If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? Read online

  In a feeble attempt to stave off the cold, I’ve shoved hand warmers inside my gloves and toe warmers into my boots. I’ve been trying to ignore the shivers by reading the plastic wrappers they come in. These marvels of modern technology consist of stuff that has been around since the wheel: iron, water, activated carbon, and salt. In French, the other language on the wrapper, this is translated as fer, eau, carbone active, et sel.

  Nevertheless, the package contains more warnings than a new chain saw. The warmers are not to be applied directly to bare skin, desensitized skin, on the instep (cou-de-pied), ankle (la cheville), or arch (l’arche du pied). Do not use them when sleeping. Children, the elderly, and some disabled people should be supervised when using the product. Don’t put them on frostbite. Don’t puncture them. If you do, resist the temptation to place the contents in your eyes or mouth. Don’t swallow them. If you do, consult a physician. Fast.

  In direct violation of the safety instructions I have ducttaped a fifth and larger warmer directly against my skull beneath two hats. I have been doing this for years, no doubt slowly cooking my brain. This explains why I’m (a) bowhunting in late January and (b) holding out for a decent buck.

  The strange fact is that I like the late season, cold and all. I like it because the smart hunters—those smug guys diligent enough to scout the preseason and disciplined enough to avoid overhunting prime stands—have tagged out. That leaves the woods to guys like me: the obsessed, the unhinged, the ones who don’t know when to quit. There is a strange satisfaction in this kind of hunting. If you get a deer, the victory is that much sweeter. If not, it damn sure wasn’t for lack of trying.

  At 5:22, I spot a doe 100 yards out as she picks her way toward the field. As long as she’s moving, I can see her. The moment she stops, she disappears into the landscape. Despite years of seeing it, the trick still fascinates. At 5:34, I register a little 4-pointer in the distance. His unusually white antlers almost glow in the fading light. I don’t want to shoot him; I want to warn him. I want to tell him to muddy those stickers up if he hopes to make it through another year.

  At 5:52, legal light ends, but something keeps me on stand, watching. Then he comes, the big shape ghosting in from upwind. It’s too dark to read my watch, let alone count tines, but I know this is the one, know it as surely as if I were seeing him under a spotlight on an empty stage. I know it because my heart is booming and the heart does not lie on late January afternoons when it’s 12 degrees out. The world stops as he passes soundlessly beneath my stand, as he enters the dark field to feed. Suddenly, for the first time all day, I notice that I’m warm all over. And a strange rapture courses through me, every molecule in my hunter’s blood suddenly alive and singing.

  II

  LYING, HALLUCINATING, AND COVETING GEAR YOU DON’T NEED: BECOMING A REAL OUTDOORSMAN

  Too Long at the Funhouse

  Beware the corn dog. It is a fickle friend, one that can turn on you without warning. The first one at the sportsman’s expo had gone down so well that I opted for a second. An hour later, watching from the bleachers as a bass pro flipped a jig to a dozen bored-looking largemouths in a tank the size of a tractor trailer, that second dog turned around and bit me. My brow was damp, despite a room temperature of 55 degrees, which is about as warm as it gets on a February day inside a ramshackle brick cow palace dating from the early 1900s. And the hall seemed to be tilting a little to one side. I knew the signs: I’d stayed too long at the funhouse.

  Realizing that the hall’s only men’s room was probably a quarter mile away and hidden behind one of the exhibits for the raffle items I hadn’t won—the Hummer with the zebra-stripe paint job or the shotgun worth two years of college tuition—I decided to sit tight and see which stopped moving first, the room or my stomach.

  The bass angler sat 12 feet up in a folding chair at one end of the narrow tank. It may well have been an informative talk. Between the acoustics of the place and a guy working the sound board who looked like one of Black Sabbath’s original roadies, what I understood was the following: “Ahm gahm zep issa hegol bass wiffem no belay rat cheer inna ma blibe well. Heh heh heh.”

