THE ROAD BACK TO HALFMOON RIDGE
Fifty years ago, when I was in college, a young fellow I knew told me his story. In a sense he told how he would return to is roots. He went to class part time and into the mountains to hunt full time. He was more avid about his avocation than his vocation of school work. He ultimately did make it through college, gaining two degrees along the way. I suspect that he put what he learned in to woods to far better use than which he learned in the classroom.
Education takes a number of paths, and the road to Halfmoon was far more enticing than Biological Chemistry or Keynesian economics. The former consuming a disproportionate amount of time compared with what his father was paying the University to accomplish.
Halfmoon Ridge was about twenty miles from the University and part of a larger and longer Appalachian chain running roughly from southwest to northeast. This particular ridge overlooked an abandoned farm. A farm which must have been totally isolated back when the mules and plows were working the ground.
Now, the fields were grass and sprouted with occasional volunteer cedar trees that bore witness to the poor quality of the unworked ground.
The buildings show the neglect of not too recent use, but provide a protected spot to park the car and get out of the way of the increasingly cooler fall winds. The lower fields contain an abundance of small game in the form of rabbits and a very occasional pheasant. The edges contain more species such as squirrels, grouse, turkey and deer. A myriad of songbirds grace both the lowland and the ridge alike. Most of this game thrives in the mixed hardwoods and scattered pines of the hillside. Acorns or mast provide the wooded critters with a staple meal. Mountain laurel on the mid level of the ridge and wild rose at the lower levels give the animals places to hide and the ridge top serves as a hideaway of last resort.
The white tail deer is the most sought after larger game animal in the area. Our friend was no exception to the fever of this fall sport. Most businesses closed on opening day and schools somehow found a way to have a vacation day as well. While the rest of us were either studying or playing in the fraternities, he would be backed up to some old oak tree waiting for his chance. The bigger the better, although I suspect that the kill was not what his effort was all about.
In the dark of a predawn opening day, just getting to where he felt the deer would go to hide was as treacherous as any of the pledge assignments at the fraternity. Footing on his personal, long traveled, trail up to the ridge was fairly easy during the day. However the walk is a little dicey in the pitch black before first light.
The small stream in the fields around the old house and barns must have provided the original owners with drinking water for themselves and their stock. Now it was now simply something else to step over. The little flow of water in the fall was multiplied in the spring, when melting snow on the ridge mixed with the little springs on the hillside. Further up the stream he, knew that he would have to contend with a small frozen waterfall which made the normally rocky hillside even for difficult to climb.
He was a small, but not a frail fellow. Stood about five foot eight inches and was light of frame. Strong for a person his size, particularly in the legs which carried him up and down these low mountains almost on a daily basis.
He chose to make his stand just below the top of Halfmoon so that his profile would not be too evident against the cold, grey morning of the skyline. He would put his back to an old tree which at the higher elevations still showed evidence of last night's flurries. He had scraped all the snow and leaf litter around the bottom of the tree away so that his feet would make no noise as he moved.
Dawn had still not broken when he took his seat to wait out the deer that he knew were moving around in the fields below. He also knew that the other deer hunters of opening day would be moving around those fields, taking their place in various stands. He was depending upon that competition from below to drive the deer to higher ground.
He told me that you could not believe the sounds of a breaking sun. As soon as the monochromatic blacks and greys begin to change to color, the woodland creatures start to stir. A squirrel can sound like a freight train when no other sound is afoot. They run, jump and scrape or dig through the litter as if it were their own playground. And it is! He was still enough that a chickadee to land on the toe his boot only to realize the mistake before tearing off to some more secluded branch.
As dawn began, a shot rang out in a distant valley and he knew that the game was on. The men who arrived and parked beside his car at the old barn were now making their presence felt and the woods seemed alive.
The bobcat that he had seen the previous spring while Turkey hunting streaked along a dead fall before taking the top of the ridge. Crows were busily screaming at a owl that was late getting back to his roost. And a commotion was forming at the bottom of the little cut in the ridge before him. The deer had been alerted to all the human movement and were headed to their sanctuary on the top of the ridge.
Just under the top of Halfmoon is the place they felt the most secure and where they bed down during the day. That was their last area of hope. Just as he thought. A smile formed on his lined face as a dozen or more does scrambled up the hill. They would spend the rest of the day trading back and forth on the ridge depending upon the human activity that had invaded their space. There was a fat four-point buck in the group. Not a trophy by any means, but fine fare on the supper table. He let them pass. Maybe a larger buck would show.
The deer stopped just below the top of the ridge on a parallel with the hunter and began to settle down. Nervous, but more relaxed as they began to nibble some of the acorns which had fallen. One doe came very close. So close that in fact as she stuck her head around his tree and they were literally face to face. He told me all he could do to keep from laughing at her expression of total surprise was to say, "Good morning my lady!" He was so still that she wheeled immediately for the top of the ridge, but only ran a few yards. She looked back totally perplexed but never left the area.
A bigger buck never made an appearance and after an hour or so and he decided that backstraps for dinner sounded just fine. He killed the four point cleanly with one shot. The last deer he would ever kill.
______________________________________________________________
I can attest to the veracity of this story. The story occurred in Centre County, Pennsylvania on a fictitious Ridge called Halfmoon. The photos were made in Tennessee in the Great Smokies.
No comments:
Post a Comment