up tornado damage in Alabama and some guy walks up to me with one in hand and says, ‘This is amazing, I need more of these to hand out.’ And I don’t even know who these people are.”

When Walt moved, his Air Force parka rustled against the rough bark of the hemlock. It was a warm coat, with a hood trimmed with wolf fur. His friends rode him hard about that coat. They told him to think twice about wearing it in the deer woods, with that ruff of gray-brown fur. But he needed it on a frigid day like this. After a few quiet hours, Witt heard men in the woods, on the move, hollering to drive deer. Most of the old family farm had been sold off a few years back, and locals had taken to pushing deer through the big woods. Still, it was hard to imagine anyone else would be here, not with the snow and rough roads.

We search the woods for another hour, pushing lower and lower toward Wills Creek. At some point we lose sight of one another; I’m tangled in the briers that thatch the old road, while Mark and Askey cut a parallel course to both sides. Dan has pushed on ahead when we hear him call out from the woods, his voice clear and determined.

“Mark,” he shouts. “Hey, Mark!”
“Yeah?”
“Come here!”

Consequences

Cutler had been on stand for about an hour, listening to the drivers holler through the woods, when movement in the dark timber across the slope caught his eye. He stepped up on a limb for a better view. Something was moving at the base of a hemlock tree, maybe 50 yards away. Something was there. For 15 minutes, eyes straining, Cutler picked apart the tangle of drooping branches and dark shadows. Each time a driver would yell, whatever it was under the hemlock would move slightly, as if turning toward the sound. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Most hunters know that a smart buck will do that—lie tight in thick cover and let the danger pass.

If only he could get a better view. About 20 feet from the hemlock, directly in his line of sight, a tree stump jutted from the ground, blocking anything but the faintest motion a few feet above the snow. He didn’t have a scope on his rifle, but he could make out a swatch of gray-brown fur, and a black stripe like the ones that lie along each side of a mature buck’s nose. Every now and then, it seemed as if a deer’s antlers dipped and danced under the hemlock. Otherwise, the animal seemed calm. He might have to shoot just to get it to move. Maybe he could thread a bullet through the branches. If nothing else, that might scare the deer toward his hunting party.

There are two verities that every hunter accepts: Once a shot is fired, it cannot be controlled. The projectile will go where the muzzle was pointed until it hits something dense enough to absorb its energy or hard enough to deflect it along another, equally ungovernable, trajectory. You cannot put a bullet back into the barrel.

And there is never an excuse for one hunter to mistake another hunter for an animal. There may be circumstances that confound logic in the field and lead to confusion and misidentification and terrible judgment. But the first rule of picking up a gun is never to point it at anything you do not intend to punch a hole through or kill stone dead.

But it can happen, and it does happen, and every hunter knows this, too. In the U.S., from 2001 to 2010, 103 fatalities were reported to the International Hunter Education Association in which the cause of the incident was “failure to identity target.” According to the National Safety Council, the rate of unintentional fatalities involving firearms dropped 55 percent from 1988 to 2008—and experts point to blaze-orange and hunter-education requirements, as well as tighter restrictions on transporting loaded guns, as lifesaving prescriptions. Still, hunting accidents happen, and there is never an excuse.

The drivers were coming. Now they couldn’t be more than 150 yards—maybe 200—through the woods. The deer looked like it was staying put, no matter what. For Cutler, it was now or never.

On Feb. 6, 1975, in the Court of Common Pleas of Somerset County, Pa., Johnston Cutler pleaded guilty to “shooting at and killing a human being in mistake for deer,” a violation of Pennsylvania’s Game Law 825(c). The trial was brief. The court records comprise a short 23 double-spaced, typewritten pages. The facts were laid out clearly: Cutler spotting movement in the timber as the drivers approached, the particulars of Walter Witt’s makeshift blind in the hemlock boughs, the stump that blocked Cutler’s view of Witt’s torso and his blaze-orange vest, the terrible confluence of poor choices that led to the fatal shot. Cutler admitted guilt.

Even in her grief, Cathaleen Witt expressed to the young man that she bore him no ill will and forgave him for the deadly mistake that took the life of her husband.

Cutler was sentenced to three years’ probation, was ordered to pay $1,000 compensation to the victim’s family and the $13 cost of the prosecution, and forfeited his Pennsylvania hunting license for 10 years.

Walt's Place

By now the boys had long since grown tired and cold. Their boots—black rubber galoshes they wore for sledding—were no match for the chest-deep snowdrifts. Mark backtracked to his grandfather’s house, but Dan stuck it out longer. On the hike in, he and Mark had quarreled about the fact that Mark got to carry a rifle on his very first deer hunt, whereas Dan had had to wait a couple of years before he was allowed such a privilege. Dan was determined to outlast his brother but now, shivering, he could take the cold no longer.

Dan stood up and followed his own tracks uphill where the snow was even deeper. His father’s trail continued on, and Dan struggled to place his boots in the deep tracks. When the trail turned down a steep slope, Dan knew he’d never make it back up the hill. He stood in the woods and he called for his father, but the deep snow, the dark timber, and the dripping melt swallowed his cries. He turned around. His father would understand. He headed back to his grandfather’s house.

Dan’s shout from the woods brings a catch to our throats. Mark passes me at a half run. The ground falls off more steeply as I stumble over mossy logs; blanketed with 3 feet of snow, this would have been a tough slope for a kid to climb indeed. Then, as the terrain flattens again, I see the first of the big hemlocks, and behind them the darker woods that form an interior edge deep in the forest. Dan is standing beside one of the largest hemlocks we’ve seen all day. Mark is down on his haunches, under the lower dead branches that droop toward the ground. Stuck into the trunk are two reflective thumbtacks, old and rusty. Some hunter marked this spot, marked this very tree. Any deer hunter worth his salt would know: This is the place to shoot a buck.

Mark finds my eyes. “This is the place,” he says. “This has to be it.”

He turns to Askey: “Where was Cutler standing? What would he have seen?”

