Hunting Chatter
Parked outside a Native jewelry shop in Cordova, Alaska, my two hunting companions and I waited in the truck while the fourth member of our hunting party was in the shop buying a souvenir for his cousin. Black bear hunting had brought us all to Cordova. Today’s stop in the port was a reconnaissance mission to check the weather conditions prior to setting out to sea in a skiff to search for bears.
The wind, white caps, and dark clouds of unwelcoming seas relegated our inspiration to the land where nice ideas go to die. Instead to head back out of town and cruise the small slough that ran not thirty yards from our cabin’s porch, once our friend completed his purchases. In the meantime, three of us sat in the truck and waited, silence giving way to chatter. Nature abhors a vacuum.
“Can I run something by you guys?”
The youngest member of our hunting party spoke up. At the time, he was in his early- to mid-twenties while the driver and I were each in our mid-thirties. We, of course, obliged—each of us hoping to help, but neither of us having the heart to tell him growing older doesn’t necessarily mean a person learns a damn thing. I sat in the backseat, listening as he unburdened himself. His future father-in-law didn’t seem to like him and made his relationship with his fiancé difficult. There wasn’t a thing in the world that would change his mind about marrying that girl, but it’s sure tough to join a family without feeling totally welcome.
Taking turns, the driver and I spoke. We hoped for poignant effectiveness while settling for layered advice approximating utility. As lifelong bachelors up to that point, we had zero first hand knowledge. What in the hell could we possibly know, or say that would help? Likely nothing. But while speaking, we searched our individual indexes of human experience and relationship knowledge and answered anyway. The outcome was a simple directive: Remember, that’s his daughter he’s giving away. Do your best to make it easy on him without compromising yourself. Was it the right thing to say? Hell, I don’t know. They're probably just nice words wearing wisdom’s uniform.
There’s an important detail I haven’t yet shared with you about this story—I’d only known each of these guys for a few days, and they hadn’t known each other for significantly longer. How do folks that barely know each other end up discussing a detail that will affect the rest of a person’s life? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s the prospect of taking life together which drives us to better understand the people whose company we share.
I, for one, don’t want to hunt with someone I don’t respect. Is this why we search and probe with every form of conversation to learn about those beside us in the field. Or could it be as simple, as downtime and the vacuum of silence that needs to be filled.. Either way, I’ve learned that hunting is a catalyzing agent that quickens human connection.
Hunting was likely a catalyst for the development of communication—hunters telling other hunters where the game is, if it’s dead, and if it wasn’t how they might go about killing it. Initially we hunted as pack animals, making communication necessary. Now, our chatter has evolved to fit the complexity of being a modern human. The English language alone has 170,000 words, many existing redundantly alongside each other. While we still enjoy hunting in packs (duck blinds and deer drives come to mind), and conversations about finding game will live on for as long as hunting does, contemporary conversations in the field range and vary as broadly as people do.
The human mind is a maze of complicated machinery, unaccompanied by a user manual to guide us toward proper usage. So, we outsource the problem, using other minds to help us operate our own. Drop a line here and there to learn if our jokes are funny. State our philosophies to see if we make sense or are living somewhere on the other side of the cuckoo’s nest. We describe our problems to mastermind a path through them—or to learn that, sometimes, we’re just going to take life on the chin. There’s solace in knowing we aren’t alone. Countless nuances of human life verbally manifest into the world to give life color, meaning, and at least a scrape at understanding where we fit into this tangle of thorns adorned with flowers.
In 2018, two of my longtime buddies, one of their fathers, and I started what would become a yearly tradition— A Christmas Eve duck hunt. For this, we set up a homemade, A-frame duck blind in a flooded cornfield at the narrow end of a valley between two ridges. Waders on, and feet submerged in the frigid mud puddle, we killed ducks as they came to our decoy spread in waves. It was working perfectly until a single duck went rogue, landing thirty or more yards away and far to the right of our spread. The elder statesman of the group was seated closest to the bird at the end of the blind. We goaded him towards the errand fowl. Purists would call such a kill “water swatting.” Some argue its sporting merits. But that’s only because modern folks mostly have the privilege of not being hungry.