  I sat there until the seminar was over and everyone else had drifted away. I watched the bass suspended in the tank until I realized we were operating at about the same level of consciousness. Then I climbed down from the bleachers with the caution usually reserved for tree-stand descents in the dark and began the long walk out. I passed the fly-fishing expert dropping a Yellow Humpy into a Dixie cup 75 feet away. A mannequin in a Rancho Safari gillie suit suddenly came to life as I walked by, grabbing me in a bear hug and nearly scaring me out of my shoes. Progress through the crowd halted near the platform where the Lumberjills, an all-female logging group, were performing. I never saw the ladies, but I heard chain saws bellowing like dueling Harleys, smelled the freshly cut wood, and saw, every so often, a 3-pound double-bit axe go spinning above the crowd and land with a solid whunk in a target 20 feet away. A burly guy with forearms like hams and a pencil stuck up under his cap rubbed his chin in a worried manner. “Helluva show,” he said to his buddy. “But I ain’t 100 percent sure I’d want my wife to be that handy with an axe, ’specially during the season.”

  Outside, the winter sun had left orange and purple skid marks in the sky. Above them dark mare’s tails danced slowly, caught the last light, and lit up briefly.

  My car was parked by a little strip of scrub woods. As I was unlocking it, I noticed an opening a few feet away. The tracks in the black mud were fresh. I hunched down and entered the woods, the faintest breeze in my face. Ten minutes and 20 yards later, I saw them. A doe and her two offspring ghosted across another trail not 30 yards ahead of me. I held my breath and watched their shapes filter through the near-darkness, members of an ancient race who knew nothing of sportsman’s shows and everything about the earth’s secrets.

  Back at the car, I breathed in some more of the cold winter air. My head was clear. My heart had begun to beat normally again. Two hours later I pulled into the driveway. “How was the show?” my wife asked. “Oh, you know, awful,” I said. “But the parking lot was great.” She didn’t respond at first. But a few minutes later, she said, “You look tired. You oughta go to bed.” I did and was asleep in moments, following as deer moved through woods in the darkness.

  Rut Strategies for the Married Hunter

  I think I have finally isolated the most important difference between whitetail bucks and the guys who hunt them. According to deer biologists, the mature whitetail is an essentially social animal (it communicates with other deer year-round by leaving scent) that prefers to spend the great majority of its time alone. The mature whitetail hunter, on the other hand, is most comfortable alone in the deer woods, but is compelled to spend most of his time in society.

  If you think about it, we and the deer are really sort of mirror images of each other, and this phenomenon extends to the rut. In the whitetail’s world, it is the female who dictates when the rut starts. In the domain of the deer hunter, on the other hand, the female is often the one to decide when the rut hunt ends. This year, for example, my hunting ended on November 14 at 11:32 A.M. when my wife—in a nonverbal but unmistakable manner—declared it over.

  Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t go back to being single on a bet. The benefits to the human male of marriage are well known. If forced to choose between my marriage and deer hunting, I would pause only long enough to gnash my teeth, wipe the tears from my eyes, and give fond good-bye pats to a Winchester .270, a Knight .50 muzzleloader, and a Mathews compound bow. Thing is, I don’t want to have to choose. I would be very happy with both.

  But the married deer hunter must adapt, adjust, and improvise to hunt the rut effectively. Farewell, endless summer evenings glassing likely areas to see if there are any good bucks there. Adieu, early-fall days afield pinpointing food sources, doe bedding areas, and the funnels that connect them. And remember when you could hang 11 stands to account for differing wind di
rections? Those days have gone bye-bye.

  Why? Because the most important element of rut-hunting preparation for the married hunter is building up a reservoir of goodwill against the toll of the coming season. October finds this woodsman taking his spouse out to dinner more often than he can afford, volunteering for double baby duty on weekends, and even attempting to cook dinner.

  In recent years, I have made the ultimate sacrifice to fill the reservoir: forgoing Monday Night Football so that Jane and I can watch another riveting episode of Ally McBeal together. (Unfortunately, three of my single hunting buddies have found this out and now take particular delight in placing a conference call to me on Tuesday morning. “Man, Raiders killed the Broncos last night, 38–28,” they’ll say. “Great game. But, listen, the real reason we called is to ask if you think Ally and that cute guy in accounting are gonna get something going or what?” Then they all laugh so hard they start to weep.)