Askey’s face is ashen. The drivers would have been moving below us, he says, away from the creek. He remembers going back the next morning and replicating the crime scene with another officer. If this is the tree, there would have been another across the slope, to the right. From there, Cutler would have watched the woods, deciphering every twitch of every bough.

Maybe 15 minutes after turning away from his father’s snowy trail, walking toward the house, cold and alone, Dan heard a single rifle shot ring out in his dad’s direction. The sound was unmistakable, one of those two-part shots—pa-THONK!—that occurs when a bullet hits something. Dan’s heart leapt with excitement: Dad just got a deer!

Mark is at the base of the hemlock now. He shifts his body, pressing his back to the tree, trying to conform as closely as possible to what he imagines was his father’s pose in those last moments of his life on earth.

“Is this about right?” he asks. “He would have been facing this way?” Mark shifts his legs so that a rifle might rest across his thighs. He swivels his head right and left. Askey and I say nothing.

“This should be it,” Mark says. “This must be it.”

The drivers would have been close. The deer would have looked like it was staying put, no matter what. Now or never.

Mark weeps quietly at the base of the hemlock, his body mostly hidden from view, only the rise and fall of his shoulders suggesting the cadence of his sobs. “This is what Cutler saw,” he says. He reaches up with his right hand and grasps one of the hemlock’s lower dead boughs, a thumb-thick branch that forks into shorter and shorter lengths like an antler. He pulls it down a few inches, then releases it to dance and bob directly overhead. “And then he shot Dad.” He watches the branch until it no longer moves.

“This is as close as we’re going to get,” Mark adds. “Right here.”

Dan and I exchange a glance. Mark gathers himself, then gets to his feet and takes a few steps from the hemlock. The woods are silent. No one knows what to say. Except for Mark. He turns to Askey to speak of the verity he lives by.

“O.K. If it were you that day, what would have happened?” His glasses are in his hand, and he wipes his eyes with the back of a sweaty forearm. For a moment I’m unsure what he means, but only for a moment. “Do you know where you would have spent eternity?”

If ever a man could be forgiven for taking a moment to himself and putting up an emotional wall against the world, it is this man at this time and place. But Mark Witt is the son of Walter DeSales Witt, and he will not let pass an opportunity to speak. “Would you like to know for sure?” he asks, leaning away from the hemlock tree, toward Askey, his red-rimmed eyes softened by a small smile. “You can. You can know. I can share with you how.”

The bullet was a .32 Winchester Special, and it entered Walter Witt’s forehead just above the right eye, just below the gray-brown ruff of the fur hood the coroner’s report would describe as a “Fur lined Head Dress,” and just above the black stripe of his thick, dark sideburns.

Fathers & Sons

This is the hard time. Winter and snow. Family and Christmas. The best of times for a hunter, of course, but in some ways the worst days of the year for the Witt boys. When Walt was shot, there were already presents under the Christmas tree. The funeral was held two days before Santa arrived. Even for these brothers, for whom Christmas is a time of celebration, December brings an upwelling of difficult emotion. “We can ruin it for our families, we know that,” Dan says. “Christmas is our wives’ favorite time of year, but for us, it can be…horrible.”

This year, though, there seems to be more light on the path ahead. I spoke with Dan in mid October, a few weeks after bow season opened in the Virginia Blue Ridge. His elk trip had been a bit of a bust—too hot, too rainy—but he took his son Hunter for the first time, and had a chance to hand out a few Mistaken Identity tracts.

“I’ve been thinking about Moses wandering in the wilderness,” he told me. “And Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son, and the stuff David went through. Things were put into their lives that God didn’t bring to fruition for years and years. As Christians, we are called to share our faith. This just happens to be my story, and I’m just starting to understand that I don’t know all of it. Mark and I just have to be open to what God might have in store.”

For now, there are presents under the Christmas trees in Lynchburg, Va., and Huntsville, Ala. Outside the leaves have fallen and the deer are settling down after the frantic weeks of the rut. At home, the brothers are redesigning their inspirational pamphlet with updated photos.

“I keep telling Mark,” Dan says, “that we have to have some good photos, and those little Alabama bucks of his don’t count.”

In two months, they will visit the very church where their father was to preach the day after he died. They will step into the pulpit and tell stories about hunting, about their father, about the faith that sustains them. They will talk about the bullet that changed everything, except for those things that are eternal and unchangeable. It will be a difficult path, but they will walk it willingly. One step at a time. Down a trail made easier by the tracks of their father.

Whitetail, U.S.A.

Online Editors — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:29:19 -0500

On a satellite image, this little piece of ground—39˚33´16.49˝ N, 96˚25´56.87˝ W—lies slightly downhill of a knuckle of pasture grass and cedar shrub that juts into a Kansas alfalfa field, up where Pottawatomie County nudges toward Nebraska. The slope falls into a deep draw, timbered with thorned wild plum trees, exactly 1.32 miles due west of Kansas Route 99. This is big farm country, big pasture country, a three-hour drive from Kansas City, about 4 miles north-northwest of Blaine, once a bustling railroad stop along the Santa Fe line and now a near ghost town.

I had stared at the spot for hours. This land was either hallowed ground—or a colossal waste of my time.

To an American deer hunter, any place that harbors whitetails is a special piece of ground. There are places where deer are overpopulated, certainly, where folks hold a gardenia-grubbing buck in scorn. But to most of us, a patch of dirt with deer tracks is a seat of magic and a trove of mystery. That’s what I was thinking better than a year ago, and that line of reasoning led me to this: If deer hunting is special everywhere, then what about deer hunting at the precise, scientifically calculated dead center of the whitetail deer range in America? Would Deer Central hold a distillation of everything we love about chasing whitetails? Or would it be just a blip on a map, a meaningless spot generated by some inscrutable computer algorithm?