“Dad, kill that duck,” my friend hissed and with movements only accurately timed with a sundial, we watched the senior member of our group sneak his gun out over the top of the blind. Rising at a pace that would make a sloth impatient, he drew a bead and shot the duck. Howling with laughter, we immediately dubbed him “Super Sneak." We spent the rest of the hunt verbally embroidering this new moniker on him.
In the years since then, I haven’t missed an opportunity to greet him with a handshake and a “What’s up, Super Sneak?” When there’s a chance to poke fun, we pantomime his movements, exaggerating them for effect. The story lives on in the lore of our little hunting family, a joke destined to live as long as we do, every Christmas Eve duck hunt incomplete without the whisper of “Remember Ol’ Super Sneak…”
I don’t know of a hunting group absent hoots, howling, and guffaws. Whether mocking each other’s antics in a duck blind or cackling at each other’s (and to be honest our own) misfortunate shots while walking a hillside for upland birds, each has its jokes and laughter. Hunters, by even distribution among the human population, aren’t particularly comedic. Yet we laugh a lot together, especially given the gravity of our chosen activity. But it could be that gravity that pulls the laughter out of us. The specter of death is ever present as we move among the hills or sit in wait. Maybe, in balance, the prospect of killing bids us to embody the lighter side of the world as Yang stabilizes Yin. Then again, it could be that an excited energy comes when doing things we enjoy with people that we like. I can’t help but believe that it’s both.
Humor is not the only driver in hunting conversation. Belief, and our frequent need to express it, fills the pauses between jokes and shots—it offers the opportunity to give and shape our worldviews when the hunting stories end, but the truck’s wheels are still rolling toward home. Sometimes the beliefs are simple. Like my completely correct, and one-hundred percent defendable, opinion that the Turnpike Troubadours are modern country music’s saving grace. Try as anyone may, I will not be convinced otherwise.
This belief may exist on the shallower end of conversation, but sitting in the woods we can talk politics and with each affirmative head nod our bias convinces us that we’re the only ones paying attention. Further, that the world will be shot to shit if it doesn’t heed what a group of folks gathered around trucks drinking coffee, and clad in camouflage, has to say.
Then there are times when seated on a hillside, eyeing country 1,000 yards away, belief takes a grander form and, with scalpel-like words, takes the world apart. Gazing far across the landscape with someone you trust to kill with is a catalyst for accurate introspection. The distance in each direction, a mirror.. The accuracy of vision reflects the trust one has in the person next to them. In turn, each cuts and sutures.
When we returned to the cabin in Alaska, shot down the slough and hiked across the soggy sod of the marsh, the four of us sat on the bank with the water behind us and the mountain in front of us. We built a fire out of whatever dead, dried wood we could find to cook the salmon caught fly fishing a glacial lake the day prior.
We glassed for bears in shifts and picked fiddleheads to snack on as the salmon roasted. After devouring the fish bare handed in a style reminiscent of our ice age brethren, we found comfortable seats by using our packs as back rests, then trained all eight of our eyes through our glass and onto the mountain. Later in the evening we would split, becoming hunting parties of two. But for a while, we coalesced four into one and satiated by a wild meal. Words were the only tools in the world that could once again parse us into individuals.
“Do you guys want to hear about my novel?” The leader of our party asked. In most instances, especially at parties full of strangers, someone offering to describe their novel is met with a collective, internal yawn and eyes darting for an escape route. But we were in that place where belief becomes philosophy, four as one, and open to understanding how each individual connected to the others. In unison, three of us sincerely agreed.
I won’t share the novel's details with you, as an ode to verbal parsimony and because the idea is good enough that if he writes it well, it will get published. And I wouldn’t want to spoil the story for anyone. When he finished, the eventual author commented, “There are just so many dark and sad novels, I think the world needs more characters like Doug.” The three of us agreed with him about Doug before sharing our takes on his story. Words returned us to individuals. Each statement, whether we consciously acknowledged it, was an expression of our philosophies in relationship to a central premise laid at our feet by a character named Doug.
