As Long As I can Remember…
It’s a crisp November morning as we roll up to the uncontrolled railway crossing that hasn’t seen a train for as long as I can remember. It’s been twenty years since I was last here. We park just off the road, only allowing one side of the car to halt in the grass; I can hear my uncle’s advice in my head: “Always keep two wheels on the pavement.”
We put my mom to rest yesterday. The apartment was too small this morning. She had never wanted to move there. Now, without her, we couldn’t just sit, stare at the furniture and the paintings on the wall. There was nothing to say that hadn’t already been said, and the grief was too fresh to talk anyway. We needed some air. So we headed to a long familiar place.
Dad slowly gets out of the passenger seat, as I put his walker near him. Before us lies the railway ditch we hunted so many times before I left.
Long ago, around the time the German armies occupied much of Europe, in a small village in the South of The Netherlands, two neighboring boys grew up together, biding their time in school or church benches, until they could run outside and get into trouble. The town consisted of not much more than a few hundred houses, a couple of churches, some shops, and a police station with a small holding cell, that every so often became a temporary home, usually for just one of the two. You see, one kid’s father was the local constable. The other kid did not suffer from such inhibitions or protections. Whether it was netting pigeons on the church roof, robbing songbirds’ nests, gentle attempts at poaching rabbits, and even one case of blowing up an unfriendly fellow’s mailbox, there was always something that kept the inseparable boys busy.
Despite these early criminal tendencies, the kids grew up just fine. One went into the army, the other one started a business. In their twenties they fell in love with two sisters from a nearby hamlet who agreed to marriage. As they grew older and moved apart and had children, the daily adventures were pushed aside by the worries of life. But they got together most weekends, and their kids started making their own joint memories. The one fellow was my uncle Jan. The other one was my dad.
My uncle hunted, like his father did. My dad never held a hunting license, but he always tagged along. As soon as I was old enough to be trusted not to drown, get lost, or shot, I came too. Only vague memories remain of those days. Big men, big dogs, endless fields of plowed, wet, sticky clay made walking almost impossible for a six- or seven-year-old. A large tableau of hare and pheasants at the end of the day. Hanging up a rabbit on the two nails in the shed, my dad sharpening a ten-cent paring knife on a corner brick, pulling off the skin, the smell of guts. Big impressions for a small kid. I did not drown or get lost, nor to this day resent the smell of the inside of an animal. I did however get shot at, once, finding myself on the wrong side of a departing hare. A story we never told mom.
My uncle leased the hunting rights on a few hundred acres of pasture and crop land from a farmer, whose barn and yard served as our staging area. By late fall, when the first driven hunts started, the cattle had been brought into the barn. Inside it would be warm from dozens of bovine bodies ruminating, and the air would be thick with the sour smell of manure, straw and silaged hay. Hunting dogs would be running around, keeping the barn cats up in the rafters. For lunch we’d warm up a big pot of pea soup to devour with sausage rolls. Laughter would fill our souls, as the same old stories were enjoyed like we had never heard them before, with a few new ones from the morning added in.
Our big hunting day of the year traditionally was held on December 31st, drawing ire of the collective non-hunting spouses. We would come home long after dark, with a tendency to leave muddy gear in inappropriate places before dozing off on the couch, missing out on the end-of-year activities. A typical day would start with a few heated arguments about how the hunt would unfold, which field to hunt first, in which direction, who would be hiding in the ditches and who would be the beaters.
None of it mattered, really, because we did the same thing every year. The old guys would be positioned along easily accessible fence lines, near trees or in ditches, and the younger guns and an assortment of beaters would be sent off to the horizon, single file, to spread out over the width of the field once we’d reached the next ditch. There never was an official signal to start the drive. Someone would just go, and the rest would fall in trying to maintain a straight line.
Many a hare exited stage left, before we tightened up the space between them and the guns at the end. A few flattened themselves into a depression, letting us walk by before sprinting backwards. Every once in a while, one would run to the end and we’d watch a figure rise, or step from behind a tree, see a hare dodge sideways, then roll over, followed by the sound of the shot. In the old days, we’d never shoot at hares from within the line of beaters. But as the volunteer crowd grew of legal hunting age and we acquired licenses and firearms, allowing us to shoot the odd one during the walk-up was the only way for the old guys to keep us willing to walk the hard yards. At the end of the drive, we’d congregate, eager to see and touch whatever game was killed, joke a bit about the missed shots, shame the gun that missed seeing a passing hare altogether, and congratulate the lucky ones.