And could I even find it? That was the surprisingly easy part. Last summer I had a geographic information systems (GIS) specialist crunch current range data for the whitetail deer in U.S., using maps compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She e-mailed me a Google Earth satellite image marked with a bright yellow electronic thumbtack at the center of the range. There was no reason for surprise, really. It was planted in what is easily one of the best counties in what is arguably the best big-deer state in the entire country: Pottawatomie County in Kansas.

To be exact: 39˚33´16.49˝ N, 96˚25´56.87˝ W.

Next, to hunt down the landowner of America’s Deer Central, I spent three days on the phone, calling local town halls, chambers of commerce, and conservation officers. Finally, I hit pay dirt. I tracked down the closest taxidermist to Deer Central and rang him up.

“Lots of folks around here have really big deer—170s, 180s, you name it,” Scott Schwinn said. Schwinn also happened to be the local sanitation officer. He knew every dirt road in Pottawatomie County. I sent him my map, and he sent me a name: Robert Christener.

Of course, Robert Christener wouldn’t have known that his family had come to own and care for the spiritual center of deer hunting in a nation increasingly obsessed with deer. But long before he learned about Deer Central, he knew his land was special. The Christeners love to hunt, and they even manage a half-section of land where they put out preserve pheasants for a few paying hunters. “I want my boys to have a taste of what I had growing up around here,” Christener told me when I called him. “But birds are one thing. We don’t let anyone but family hunt the farm for deer.”

I kept the phone still and held my breath. Deer Central, it turned out, was just for family. And, just this once, for me.

Deep Roots
On Nov. 11, 1869, Robert Christener’s great-grandparents made landfall in Kansas—in a covered wagon, family tradition holds. They claimed 160 homestead acres of rolling ground crosshatched with wooded draws, and over the years the family’s holdings grew. These days, the Christeners own four tracts scattered about Deer Central, and another 1,500 acres or so around Frankfort, Kan., 10 miles to the north.

The Christener family is as Heartland, U.S.A., as you could imagine: Robert is 53 years old, lean and boyish and rugged; a flap of brown hair peeks out from under his blaze-orange cap. His wife, Janet, runs a day care and is no stranger to a bolt action. They have two sons, Donnie and Mike, and a daughter, Melissa. They share farm chores. They dote over elderly family members. They say grace before meals. And they struggle with the challenges faced by rural families across the country.

The afternoon sun casts long shadows when I pull up to a white, two-story clapboard farmhouse to meet Robert’s boys. They’ve both come straight from work, and their differences are telling. Mike, 23, lives here and is just in from the farm. He is brawny and big and wears battered coveralls, mud-splattered boots, and a hooded sweatshirt. Donnie, 26, has just driven in from Kansas City, where he manages mutual funds for a Luxembourg-based firm. Gym-fit, he sports an outfit he’s anxious to change now that he’s home: black jeans, a black pinstriped shirt, and black square-toed shoes.

Mike tried college for a semester, at an agricultural school in Nebraska. “But I just can’t sit inside too long,” he says. “One day I was in class learning about how to drive a tractor and I knew that was it. I’d been driving a tractor all my life. I came home.”

Donnie’s horizons always seemed a little farther out than the Pottawatomie County line. “Mom and Dad always encouraged me to try something else,” he says. “They told me that the farm would always be here if I wanted to return.” But college and career have taken their toll. While Mike has filled a room with crazy-big deer, Donnie’s had few chances to score. The Kansas rifle season always seemed to coincide with college exams. Getting away from work is never easy. He grins sheepishly. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t shot a buck since high school.”

That’s putting a bit of pressure on Donnie, and we feel it the next morning, on our first hunt together. Donnie and I are 10 minutes from the truck when the worst possible scenario emerges on the dark horizon: Four does scramble to their feet, silhouetted against the sky. We hit the deck. We have another quarter mile to cover before shooting light, but we grind our faces into the dirt, pinned down on open ground near a pencil line of locust hedgerow. Donnie groans. “That’s exactly where we want to be,” he says.

Fifteen minutes later the whitetails bolt across the field into the broken cover beyond. Donnie and I take a stand on the field edge and wait for the sun, but I know the chances of a buck’s ignoring the fuss and stepping into range are nil and none. When we limp back to the truck after three hours of watching an empty field, our only solace is the fact that getting busted is perhaps the single most unifying experience in the entire realm of deer hunting in America.

Home Ground
The next day, I have one of those could’ve-should’ve-would’ve moments that haunt every deer hunter. Behind Mike’s farmhouse is a 60-acre cornfield, edged by a sharp bend in Clear Fork Creek. Across the creek, an overgrown pasture cloaks a gentle slope. There’s a thicket up top, a wide belt of oaks, and an ankle-deep trail of deer tracks scored into the bank. I’m hunkered down by midafternoon, back against a big oak, a cut cedar at my feet to break up my silhouette. In 36 years of deer hunting, I’ve never watched a more perfect deer funnel.

What blows me away is how rarely this spot is watched. Mike sleeps with his head on a pillow exactly 1,013 yards to the north, but he hardly ever hunts this crossing. I realize that I’ve brought my own baggage to Deer Central, expecting an obsession with whitetails that infuses every aspect of life. I find something like that. But it looks very different from what I’d imagined.

By and large, deer season on the Christener farm is embraced in a subtle fashion. Suddenly, one morning, blaze-orange vests appear on truck seats. Binoculars find their way to dashboards. Many locals hunt in whatever grease-grimed coveralls they wore to rebuild the combine thresher; in five days of deer hunting I will not see a single item of camouflage clothing other than my own. And guns are always at the ready. During the 10-day Kansas rifle season, rarely will a member of the Christener family travel farther than the woodpile without a centerfire within reach. Here, deer hunting is a seamless part of a day on the family land.

From my perch I watch a pair of does feed across the pasture slope, dark shapes like cloud shadows. Geese call overhead. About an hour into the sit, a spike buck bumbles down the trail, sparring with saplings, unaware of the crosshairs that rest on his ribs. I’m not tempted, but still my heart starts to pound. Then, as the last of the sunlight creeps up the trunks of nearby trees, a shape forms in the upper right quadrant of my peripheral vision. At first, I am not completely aware of it, only of a vague sense that another being has entered my orbit, and I realize that I am fondling the checkering on the gunstock with my index finger.

