Pennsylvania Game News - October 2009 - 9

houndsmen in the flickering light, listening and remarking on the progress of the dogs — Shade, Pie, Drift and the others — those renowned vocalists who sang ancient anthems of the magic and mystery of the hunt. Stories would be offered up; the great valley brimming with tales of legendary hounds and foxes, famed trappers, deer and deer hunters. The young hunters sitting in rapt attention at the threshold of their own storied tenure in this vast warren of hollows. The chill air reminds him of one crisp November night at the peak of a meteor shower when the serenades of the hounds rang so sweet and clear it was as if the iconic constellations cast sparkling jewels to earth in appreciation. He could hear yet the peal of the silver German hunting horn and recalled how it carried far up the valley. For a moment he catches himself listening hard at what, for an instant, sounded like a trailing ghost note from the horn or phantom hound, but it was only the wail of the wind through a flute in the rocks. He scoops some snow to clean the cup, then pushes on, the light and heat of those remembered campfires burning off the melancholic fog that had enveloped him of late. THE BUCK TOOK a tortuous route across a steep hillside, wending through reefs of laurel, over ankle-turning rock slides, around and under veils of greenbriars. He is relieved when it leads into the gentler terrain of Sugar Run Hollow. The old sugar maples here are broad and gnarled, and he watches a squirrel tightrope along a grapevine and scramble into a den hole. This had been his father’s favorite place, with its progression of benches and frisky run replete with waterfalls rimmed by mossy rocks. Native brookies fanned in the plunge pools, tiny but ferocious predators disguised in gaudy foil. It was here he caught his first trout, dug his first leek, saw his first wild turkey. Before sitting on a log he kicks away the OCTOBER 2009 snow and leaves beneath his boots. As he unwraps his sandwich the singular aroma of autumn trapped beneath the leaf litter fills his nostrils. It is said that nothing jogs the memory as powerfully as certain smells and he thought that true, recalling in crystalline detail the October morning his father first brought him here to hunt squirrels, sharing coffee from this same thermos. A flood of other autumns drift from the portal in the leaves, stirring other senses. Beagles in full cry pouring from a hedgerow laced with hoarfrost; the contrasting textures of weed chaff, downy gamebird feathers and waxy paper shells in a canvas pocket; dressing out his first deer, its heart as hot and hard as a sun-baked river cobble. And when they returned, the glorious jungle-like humidity in the big farmhouse kitchen suffused with the aromas of fresh baked bread and the traditional hunter’s stew. Memories like timbers that can shore up the rest of a hunter’s years no matter what befalls him; and when only memories remain, it is those same timbers that provide shelter until the very end. A passing raven stirs him from his reverie, its quork, quork, quork, sounding like move, move, move, urging him on.

Pennsylvania Game News - October 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - October 2009