After the first drive, the assembly would move laterally to a next suitable block of fields and activities repeated, until just before lunch. In later years, my dad would have a car ready, to collect shot game and to ferry the oldest to their next stand. The last drive before the break always included the woodlot my uncle owned. This rectangular piece was bordered on all sides by rough-looking pasture, beyond which on one side a larger treed area started. With some imagination, one could call it a forest. Right through the middle meandered a ridge of higher ground, but otherwise the forest was really a swamp with mature trees. On the east, the property was lined with neglected knot willows, with shoots growing off the ancient base almost as big as a stand-alone tree. About 20 feet beyond, the ground dropped into a swamp covered by towering poplars and made impenetrable by walls of decades-old bramble bush.
Every year we’d have a newbie beater volunteering to go in, despite our warnings, and every year we’d have to stage a rescue mission because they got stuck or lost. The lucky ones still had all their footwear, but few got out without scratched-up face and hands, or torn clothing. Every year we got fewer volunteers.
Once I acquired a bird dog, a gentle German Langhaar bitch and was able to demonstrate a basic level of control, it became my job to walk the middle and have the dog work the swamp. A thankless job, mostly because I never got to see a bird. Judging from the number of shots and the lack of feathers to touch at the end, pheasants provided pretty challenging opportunities. The afternoon would be a repeat of the morning, with more fields to be walked, only now weighed down by a full stomach and weary legs.
The last walk of the day was always the Railway Ditcht. Some of the older folks would retire to the barn early, the temptation of small glasses containing something strong, more potent than the desire to shoot another bird. Two guns would sneak ahead to the end, before we’d ask the dogs for one more push. Pheasants might start running parallel to the tracks as soon as we started, some smart ones would just flush into the ditch on the other side of the tracks, where we couldn’t go. We’d try to maintain a modicum of organization, but with the dogs invisible once they had entered the jungle, pheasants might pop up anywhere. Occasionally, a rooster would take flight and use the length of the ditch to pick up speed. Shots would ring out, and we’d already know the excuses: too sudden, too fast.
A wounded pheasant, or even a dead one, would be hard to find for even the best-trained dog. I used to have a little German Hunting Terrier, whose passion at the end of the day never waned, who was the uncrowned champion in this terrain. Where the big dogs struggled to push through the vegetation, she would duck under and use the maze, just like the pheasants would. Often, at the end of the drive, she and I would stay behind, and quietly work to find the birds the other dogs couldn’t. We were a mighty proud couple joining the post-hunt cheer, quietly adding a brace of roosters to the table. She unfortunately also died too young.
I support my dad, as we roll his walker through the muddy start of the trail.The two-track path between the rails and the ditch gets used just enough to allow a ninety-year old to push his wheeled support. Both sides of the railway are bordered by a thirty-foot-wide stretch of the nastiest tangle of reeds, willows and brambles you can imagine, with an understory of grass tussocks. Nothing but boot-sucking mud in between, with the odd bottomless water hole thrown in to make things interesting.
Slowly we make our way to the midway point, where an ancient pumping station is still helping to keep this country dry. My uncle’s ashes were spread here. His heart gave up in his early seventies. Back before it became illegal, and probably even once it was, he would use this spot to put out corn and beet heads to keep pheasants from wandering off. He continued to feed through the winter when most of the surrounding country had turned into a waste land in pheasants’ eyes: plowed blocks of clay, lying fallow till spring, or a monoculture of grass for cattle.
Our hearts only slightly lighter we head back to the car. We skip the oak-lined cemetery at the end of a cobble-stone road, where we’d shoot wood pigeons. It’s not going to help our mood. I doubt I’ll see this place again. Nobody we know still hunts here, most have passed away years ago. A paved bicycle path, lined with street lanterns, now bisects the lease. The woodlot was sold after my uncle’s death. Between the old farmhouses we can see the outskirts of the ever-expanding town. I’ll hang on to the memories, not willing to accept the changes.
In a few days I’ll fly home. A seven-month-old puppy is waiting, and there are still a few days left in pheasant season.