The buck slips along the pasture, just as I had hoped, and turns toward the creek crossing, just as I had planned. He stops, 70 yards away, nose to the ground, on a narrow gravel island. When the buck turns to the right I see that he is bigger than I first thought. The main antler beam extends almost to the nose, and the tines tower over his head. It’s a deer I should shoot, and I should figure out just where that will happen.

The whitetail steps behind a big sycamore tree, and I wait for him with crosshairs centered on the other side. For the next half minute I search frantically through the riflescope for an ear or antler or patch of white belly hair. But the moment is gone. The buck simply disappears into that unseen hole in the forest floor where deer often fall, and vanishes.
Later, Robert will smile and tell me about the side trail along the dry creek bed, the one that slips just out of sight beyond the gravel island. It’s a trail a hunter might know about, if this land was his land. It’s one that the buck knows, since this is his home.

Just Reward
It’s the next evening that it all comes together. The buck walked out of the big woods to the west of a cornfield where a long stone wall channels deer from one farm section to another. Donnie tells the story while standing in the field stubble, stars twinkling overhead. Robert and I have just driven up in Robert’s pickup, and Donnie’s words are still rapid-fire, still breathless an hour after a big whitetail went down.

When a single doe stepped into the field, Donnie and Mike, sitting about 5 feet apart, backs to the woods, exchanged glances and shrugged. You think she’s alone?

When they looked back toward the field there were four does and one of the biggest bucks Donnie had ever seen. It happened just that fast.
“But I’ve always had a hard time judging deer,” Donnie says. Mike makes a face and nods. “So I looked back at Mike and his eyes were bugged out, and he gave me a little head shake like, Are you going to shoot that deer or what? That’s when I really knew what was standing out there.”

Donnie took two shots with a .270 bolt action, his arms shaking. The buck took a few steps and went down in a heap.

“Oh man!” Donnie says. “So there we were, high-fiving and whooping it up on the field edge, but you know you’re not supposed to walk out there right away. That was the really awesome moment. You know the deer is out there, lying in the stubble, but you really don’t know what you have yet.”
What he had was a brutish 11-point buck, wide racked and neck swollen, with a single hole in the shoulder.

Robert and I follow the brothers in Mike’s truck to the Christeners’ sprawling farmstead a few miles away and pull up to a soaring barn shoehorned between feedlots and corrals. It takes a tractor to unload Donnie’s trophy, and as the headlights wash across the barn interior they light up another pair of big Kansas whitetails. There’s a 10-point buck Janet shot two evenings ago when she and Robert were getting hay for the cattle. Her deer hangs beside a 12-point beast with split brow tines that Mike shot the next morning. He saw the whitetail while ticking off farm chores.

It is impossible not to feel a bit envious. This is a trio of monster whitetail deer, and Donnie shot his buck not 300 yards from where I had been snookered by my own Deer Central buck. The whole family comes out to marvel. Mike drapes his heavy hunting coat around his sister’s shoulders, and I feel my outsider status keenly. The Christeners are warm hosts, but this is a family moment, a time to remember.

Inside, around the dining room table, we chat about Robert’s side business hauling cattle, and Melissa’s upcoming volleyball schedule. Janet has fixed pot roast, plates piled high with steaming vegetables. As I hold hands with the Christeners while Robert says grace, I can hear the mama cows shuffling in the feedlots outside. With my eyes closed I see the three Christener whitetails hanging in the barn, towering overhead, each one the end of a winding trail leading to one special place, and I tell myself that this is how it should be.

Ticking Clock
Two days later I hike across a half mile of CRP grass as stars streak across the sky, and burrow into a frost-sheathed haystack. It is 14 degrees and everything is right: the wind quartering in my face, a killer setup commanding a half dozen wooded draws. Everything except for the complete lack of deer.

I’m halfway through a five-day hunt, and I haven’t seen a mammal in three hours. Dejected, I drive back to Mike’s place, warm a pot of five-hour-old coffee, and plop down in the living room to make myself feel better with a giant bowl of Cap’n Crunch. This doesn’t work, either. I am surrounded by reminders of what could be.

On one wall, there’s a huge 11-pointer with a branched brow tine, next to another 11-point buck with midbeam mass fat as a cottonmouth back home. Directly over my head: 12- and 14-pointers. Framing the door to my bedroom: a soaring 10-pointer with overlapping main-beam points and a garishly tall 12-pointer with a triple-branched G2. Whoppers are propped in corners like forgotten mops. The TV stand looks like a voodoo supply closet: skulls and antlers in a heap. Within 20 feet are 20 sets of whitetail antlers so large that most American hunters would carry their photos around in their wallets.

“I like ’em with some character, I guess,” Mike said earlier, trying not to smirk as I gawked at his dropped-tine, branched-tine, misshapen-beam trophies.

I take a drive down to Hofman Farm Supply, in nearby Blaine. Back in the day, Blaine sported a bank, hotel, stockyard, grocery store, and bar. “This was a real community,” Elaine Hofman says. “Folks thought we were really something for a while.” Hofman has run the store with her husband for 37 years, since the day after their wedding. These days, the old farm-supply store is mostly stocked with auto parts and tires, a reflection of the lack of farm business here once the railroads literally pulled up the tracks. Dressed in packer boots and a snazzy red jacket with a Christmas tree brooch, Hofman is tickled pink to hear about Deer Central. “It’s remarkable that we’re noted for something up here. The town’s just about all gone now.”

It seems that the changes and challenges facing the Christeners are reflected in what’s happening elsewhere in Deer Central. This rolling, pastoral countryside keeps a tight grip on the hearts of its residents but has a harder time holding on to the people themselves. There were 32 seniors in Mike’s graduating class at Frankfort High School. Melissa’s class is half that size. For now Deer Central serves as Christener Central, too, a time and place where the family’s diverging paths are wound back together.