  Jane does not pretend to understand why I have to be in the woods in November, but she tries to be patient. Even her patience has an end, however, and this year the end came on November 14. That morning I had glassed a wide 8-pointer chasing a doe into a thicket and had come home just long enough to shower and put on fresh camo before returning to the woods.

  In retrospect, it occurs to me that I may not have actually spoken to my wife for four days, which could have been the precipitating factor. While I was lathering up with scent-killing soap, a familiar woman’s hand appeared wordlessly inside the shower curtain. In the palm of that hand sat a baby, who was grinning up at me as water darkened her pink terry-cloth onesie. I took my daughter, whose diaper was heavy and odorous. I heard the door to the bathroom click shut. I looked at my watch. It said 11:32. At that moment, the rut had just ended.

  There’s always next year.

  Death (Nearly) by Bass Fishing

  In a moment of acute midlife irresponsibility a few months back, I decided to roll the dice, plunking down four grand I didn’t actually have to chase giant peacock bass in Brazil. Peacocks, native to the Amazon Basin, have a lifelong case of road rage and gleefully destroy anything that gets in their way, big topwater lures included. They are bass in the same way that Komodo dragons are lizards. More than one Yankee angler has gone home minus a thumb after trying to lip a fish with razors in its mouth.

  My plan was to go to a fishing camp on the Rio Negro, about 1,000 miles upstream of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon. This is where the current world-record speckled peacock (largest of the nine known species), a 27-pounder, came from.

  All was going well until just before my last connection, when I was poleaxed by a combination of nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, fever, chills, and vomiting. Also, I didn’t feel very well. I must have hailed a taxi before passing out, because I woke sweaty and feverish in a bed at the Hilton in Belém.

  Flexibility is the key to successful foreign travel. I immediately decided against fishing in favor of a more important mission: attaining the minibar at the foot of the bed before I died. Everything that was crucial to my survival was inside that magic box, including potable water to combat the dehydration that had made me delirious and transformed my tongue into a twice-baked potato; little boxes of fruit juice to replace the calories that had been rocketing out of my body; and Chivas Regal miniatures to muffle the auto-body shop that had taken up residence behind my forehead.

  In a single, athletic move, I lurched forward and fell face first into the shag carpet at the foot of the bed. It was soft and, I assume, synthetic, since it seemed to wick the sweat away from my skin. At eye level, the tangled fibers turned into an aerial view of the rain forest. In the ensuing fever dream, I found myself floating, looking down into dense jungles that had never seen an axe. Green and yellow birds did a stately, hopping dance by bright rivers. Monkeys solemnly inspected fruit in the tops of trees. Jaguars traced ancient paths known only to their race. Somewhere in the wispy clouds, Sting was plucking a guitar and singing sorrowfully in Portuguese. It was then that I understood that the rain forest was truly the lungs of the world. Or at least of this particular shag carpet.

  The hotel doctor who saw me was a very wise man with a long face. He listened to my chest, told me I was indeed sick, and left a $100 charge on my room bill. Two days later, recovered enough to fly home, I sat for an hour in the stifling heat of Belém by the docks of the river, watching three little boys fishing in the muddy water. Their technique was to cram a crust of bread into a wine bottle, tie it to some heavy mono, and cast out. Five minutes later, they would dive into the river and follow the lines down to their bottles, trapping the minnows inside with the palm of a hand. They pantomimed to me that they would eat the fish, bones and all, in soups their mothers would make that evening.

  So that was my South American adventure: four grand and 6,000 miles to sit on a bench and watch kids catch minnows. On the other hand, I’d cheated death, reached the minibar under extreme conditions, and learned a new way to fish. And I’d been reminded of a lesson I seem destined to relearn every few years: When you roll the dice on a dream trip, make sure you’ve got a bottle of Kaopectate within easy reach.

