The Crying

It was old timber, good, heavy timber, some of the best left in the land. There was enough of a canopy in the tops to keep the sunlight blocked and prevent the undergrowth from taking over, and I’ll tell you that’s something rare in this day and time. The floor was so clean you had shooting lanes anywhere you wanted to look, and it was easy to see any movement in all that open space of dead leaves. I was lucky to be able to hunt on it. I knew it might not last much longer. Not that you can blame people for wanting to sell land and make money, or for getting old and in bad health and unable to pay the taxes on it. You just hate to see it leave, because you know that particular forest will never be back. It takes a hundred years to grow a forest like the one we had. And Weyerhauser and U.S. Plywood and Georgia-Pacific don’t want hardwoods anyway. They want pine trees about twenty years old, for more lumber for more houses for more people to spend their lives paying for. They can grow five of those forests in a hundred years. But when the logging crews come into untouched area like that, with their long-bar saws and dozers and skidders and trucks, it’s an awful thing to see.

We had a five-year lease. All written down on paper and typed up in a lawyer’s office, all duly signed by all involved parties, the money paid. It was safe, at least for a while. We didn’t know what we’d do if Mr. Barlow upped the ante the next time around. We were all getting to the age where we had to start thinking about things besides deer hunting, things like college educations and car insurance for the teenaged boys, additions on our homes. Our sons were growing up, you see. That was the kicker. We hadn’t leased all that land just for ourselves. We’d leased it for our boys, too.

None of them were along that morning, though. Randy had played in a football game a hundred miles away the night before, and Jim said that when he came in a little past midnight, he was beat up and worn out and too bruised to go. They’d lost a heartbreaker, too, 20–21, for their division title. Bobby’s boy, Ted, had a broken leg that was still in the cast, and I hadn’t been able to pull Alvin out of the bed at 4 a.m. So the three of us went by ourselves.

It was one of those mornings when I thought the sun would never rise. The woods were as quiet and cold as I’d ever seen them. Even before it got daylight you could see the thick white rime of frost laying on everything so hard it looked like snow. And within an hour I was in agony. It wouldn’t have mattered if a real trophy buck had walked up; I was shaking too hard to draw a bead on anything. I’m always in a hurry, always forgetting my thermos of coffee or my gloves, or another pair of socks. I’m always in a hurry to get into my stand. Later that day I heard that it had gone down to three degrees.