In the dark the next morning, Robert describes what we’ll see when the sun comes up. “This is a half-section, 320 acres,” he whispers. In front of our pop-up blind, a deep draw leads into grassland, thicketed with plum and dogwood. There are beanfields to the south and alfalfa in the field behind us, but the land still hews to its pioneering history. To the north, native pasture rolls out of sight. “There’s big bluestem, little bluestem, buffalo grass. Prairie that’s been here, basically, forever.”

Now the wind comes up with the sun. By shooting light the gusts are ripping better than 30 mph. They knock the pop-up blind around like a thin bush and whisk through the shooting windows we’ve closed to meager slits. It doesn’t take long to start a slight shiver.

When I set out on this long-shot quest, my intention was to spend a cold morning or two in the heart of deer hunting in America, and roll the dice on the gift of a deer in such a place. I’ve found all I could want in a deer hunting spot, no doubt. But more compelling than my discovery of Deer Central has been my encounter with the family that loves this place, that shepherds the very ground that sustains their bodies and souls and knits their family together. Glancing over, I see Robert’s face silhouetted in the dark shadows of the blacked-out pop-up. His eyes are fixed somewhere out on the rolling hillsides of his family land, and it occurs to me that no matter how hard I look, I will never see what he sees.

Robert shuffles his feet and arches his back in a long stretch. “When you called me and told me about the idea of Deer Central,” he says, “I felt like it was a real privilege to have something like that on our land.” He is quiet for a moment. “I really want you to shoot a big deer, Eddie. But seeing my boy with that buck the other night, him and his brother together, after so many years for Donnie.” He shakes his head and glances over, almost apologetically. “Well, that’s just everything to me. I sure hope you understand that.”

If I didn’t, I think, I wouldn’t be here.

Last Call
On my last morning in Pottawatomie County I follow fence posts in the dark until a line of plum trees runs out along an alfalfa field. I worm under a barbed wire fence, snip thorns from a plum’s trunk and lower branches, and hunker down in the grass. I am invisible. I prop my boots up on the lowest strand of barbed wire, and wait for it to come together in Deer Central.

Three hours later, I have no choice. I’m faced with a three-hour drive to a 2 p.m. flight. A trio of western meadowlarks flies into the tree overhead, chipping nervously. I take it as a Kansas farewell. I’ve had my chance.

When I stand up, there he is. A very big deer, an 8-pointer, at least, and likely larger, with a neck like a sack of cattle feed. He must have been stepping out of the plum thicket as I crawled out of my hide, within rifle range with a steady rest, but by the time I get the scope on him I figure it’s 250 yards, and he’s loping through broken thicket cover, aware of danger but not yet crazy-spooked. I seethe with frustration and disappointment. Five days of hard hunting and I needed but five seconds more. I center the buck in the glass, then move the crosshairs ahead of his shoulder, and in my mind I empty the rifle’s magazine. But already I’m shaking my head. This deer deserves better.

I ease the rifle down. He’s crossing pasture now and pours it on. With each vaulting leap he covers 15, maybe 20, feet of open ground, and seems to belong to both earth and sky. A part of me knows he belongs to the Christeners, as well, and that he’s not meant to be my deer. For the moment he is, quite simply, a marvelous thing to behold, and when he vanishes into a distant wood’s edge I realize that I am smiling.

F&S Classic: "The Descent"

Dave_Maccar — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:17:15 -0500

The idea that there are two Alaskas came to me in a cold wave as my canoe was swept into the toppled trees and I was thrown overboard. I caught a glimpse of my pal, Scott Wood, sprinting toward me across a gravel bar, knowing that this was what we had feared the most. Wood -disappeared into the brush, running for my life, and then the river sucked me under and I did not see anything else for what seemed like a very long time.

Every angler dreams of Alaska. My dream was of untouched waters, uncountable salmon and trout, and an unguided route through mountains and tundra. But day after day of portages and hairy paddling had suggested that mine was a trip to the other Alaska, a place that suffers no prettied-up pretense. The other Alaska is not in brochures. It is rarely in dreams. The other Alaska will kill you.

We’d had plenty of postcard moments, for sure: king salmon jetting rooster tails over gravel bars. Tundra hills pocked with snow. Monster rainbows and sockeye salmon heaving for oxygen as we held their sagging bellies. But day after day the four of us had paddled through the other Alaska, scared to death, except when the fishing was good enough to make us forget the fear.

Now the world turned black and cold as the Kipchuk River covered me, my head underwater, my arm clamped around a submerged tree, my body pulled horizontal in the hurtling current. Lose my grip and the river would sweep me into a morass of more downed trees, so I held on even tighter as water filled my waders. The river felt like a living thing, attempting to swallow me, inch by inch, and all I could do was hold my breath and hang on. But I am getting ahead of the story.

Welcome to the Tundra

Give me a canoe, paddle, portage pack, and time, and I can make it down almost any river. For years I’ve considered this a given, and remote rivers have been my express route to fish that have never seen a fly.

It may be that no one had attempted what we set out to do last July: Complete a 10-day unguided canoe descent of southwestern Alaska’s Kipchuk and Aniak Rivers. These are isolated headwaters in the extreme: To get bodies and gear on the ground required five flights in two-person Piper Cub and Super Cub bush planes. Our largest duffels carried 17-foot PakBoats—folding canoes on aluminum frames—which I figured to be our masterstroke. This was part of the dream too: Instead of a ponderous raft, I’d paddle a sleek canoe, catching eddies and exploring side channels. Or so I’d planned.

