Precious Memories
By Dennis Clay Smith
A bite in the April air caused me to snuggle deeper in my camo shirt.
I struggled to sit still as I gazed down through the woods, looking for that fist-sized red head to come bobbing up the hill or peaking around a tree or over a stump. You had to be on guard for those sneaky turkeys. More than once they had surprised me, not bothering to gobble on the way in. They were extra cautious from being called too much before the season opened. I don't know what I was thinking when I picked that shagbark Hickory as my backrest and ambush spot. And even though I raked what I thought were all the rocks and sticks away from the tree, I'd only been sitting for ten minutes before I felt another sharp Ozark rock that seemed to work its way out of the ground and into my hip. After I removed the intruder I yelped a couple times on my Lynch box call.
This was the day I'd been waiting for all year opening morning of the Missouri Spring Turkey season. The weatherman promised that it would be sunny all day, no chance of rain, and after the brief morning chill it would warm up to the low 70's. To my left, two young gray squirrels were chasing each other back and forth on a log. Father down the hill, I spotted a fox squirrel digging in the ground. Suddenly, a Blue Jay landed in a small bush to my right. He cocked his head from side to side, watching me intently and then he squatted and scolded me with a volley of caws before flying away.
I can still remember my dad's voice on the phone: "Denny, I'll meet you up at the farm next Sunday. Better bring your longhandles too, you know how chilly it gets up in Dicken's Valley this time of year. I hope that boss gobbler I missed last year is still around."
That gobbler may have still been around, but my dad wasn't. He passed away the next day. Now I was hunting some woods near his house on the outskirts of Doniphan, Missouri, a couple days after his funeral. My wife, Mary, practically pushed me out the door and made me go hunting. She was back at dad's house by herself, grieving too. They were very close. Mom had died a few years earlier, and when dad found out he had colon cancer, he came and stayed with us in St. Louis where he had his operation.
After he recovered, Mary took some time off from her Home Health Care job and drove the two hundred miles South to spend some time with him and help him cope and adjust to his new colostomy.
He tried to make the best of it, and he joked to Mary that at least he'd never have to drop his drawers again on a cold November morning in the deer-woods.
Sitting under that hickory I cried a little and smiled a little, reminiscing about all the fun we'd had through the years. I'd have given anything if I could have seen him coming over the hill again this morning, with that big smile on his face, carrying his first spring turkey he'd managed to call in and kill by himself. I thought back to a beautiful fall day we loaded up his old rusty truck with our camping gear. We had enough food and supplies and time to camp and hunt for four days. Early that morning while sitting in the truck, waiting for daylight and drinking coffee from the thermos, we plotted our strategy. We planned to hunt a few hours in the morning and then drive down the road a mile or so and pitch our tent at a remote camping spot we'd shared the past spring. We never made it to the camping spot we both killed a turkey that morning, took them to the check station, and drove home without unpacking a thing. I still remember the look on mom's face when we pulled back in the driveway a few hours after we'd left.
Dad was opening the camper shell door when she came out of the house and said, "Did you forget something?
"Nope," my dad replied.
"I thought you were going to hunt for four days."
"We were, but you can only kill one turkey each week."
"Did you get one!" she asked.
Dad smiled as he hefted both turkeys out of the truck and held them up.
I finally got up from my spot under the Hickory. I had to grab a Dogwood bush as I spun around in a half circle, nearly collapsing from a half-asleep leg. I doubled-checked the matted leaves where I'd been sitting. (A nearly new pocketknife had slipped out of my pocket on a deer hunt a few years ago. It took me a half a day to hike back there the next morning and find the tree I'd been sitting under.)
I picked up my knapsack, shouldered my Mossberg, and headed for the truck. When I got there, I looked at my watch. It was only 9am and you could hunt till noon, so I decided to drive over to Cedar Creek holler off Highway O. I fished a bologna sandwich out of my knapsack. Then I poured a cup of coffee out of my dad's new Aladdin steel thermos, he'd never got to use.
He was tight with his money, and it took plenty of prodding and gigging to get him to throw away his old plastic, leaky one, and part with the 20 bucks or so to buy nicer one.
When I turned off O highway onto a county gravel road, I passed an old house place sitting back off the road. The house was falling down now and the yard was grown up in waist high weeds and small saplings.
"Old man Day lived there with another old codger," my dad told me every time we passed it
"When deer season first reopened back in the forty's, he let Doc and me hunt the woods behind his house. Deer were hard to find back then, but there was lots of sign in the woods behind old man Day's place. You could only kill a buck back then, but old man Day told us, 'if you boys would happen to accidentally kill a doe, don't worry about it Just bring it to the house and I'll take care of it.' Dad said he said he felt sorrow for him, because he knew they were hungry and food and money was scarce. He said they camped out in an old army tent that had no floor. He said they nearly froze to death, even though they had a little wood stove in the tent they kept roaring with pine knots. Dad said Doc would keep telling him he better turn that damper down or they were gonna have to carry that stove outside. He said those pine knots got to popping real loud and that stove was bucking around so bad he thought it was gonna turn over.
They came back from the woods the next morning and some wild hogs had got in their tent and rooted out and ate all the groceries they'd had in some cardboard boxes.
About a mile up the road, where it forked and the bigger timber started, I stayed to the right and headed for Cedar Creek holler and Current River.
A couple hundred yards into the woods, I came upon a place Dad and I used to setup a deer camp. Since nature was calling, I pulled off on the old logging road at the edge of a small clearing. I saw the place where we used to pitch the tent, the Post Oak with the low limbs where we had hung a few deer. I walked a little further, looking around in the leaves and tall grass. There they were
A circle of rocks where dad used to build a fire and cook our supper in a cast iron pot. As I stood there, my eyes became blurry again. I bent over and picked up one of the rocks and put it in the truck.
I continued down the road toward the river. A mile or so further the road forked again. I took the left and came to a saddle in the road. I remembered dad telling me to stand there one frosty November morning on opening day of deer season. "That's a real good crossing," he'd said. "And if anybody is running any dogs, one's liable to cross here." I remembered shouldering the Winchester 30-30 he'd bought me that year. I also remember emptying it at deer streaking down through the woods. I never touched a hair on it; I don't recall seeing the sights and I'm sure my thirteen-year-old eyes were two or three inches above the barrel.
The road was getting really rough now. Recent rains had gully-washed it and I down-shifted to first and eased my way down the steep hill, trying to keep from tearing off my oil pan. When I finally made it down to the riverbottom, I wound around a few tight turns and arrived at a remote conservation campground on the river. I shut off the truck, got out and walked over to a fairly new picnic table and sat down and looked out at the river. Over to my right, a rotten pile of boards was stacked up against a gum tree. I wondered if those were from the picnic table that Dad and I had shared many years ago. As I sat there, I thought back to the time Dad and I camped here on a Halloween weekend when I was nine. This was the same place he'd pitched me his car keys and told me to get something out of the car's trunk.
It was my very first gun, a little Remington single shot .22. I killed my first squirrel with it the next morning. Dad had to work most weekends at a factory in the city back then, and this weekend he finally got the weekend off. My cousins were all getting together to go trick-or-treating and I had to decide if I wanted to go with them, or hunting with my dad. I know I made the right decision.
This story is for all the readers of Full Cry, some who are personal friends, some are friends I've only got to meet over the Internet, some are just fellow hunters who share the love of hunting dogs. Whatever the case, we all eventually share the grief of losing loved ones and we all share the joy of reliving Precious Memories.
