What do you see?

What do you see?

When you walk into my house, or my parent’s house, what do you see when confronted with the dead animal heads?  If you are family and friends, most likely you aren’t shocked, and unless you are a hunter, you probably don’t give them a second glance.  There is of course the potential that you are offended.  How macabre, how barbaric, how antiquated, how blood-hungry you might ask.  Let me tell you what I see.

First, I see a myriad of stories.  Each head holds a memory shared, for not only the person who harvested it, but the entire camp. One of the greatest parts of hunting camp is the comradery, the swapping of tales at the end of the day. Not of only successes, but near misses and the beauty encountered.  For each animal harvested the story was recounted as others filtered into camp that evening, breathing the joy of success throughout each person.  In this way the animal doesn’t belong to just the man who pulled the trigger, but to all who were there to hear the story, who walked those same hills, through those same trees, and bent under the weight of a pack filled with meat. 

While you may see a tame, frozen, inanimate rendering of some creature, I see wildness.  Those lifeless glass eyes hold a million mysteries to me. What experiences did that animal have? Living in the wild every day that we spend a short week in, how many amazing sunrises and sunsets did that animal witness? I don’t merely see a rigid, artistic recreation of the animals head, but rather a vision of the entire animal, surrounded by its natural home. Trees, grass, and mountains the background rather than warm earth-tone paint.  To me this is the greatest reason to hang a head on the wall: it is not to intimate a taming of wildness, but to bring that wildness into the tameness of our households.

 

Lastly I see the trophy.  But it’s not as simplistic as you might believe.  This isn’t some point-counting, scorekeeping, record-book-entry-seeking ideology.   Rather it is respect and celebration of the animals’ uniqueness and greatness.  The number of tines and Boone & Crocket score is not a reverence paid to the hunter, but rather to the animal.  The hunter didn’t survive for years in the wild, escaping other hunters, enduring bitter winters, and eluding natural predators.  The animal is its own trophy, a celebration of its own remarkable life and legacy, not the hunters.

When you next see an animal head mounted (it is worth clarifying they aren’t stuffed—that would be a teddy bear!) try to view it from my perspective.  It is not some gruesome braggadocios claim of the hunter’s prowess, but a tribute to an amazing animal’s life. It is a preservation of that animal’s greatness, its story intertwined with those who chased it, and a life ended not in dismay, but in celebration and respect.  And most importantly, at least to me, it is a conduit to the wild places that animal inhabited, a reminder of their mastery of places we only visit for short times.  Next time you see a head on someone’s wall, ask them the story.  If they are a true hunter, their eyes will light up as they recount the tale. And if you listen closely you will hear something special; it’s not the hunter’s story, but the animals’ story, a story preserved forever in the icon silently adorning the wall.  

Dad's Bull

 I stood in the dark timber, my first elk in more years than I can remember lay dead at my feet. I radio back to camp to let them know to bring the packs my way and check in on how everyone else has done. “Dad got a bull this morning” says my brother.

“Is it a nice one?”

“Yeah” he answers.

“A wall hanger?”

“Definitely.”

Suddenly I forget my own joy and revel in something deeper.  To understand what I was feeling at that moment I need to take you back to the beginning. The very beginning.

If you don’t know my dad, your life is dull and dreary. O.k., maybe it’s not that drastic, but you are missing out on one of the most amazing men who deserve the title “man”.  My father hasn’t cured cancer or thrown a Super Bowl winning touchdown. What he has done is everything he can with what he has.  He doesn’t have a college education, but he has the most amazing work ethic and drive of anyone I have ever met. That isn’t just a fluff statement that everyone says about their dads. My dad has worked 60+ hours nearly every week of his life, and back when he did game season it was probably closer to 80-90 hours a week for 3 months straight. Forget days off. Forget weekends. He worked.  Even now at the age of 60 he is putting in over 60 hours a week. And through this he wasn’t an absentee father. He was there for us anytime we needed him, he was involved, and he cared.  His reward for all this hard work was one week a year. That week was hunting week.  I remember watching every year as the group loaded up the Jeep with the old canvas tent and kerosene stove and headed out in the dark the day before the season. Six days later they would come back, tired and dirty, but always happy. And the stories.  It was like they stepped into an alternate universe detached from the one I lived in, and I couldn’t wait to hear their fantastical stories. I was in love with hunting before I ever went hunting.

And then I went hunting. It was here I learned the most amazing life lesson: who you are in your daily life is who you are in the woods, just more raw, more honest.  My dad’s work ethic didn’t go away at hunting camp, it showed through as the natural part of him it is.  He is the first one up, cooking breakfast. As soon as an elk is down he is the first one to get there to start quartering it, tying it on packs, and shouldering one of the heaviest packs back to camp.  In hunting camp his love for me and others showed through in all these selfless acts. Whenever we hunted together he always let me shoot first when we came across elk. He would come back to camp early, losing those last couple hours of hunting to put dinner in the oven. 

Year after year he hunted hard, made sure everyone else enjoyed hunting camp, and waited. He will be the first to tell you that hunting is not about killing a certain species or shooting a trophy animal.  However, every hunter has that hope, that unspoken goal. For my dad I believe it was a trophy bull elk. The area we used to hunt is certainly not known for producing giant bulls, and so my dad waited 8 years to draw in Unit 61, an area that gives out limited bull tags to increase the size of the bulls in the area. True to his form he hunted hard for 5 days, leaving camp in the dark, hunting all day, and coming back in the dark.  Even truer to form he gave up a couple hours of the last day of his hunt to help my cousin find his missing GPS. And then he was rewarded with a broad-side shot at a giant bull on the opposite ridge. A single shot and the bull dropped, and rolled down the hill and out of sight. They weren’t able to find it that night, and the entire camp went over the next morning, the last morning to help find it. We didn’t. I remember being angry at God. I am not proud of this moment, as I admit it was insanely immature of me. But it just didn’t seem fair. No one “deserves” to kill an elk, much less a trophy elk, but I felt my dad deserved it.  He never once complained. Not once did he mention feeling sorry for himself, mad, frustrated. Instead he started applying again. He waited another 7 years.  This time was different. He never even got a shot, never saw a trophy bull. Again, not a single complaint.  This looked like it was his last good opportunity as waiting another 7-8 years maybe wouldn't be feasible, although I would never doubt his ability.

And so here we are this year, in a new unit that certainly isn’t known for its trophy elk. Saturday my cousin got a bull and my dad was there to help pack it out. Sunday morning my brother shot his first bull (another sweet memory), and my dad was there to pack it out. And then Monday morning, 15 minutes into the hunt, less than a quarter mile from camp, the moment my dad had worked for in 42 years of hard hunting finally paid out.  I wish I could have been there to enjoy the moment in person, to help him pack that elk out too. Instead I was over a mile from camp, earning my own elk. And it was the work ethic he taught me that drove me there. 

So congrats Dad, you deserve it. Not just the elk, but whatever “it” is, you deserve it, you deserve it all.  You have given so much to so many, especially me and Kyle. We can never repay you, but I am unspeakably grateful to get to enjoy moments like this with you.