There were four in the party: myself, photographer Colby Lysne, my friend Edwin Aguilar, and Scott Wood, who more times than not can be found in the other end of whatever canoe I inhabit. Dropping through tundra, we’d first negotiate the Kipchuk through a 1,000-foot-deep canyon. Then we’d slip into the Kuskokwim lowlands, where the river carves channels through square-mile gravel bars and unravels in braids until it flows into the larger Aniak. Some of the most remote country left in Alaska, it is the second-largest watershed in the state, with just a handful of native settlements. We timed our launch for a shot at four of the five Alaska salmon species—kings, pinks, sockeyes, and chums—with a wild-card chance for coho and the Alaska Grand Slam of salmon. We’d been counting our fish for months.

Truth be told, though, no one really knew what to expect on the Kipchuk. According to our bush pilot, Rob Kinkade, less than a handful of hunting parties raft the upper river each year. He’d heard of no one who’d fished above the canyon, ever. As for the paddling conditions—well, he said, it all looked workable from the windshield of a Super Cub. But we weren’t paddling a plane.

The first test came fast, just after put-in. A fallen spruce blocked the channel, with barely enough room to shoulder past. The obstacle looked easy enough to handle, but the water was swift and heavy, and the laden boats were slower to react than we’d imagined. Wood and Aguilar fought to cross a racing tongue of current and were carried straight for the spruce. Watching from upstream, I could hear Wood barking over the rush of water—“Draw right! Right! Harder! Harder!”—as the canoe slipped closer to the tree. They cleared by inches. Wood glanced at us, knowing what we were in for.

“So,” Lysne said, his eyes on the water. “That didn’t look so good.”

Already we were feeling our handicap. With a flyover scouting report of no whitewater, Wood and I had dialed back the level of paddling experience we expected from our partners. Lysne and Aguilar had plenty of remote camps in the bag, but they’d never been whitewater cowboys. Cocksure with a canoe paddle, I figured—as did Wood—that we could handle whatever came up from the stern. What came up was a paddler’s worst nightmare: miles of strainers. Where sharp turns occur, the current undercuts the channel’s outside bank. As the bank collapses, trees fall, wedging against the shore. Water gets through, but a canoe carried into a strainer has little chance of remaining upright—and a body slammed into the underwater structure has little chance of escape.

Rattled, Lysne and I slipped into the fast water and tried to crab the boat sideways with short draw strokes. A big-handed North Dakota hockey player, Lysne tackles obstacles with a brawler’s bravado—a frame of mind that would pay off later. I started to yell as we neared the strainer, and for a second I caught Wood’s concerned look, knowing that in the next moment, the boat would tangle sideways in the spruce and our fishing trip would turn into a rescue operation.

I paddled the strongest half-dozen strokes of my life as the spruce boughs raked across Lysne’s shoulders and caught me in the chest. We pulled away, inch by inch. My heart was pounding. We sidled up to the other PakBoat.

“We cannot capsize,” Wood said, his face intense. “You know that. We simply cannot capsize.”

That night we calmed our nerves with Scotch and pan-fried Arctic grayling, whose bodies had spilled out whole mice when we cleaned them a few hundred feet from our campsite. Wine-red shapes coursed up the pool—king salmon that ignored our flies. But it was early. With each paddle stroke, the fishing should only get better, the paddling easier. I crawled into the tent feeling like a dog clipped by a car. Tomorrow, we figured, it would all come together.

But tomorrow was the day the canyon closed in.

This stretch of the river was filled with more dread and sweat than we’d bargained for—and far less fishing. Every turn in the Kipchuk was a blind bend. Every bend was lined with downed trees. And each time the river narrowed, a chute of blistering midstream flow formed a hard wall of current that threatened to flip the boats.

We were also running a different kind of uncharted waters. Though Wood and I have been to spots where getting through the country proved difficult and dangerous, never had we experienced day after day of serious peril. We wanted the Alaskan wilds, and we didn’t mind pain and sweat for a payoff of unknown country. A taste of fear was part of the price. But on the Kipchuk, we were gagging on terror.

Careful What You Ask For

“There was a time,” Wood said, standing on the bank three days into the canyon, “when I liked being scared in the woods. It made it all seem so…real.” His voice trailed off, and his gaze followed downriver. I knew where his thoughts were taking him. Mine were already there. Home. Wife. Children. “I don’t like being scared anymore,” he said.

Lysne and I pushed the canoe into the river without saying a word. I could only imagine what he was thinking. Lysne never complained, never pointed out that he’d signed on to photograph a fishing trip, not an adrenaline rush down a rain-swollen river. I didn’t voice the thoughts coursing through my own head. The cheerful scouting report notwithstanding, I’d had no business putting inexperienced paddlers in such remote, unknown water. My arrogance was shameful, and the dangers were accruing. Humping gear and dragging boats through 20-foot-tall thickets, where a feeding bear would be invisible at 10 feet, was a necessity. But that’s the seduction of wilderness travel. Each time you come back, you think you can handle more. Until you can’t.

Downstream, the river disintegrated. On the banks, water boiled through 10-foot-tall walls of downed timber as the Kipchuk careened around hairpin turns. Time and time again we roped the canoes around the roughest water, but too often the only choice was to carry everything. To portage the hairpins, we bushwhacked through thickets, taking turns as point man with the shotgun and bear spray. We hacked trails through streamside saplings. We fished in spurts—10 minutes here, 15 there. It took all we had just to keep going.

One night I crouched beside the campfire, nursing blisters and a bruised ego. My back felt like rusted wire. Lysne limped in pain, his toes swollen and oozing pus. I was tired of portaging, tired of paddling all day with little time for fishing, tired of fear. I watched Lysne take a swig of Costa Rican guaro.

“I have to be honest with you,” he muttered. “I’ve had some dark times the last few days. Been f---ing scared and I’m not afraid to say it.”

The night before, he said, he’d dreamed that we were paddling through a swamp, but it was inside somebody’s garage, and a fluorescent alligator attacked the canoe.

“Weird, huh? I wonder where that came from.”

The next morning I dragged myself out of the tent with a mission. Somewhere, downriver, the other Alaska waited.

“Today we paddle like madmen,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Aguilar groused. “We need to quit being such slackers.”