  Stir Crazy

  The instant the babysitter shows up, all you’re going to see of me is taillights. I’ve got an accomplice, Jim, idling at the nearest ramp in a bass boat with a new sonar unit. I’ve got six rods ready and stashed in my car, along with some heavy bass ordnance from the new Cabela’s catalog: Recoil Grubs made of a miracle plastic that stretches to 15 times its original size so that a 4-inch bait doubles as a cargo tie-down in emergencies. Yamamoto Senkos, those pricey little jerkbaits packed with so much salt that you’re tempted to snack on them yourself when the fishing’s slow. The Yo-Zuri Hardcore Shad with the tungsten weight that slides to the tail of the lure for long casts and then falls into the belly, where it is secured by a tiny trapdoor during the retrieve.

  This stuff is burning a hole in my tackle bag. I have not been fishing for an entire week, ever since my wife went to Chicago on a business trip. But today the dry spell ends. Faith, the high school girl up the street, has agreed to babysit. Sensing my desperation, she has also jacked her rate up to six bucks an hour. Fine. If I ignore the speed limit, I can be waterborne in 16 minutes. But the green flag doesn’t drop until Faith shows.

  Meanwhile, Emma and I are watching The Lion King on video for the 6,000th time. At 3, Emma lives in a blissfully simple world. The first thing she wants upon waking is a bottle of milk. The second is The Lion King. Right now, we’re at Emma’s absolute favorite part. Timon, the fast-talking meerkat, and Pumbaa, his dim-witted but lovable sidekick (a warthog with a flatulence problem), have just encountered Simba, the runaway lion cub who wrongly believes he is responsible for his father’s death. Meerkat and warthog welcome lion into their carefree outcast existence with the insanely catchy song that (after much repetition) winds up:

  It’s our problem-free phi-los-o-phy.

  Hakuna Matata!

  Emma squeals, “Kuna Tata!” and I check my watch. Faith is now 11 minutes overdue. I look around the room for something to place between my jaws in case I start to scream involuntarily.

  Things were not always thus. There was a time just a few years ago when I fished whenever I wanted. I generally chose those times by the positions of the moon and sun, and by relative barometric pressure. I liked dawn or dusk, a low (or at least falling) barometer, and the moon either directly underfoot or overhead. As much as possible, I avoided weekends, which is when people who work for a living fish. I was, to put it bluntly, an unbearably smug bass fisherman. Fatherhood has taken me down a few pegs. These days, I take my fishing whenever I can get it, and I take it humbly.

  The phone rings. It’s Faith. She says she has a sore throat and can’t make it. End of story. I call Jim on his cell.

  “I got nuked,” I tell him. “Babysitter’s sick.”

  In the background I hear the sounds of truck doors slamming, the eager voices of anglers loading up their gear, t
he bittersweet Doppler whine of a boat engine as it heads off into the distance toward fish. Meanwhile, Emma is rewinding the tape so she can watch her favorite scene again.

  “I feel your pain, bud,” Jim says, and I know it’s not just a Bill Clinton imitation. He’s a father, too. His daughter is now 16. He once again fishes at will.

  “Next time,” he tells me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Hakuna Matata.”

  He laughs. “Oh, man. The Lion King. That sure takes me back. You know what? I actually got to where I liked that movie.”

  I quietly hang up the phone without saying another word. Jim and I are no longer friends.

  Code Orange Fishing

  The fish strained left, ran right, jumped, and tried to shake the hook, then darted under the canoe to sulk. It made a last furious run, trying to tunnel its way back to the bottom. Then it was over, and I was proudly hoisting my prize for a quick photograph. Greg, looking through the camera, shook his head and frowned.

  “This isn’t working for me,” he said. “We’ve got you, a bass, and a couple of guards with M-16s in the background. It looks like you’re fishing in a catch-and-release-or-we-shoot zone. Try turning the other way.”

  I turned, held the bass up, and smiled at the camera again.

  “Unh-unh. Those surveillance cameras look like they’re growing out of your head. Hang on.” He put down the camera, picked up his paddle, and quickly spun the canoe around 180 degrees.