We didn’t only hear the plot of a novel, although we did hear a good one. We listened as a man cut the world apart while simultaneously stitching it back together. In doing that, he showed us himself. But he also showed us that the world could be lighter and better, and we could see it that way if we really wanted to. Without the flow of a stream behind us and a pine striped mountain at the perfect distance in front of us, I don’t know that we would have believed him. Hunting gave us the chance to converse and grow better for the effort.
During the last few days of the goose season that ended a few months before writing this, the son of Super Sneak and I set up our single-person blinds in a pasture adjacent to a small stream in that same valley where Super Sneak earned his name. The land belonged to a welcoming farmer and had been a productive haunt for us that season. Many geese fell to our shotguns, their breasts cured into pastrami. Their legs braised into barbacoa. The conditions seemed right, so we expected a productive day. Problem was, the last time someone was there, it wasn’t us. So, we relied on a buddy’s scouting report rather than seeing the truth with our own eyes. But the real truth is that the wildlife's whims control a hunting story’s plot. Our scouting reports are guesses at reality designed to comfort the human psyche with the illusion of control.
As the sky to our left turned pink with the sunrise, we heard geese honking out notes overhead, expecting that they’d feed and then come to the stream to loaf. They did no such thing. Two large groups passed over us and made their way to the other end of the valley, leaving us to guess at their plans for the day and giving us something else to talk about.
The pink sky dissolved into a bright, blue bird day. On we sat, as the morning grew brighter, talking between our blinds and recounting the season as it wound down in an apparent anticlimax. The company was good, so we decided to stay a bit longer, hoping the fates would reward our patience. Certain the geese would come, although it wasn’t only this belief that kept us. Excluding the birth of a child or the day you marry your love, there are few moments more precious than those sitting in a blind talking to a person you’d call brother if it weren’t for the inconvenience of being born to a different set of parents.
The music played again from somewhere over the hill behind our blinds. Super Sneak's son played goose notes of his own to call them into our spread. Appearing over the hill, three geese circled downstream, staying high and taking a good look at what was going on below. Goose music fell from the sky and rose from the ground. It looked as though they’d drop into our spread, but at the last minute they pitched two-hundred yards across the pasture and over a fence, landing in a barren ag field. Amused and perplexed, we had more to talk about, although in more hushed tones. We sat low in our blinds, our hope-derived logic telling us they would feed in the field for a few minutes and then come to the stream to relax. So, we waited and talked, relegating ourselves to the fact that we don’t know a damn thing about geese. They never came to the stream.
We decided to pick up and head home. Like a cup holding water, one setting can only hold so much chatter before folks need a new place to look at each other while opening their mouths. Rising out of the blinds and heading toward the decoys, the music returned. “Back in the blinds!” my brother exclaimed, still managing a hush. The music of a lone goose fell to our ears as our hearts thumped from hustling and gave backing rhythm to the music. Circling and dropping, circling and dropping, the goose working down as the music played in both directions. Fearing that the goose would only give us a brief concert before gaining on the sky and leaving, my brother dropped his call and said, “Kill it,” offering me a left-to-right crossing shot at about thirty yards. Rising from my blind, and finding my lead, I squeezed the trigger. The goose folded and fell dead on the stream’s opposite shore.
The morning hunt had all the makings of a good story. On the bank of a meandering stream, in view of an ancient ridge, two friends hunted with anticipation, finding that they were wrong more times than right. But the hours talking bonded them closer and grew them in character. Weathering the disappointments, they stayed steadfast in their efforts, and just when it seemed that the fates would disregard their perseverance, success befell them at the eleventh hour—and they were happy for the lot of it.
On the way home, we pulled into Super Sneak’s machine shop and told the story. It's one of my favorites despite only being a tale of moderate success. Maybe that's why.
Or maybe it's because I spent the morning talking with someone dear to me—hunting, as it always does, providing the setting for the connection. It was the opportunity to tell stories to each other as we created a new one, to joke and laugh with each other, to talk sincerely about how we’d take the world apart and put it back together.
Eventually, all the last-times-we-were-here will lead into a final time we were anywhere, and hunting will always give us a chance to talk about it.