A few miles downstream we lined a run and dragged the canoes to the head of a deep pool the color of smoke and emeralds. A half dozen large fish held near the upstream ledge. I slid a rod out of the canoe. The first cast landed a pink salmon. My second brought in a chum. I hooted as Aguilar fumed and glanced at his watch.

“Ten minutes!” I pleaded. “I promise, just 10 minutes!”

He huffed and grabbed a rod. Fishing chaos broke out. Wood, Lysne, and I worked a triple hookup on salmon, our lines crossing. We fought sockeyes, kings, and wolf-fanged chum salmon. We landed 3-pound grayling and a solid 26-inch rainbow. One fish ran up the rapids at the head of the pool, leaping like a silver kite. Another was so close that it splashed me. For the first time I felt the pieces coming together. The pull of strong fish was a poultice for ragged nerves and sore shoulders.

Eleven salmon steaks, slathered in chipotle sauce, sizzled over the fire that night.

“We deserved today,” Aguilar said, lying back on a bed of rocks.

“Fishing is fun,” added Wood. “We should try to do more of it.”

Pay to Play

Late the next afternoon, we beached the boats to fish another salmon-choked pool, and in less than a minute we were shoulder to shoulder, working a quadruple hookup. Lysne cackled as my king ran under his bent rod.

It was a fine place to camp and a good time to call it quits, but I’m not fond of camping above a hairy rapid. Just below the pool, a pair of fallen spruce trees leaned over the main channel, then the river bent hard, the bank combed with strainers.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “We can celebrate when there’s clear sailing ahead.”

“Sure,” Wood replied. “But we were first on the last horrible, terrible, death-for-certain river bend. You’re up.”

The next half minute, Wood would later say, seemed to last an hour. Entering the river, Lysne and I lined up with the route we’d hashed out. Once the laden canoe sliced into the main current tongue, however, it was propelled downstream with terrifying speed. Draw strokes didn’t budge us. Pry strokes and stern rudders proved useless. I lost my hat as we rocketed under the timber. The craft arrowed into a wall of downed trees and suddenly we were tangled in branches, broadside to the current, water boiling against the hull.

“Don’t lean upstream!” I screamed. Lysne didn’t, but in the next instant the river swarmed over the gunwales anyway. The boat flipped, violently, and disappeared from view. The current sucked me under. I caught a submerged tree trunk square in the chest, a blow buffered by my PFD, and I clamped an arm around the slick trunk.

I can’t say how long I hung there. Twenty seconds, perhaps? Forty?

For long moments I knew I wouldn’t make it. With my free arm, I pulled myself along the sunken trunk as the current whipped me back and forth. But the trunk grew larger and larger. It slipped from the grip of my right armpit, and then I held fast to a single branch, groping for the next with my other hand. I don’t remember holding my breath. I don’t remember the frigid water. I just remember that the thing that was swallowing me had its grip on my shins, then my knees, and then my thighs. For an odd few moments I heard a metallic ringing in my ears. A vivid scene played across my brain: It was the telephone in my kitchen at home, and it was ringing, and Julie was walking through the house looking for the phone, and I suddenly knew that if she answered the call—was the phone on the coffee table? did the kids have it in the playroom?—that the voice on the other end of the line would be apologetic and sorrowful. Then the toe of my boot dragged on something hard, and I stood up, and I could breathe.

Wood crashed through the brush, wild-eyed, as I crawled up the bank, heaving water. I waved him downstream, then clambered to my feet and started running. Somewhere below was Lysne. The big-handed hockey player had gone overboard farther midstream than I had and vanished beyond the strainers. Stumbling through brush, I heard Wood give a cry, and my heart sank. I burst into sunlight. Wood was facedown on a mud bar, where he’d catapulted after tripping on a root. Aguilar battered his way out of a nearby thicket. A few feet away, Lysne stood chest-deep in the river, with stunned eyes and mouth open. In his hand he gripped the bow line to the canoe, half sunk and turned on its side, the gear bags still secured by rope.

Our ragged little foursome huddled by the river, dumbstruck by the turn of events. For a long time we shook our heads and tried not to meet one another’s gazes.

Wood finally looked at Lysne. “I can’t believe you saved the boat.”

“It was weird,” Lysne said, his voice rising. “I popped out of the water and saw another strainer coming for me, and I just got pissed off. I was yelling to myself: I ain’t gonna drown! I ain’t gonna drown! I went crazy, punching and kicking my way through the trees. Then boom: I saw the rope, grabbed it, and started swimming.”

I’d lost a shotgun, two fly rods and reels, and a bag of gear, but everything else that went into the river came out.

Aguilar sidled over, quietly. “You okay? I mean, in your head?”

Only then did I feel the river’s grip loosen from my legs. I began to shiver, and no one said a word.

The Cane Pole Hole

“Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon.” I was counting the kings passing under the boat. Sunlight streamed into the water, lighting up 15-, 20-, and 30-pound chinooks.

Downstream, the Kuskokwim lowlands flattened out—no more canyon walls, no more bluffs: slow water and flat country and easy going.

In the bow, Lysne watched the fish and shook his head. “I just spent a week on the Russian River, shoulder-to-shoulder combat fishing,” he said. “I can’t believe nobody’s here. And nobody’s been here. And nobody’s coming here. Amazing.”

I settled into a cadence of easy paddling, the sort that lets the mind drift free. So far, the price of admission to a place where nobody goes had come close to a body bag. I wondered how much longer I’d be willing to shell out for the solitude. Back home were two kids and a wife and a life I’ve been lucky to piece together. With each year I have more to lose. I’m not ready for an RV and a picnic table, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was time to dial the gonzo back. I didn’t know. I won’t know, until I hear of the next uncharted river, the next place to catch fish in empty country, and ask myself: What now?

Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon.

Late in the afternoon we slipped into a deep pool unremarkable but for the 50 kings, pinks, and chums queued up, snout to tail. For 15 minutes they ignored egg-sucking leeches, pink buggers, Clousers, mouse flies, saltwater copperheads, and even a green spoon fly, the go-to choice for hawg bass back home. Downstream, salmon darted across a gravel bar. We could see them coming from 100 yards away.

