December 11, 1993
The acorns, which fell early this year, predicted a cold winter, as did the hornet nests, built very close to the ground. Misty treetops hidden in the fog. Meadowlarks work the fields, confusing the dogs. On overcast days the sky falls all the way to earth. Autumn’s bearing is one of lingering death.
Two weeks ago a storm blew across the pond and stripped a sweet-gum tree of a year’s worth of living by hurling its leaves into the water. Golden reflections raced over the choppy gray surface and disappeared like shoals of shiners into the bulrushes.
High-flying cirrus clouds curl over the state with regularity, and the insects that are not otherwise transfixed by the cold hibernate under a scale of time. Freezes deepen the silences of night. Early in the morning when dew beads the spiderwebs and fog washes the shadows away, the kudzu vines hang lifeless from the trees like the rigging of becalmed sailing ships. The quail, even the squealers, are full-grown and have chosen their retinue. I run the dogs for a week without carrying a gun. We work the heart out of the mornings and, hiding behind trees, under leaves, and high in the sky, the eyes of nature track our progress. The sky never reneges on its deadly promises to quail.
The discoloration of fall and the comportment of the dogs, casting with rural determination ahead of me, reestablishes the conviction that simplicity wears well. I celebrate that simplicity every time I hunt.
The dogs investigate beneath the wax myrtle bushes, the briars, the boundaries of fallow fields, and the edges of wet-weather ponds, where they startle an occasional snipe. They mouse in the grass like puppies because this is the first week of the season and I’m not carrying a gun. Sorting out game-bird smells from the distractions of an undergrowth as yet untamed by frost is not easy and at best requires a limbering of the muscles, a sharpening of the senses, and the remembrances of years past.
The coveys we flush stretch their wings on a free ride to safety, profiting for having survived the encounter. Compared to walking down a city street, the vegetable hindrances, the vines, and the amateurish dog work is good stuff. In my strange and unyielding domain I fall, as I do every autumn, for nature’s seductive solicitations.
A family of coyotes howls at the moon. My wife runs outside and gathers her baby white cat in her arms, scared for its life. Two years ago, a similar commotion turned out to be a wild bobcat pacing the length of the swimming pool into which it had convinced my wife’s old cat to swim or be eaten. The bobcat ran into the night while I dragged the old cat out by its tail, sleek and hissing. That afternoon I took it to the vet’s, where it was put to sleep; the cancer growing in its colon, I was told, had spread and nothing more could be done without adding insult to its pain. I buried the cat next to the pond but, reflecting on the irony of the bobcat’s timing, I dug the grave too shallow. A week later a hole in the earth was all that was left of the cardboard box that had served as a coffin. I convinced myself that the wildcat had found the burial site and enjoyed its meal after all.
A rain shower later, I found a perfect spearhead inches from the empty grave. The white flint stone was two and a half inches long, two inches wide, and shaped like a sagittate oak leaf. The hunter who had carved it four hundred or so years before had used a deer antler to shave and shape each facet before lashing it to a hickory shaft. The tip on this specimen was intact, which led me to guess that the spear either found the soft tissues of a mammal that got away or rode the wind and landed on a blanket of grass. In either case the flint stone remained hidden, and, like a seed, lay dormant for centuries waiting to be disturbed by the rain and me. I have found dozens of Indian artifacts since I moved to the farm, mostly from the Lower Creek tribes that lived in the area, but also from Appalachees and the nomadic Cherokees. There are half a dozen springs on the farm, and that’s where I go looking for the past after it rains. Finding an unbroken arrowhead is akin to finding a perfect seashell after a storm; to muse about the man or woman who carved it adds weight to its beauty.