Wood reeled in and stomped off. He is not one to be snubbed by visible fish. “I’m gonna think outside the koi pond,” he said, following grizzly tracks up the sandbar. Ten minutes later we heard a whoop from inside shaking willows. The tip of a fly rod protruded from the thicket, arcing into the water. “Bring your cane poles, boys,” Wood hollered.

Worming his way through the brush, Wood had flipped a fly into the gravy train of salmon. It didn’t work right away. But ultimately, a pig king had sauntered over to slurp it. No casting, no stripping was required—you just had to keep the fly away from the tykes and hold on. Some of the fish were enormous. Dangling my rod over the salmon, I tried five drifts, 10, no takers, 15 drifts with the pink leech jigged fractions of an inch from the mouths of fish. They stared, looking, looking, l-o-o-o-king, until one sucked it down.

Cackling and howling, the four of us caught king after king, taking turns in the hole. No one cared that this was artless fishing. Dumbed-down salmon whacking was what we needed. A half hour later, Lysne hooked a brute of a king. The 30-pound chinook never showed until Lysne fought it into the shallows. I went in up to my armpits to land it. My hands barely reached around the base of the tail. Lifting the fish was like pulling a log out of the water. When I handed it to Lysne, he groaned. “We’ve got to camp right here,” he said and grinned. “I don’t think I can lift a paddle after this.”

Behind him, chum salmon leapt in the air, and kings sent more rooster tails skyward, their backs out of the water. We flopped on the sandbar and fired up a stove. Mist turned into rain as we scrounged the food bag, poured out the juice from a can of smoked mussels, and sautéed jerk-seasoned sockeye in the makeshift frying oil.

Not 3 feet away, a single chum salmon labored upstream. This one was far past spawning. The sight struck me silent: The fish was rotting, its flanks pale and leprous, the spines of its dorsal and tail fins sticking out above the flesh like the shattered masts of a toy sailboat.

The Land of Easy Living

The next three days brought the Alaska of my dreams. Now the fish came in schools so large that they appeared as burgundy slicks moving upcurrent. There was nothing easy about coaxing them to a fly, and nothing easy about bringing them to hand. We killed one fish a day, enough to eat like kings. One afternoon I was lying back on rocks near grizzly and wolf tracks so fresh that the prints had not yet dried. “This is what I thought it’d be like every day,” Aguilar said. “But now, just one day of it feels so-o-o-o good.”

We’d had moments of fish chaos—multiple hookups, the Cane Pole Hole, outrageous rainbow trout. But fishing remote Alaska isn’t about the numbers, or the variety of species. It’s about the way the fish are seasoned with fear, sweat, miscues, and the mishaps that are the hallmark of an authentic trip in authentic wild country.

On the night before our scheduled pickup, we camped at the juncture of the Aniak and a long, sweeping channel. After setting up the tents, Lysne cooled his heels. His toes were swollen and chinook-red from day after day of hard walking in waders.

“I can’t even think about wading right now,” he said. “I’m just gonna lie here and fish in my mind.”

Wood, Aguilar, and I divvied up the water: They headed off to hunt rainbows down the side channel, while I fished a wide pool on the river.

Since I’d lost my rods and reels when our boat flipped, I fished a cobbled-together outfit of an 8-weight rod with a 9-weight line. It was a little light but heavy enough for the fish we’d landed over the last few days. In an hour of nothing, I made 50 casts to an endless stream of oblong shapes. Then suddenly my hot-pink fly disappeared. Immediately I knew: This was my biggest king, by far. The salmon leapt, drenching my waders, then ripped off line and tore across the current.

The rod bent into the cork, thrumming with the fish’s power. I’d have a hard time landing this one solo, so I yelled for help, but everyone was long gone.

So I stood there, alone and undergunned, and drank it all in. It no longer mattered if this was my first or 15th or 30th king salmon. What mattered was that wild Alaska flowed around my feet and pulled at the rod, and I could smell it in the sweet scent of pure water and spruce and in the putrid tang of the dying salmon. I felt it against my legs, an unyielding wildness. Part of what I felt was fear, part of it was respect, and part of it was gratitude that there yet remained places so wild that I wasn’t sure I ever wished to return.

Then the king surfaced 5 feet away and glimpsed the source of his trouble. At once the far side of the river was where the salmon wanted to be, and for a long time there was little I could do but hang on.

The Hunter’s Job: Carving

Dave_Maccar — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:45:15 -0400

There may be other deeds more laden with American pomp than carving a Thanksgiving turkey—folding the Stars and Stripes comes to mind—but there aren’t many that train so keen a spotlight on a single moment, a single person, a single act with a knife in hand. The bird has been in the oven long enough to send its aroma wafting through the house, and now the gathered clan sits at the table, gawking at all the wedding china and silver that has emerged from the attic on a schedule similar to that of Halley’s comet. All eyes turn to the turkey. Cue up Norman Rockwell. And don’t screw it up.

By now you should have paved the way for a civil service. Go ahead and decide which kids get the drumsticks before you say grace—no use ruining the meal with a fistfight right out of the gate. Let folks know they shouldn’t eat till Grandma first lifts her fork. No cursing. No ketchup bottles on the table. And honestly, it’s a celebration, so if little Johnny wants to slip a whoopee cushion under Grandpap’s seat, where’s the harm?

But know this: The very act of carving a turkey—especially a wild turkey—changes the game at the table. It’s the moment when something—the essence of which is undeniably, unabashedly wild—transfigures into the very building block of civilization: human food. Each of us closes that circle with a fork.

It’s a metamorphosis worthy of a moment’s contemplation, at the least, and worthy of the giving of thanks. And for the sake of Ben Franklin and all things pure and true, forgo any blade that comes with a power cord sticking out of the handle. —T. Edward Nickens