Like I say, the Old Man infected me early with a feeling for the seasons of the year, and he divided the year sharply according to what the seasons had to offer. This, the Old Man said, was the way the Greeks did it. There was a season for planting, a season for harvesting, a season for suspicion and worry, and always a time to love and a time to die. March, the miserable month, had its ides, against which even the great Caesar was warned. June was soft and sweet—a woman’s month—and October was full of promise and present perfection.
But the big month, at least for this boy—and I think for the Old Man—was November, a harsh, rough, tough man’s month, with the threat of winter ahead but a marvelous sense of weathered magic in the woods. The quail now called only when they were scattered from flushed coveys, and you could hear the rutting snort of the buck deer as his neck swelled and see where the velvet had rubbed off—in tatters—his fighting horns.
Everything happened in November. The quail season opened, around Thanksgiving time, and the deer and turkey seasons opened. The days were crisp but still red and golden in North Carolina, and the nights were sparklingly cold and made welcome a roaring blaze. The ducks were flying legally, and sometimes it seemed that there was just too much action for one boy to stand.
Even the fishing had improved. The summer fishing was gone, but the big stuff had come in from the skimpy schools of September and early October, and November was the time for the really big jut-chinned blues and the heavy channel bass. The gray seas were chill and sad to see, but the fish flocked in close in the deep-cut sloughs, which were now almost bayous banked by a barrier reef, and the fish took up housekeeping in the sloughs.
One of the keenest memories I have is of a big shark, run almost aground and stranded on a reef when he sought to cross the barrier reef that lay between him and the feeding blues and trout and Virginia mullet. His dorsal fin wavered out of water as he literally pulled himself over the shallows on his belly.
After my first few bucks I was never much of a deer shooter, but to me November meant the beautiful belling of the hounds in the dim distance, growing and swelling to the full strength of bass and cello, almost in your lap, just before the buck burst out of the gallberries.
The dogs knew November: Jackie, the upcurl-tailed fice that was an expert on squirrels; the deerhounds, Bell and Blue; and the quail dogs, which had hunted themselves lean in early practice and now were deadly in diagnosis and steady as rocks to shot. Six days a week saw me in the woods or on the water, and if it had not been for a certain stuffy attitude about Sunday shooting I would have compromised the Biblical injunction about working on six days and resting on the seventh.
Maybe I’m too much the old man now and too little the boy when I say that modern kids—those I know, anyway—don’t feel as deeply about the wondrous works of God in the forests and fields and waters; that they are completely unconscious of the present unless it involves a TV show or a red-hot car. Am I becoming an old fuddy-duddy—one of those when-I-was-a-boy types?
Perhaps, but I still think that modern kids are cheated of sensation that is not contrived. I occasionally try to talk with some of the spawn of my friends, and get the feeling they are very far away from kinship with adults. It seems to me that as a boy I didn’t have many friends of my own age. My friends were mostly adults, black and white, and they raised me without recourse to hot-rods or rumbles. I can swear that the month of November was rendered delightful by my association with a bunch of hairy characters, who would be ruled off the course as improper associates in this era of the switchblade knife.
My guys fought among themselves when they got drunk on a Saturday night, and some of them manufactured illegal whisky, besides drinking it. But mostly they seemed to possess a tremendous gentleness and understanding for small boys who tagged along with them in the woods or on the boats. I can even recall one compulsive thief who threatened to beat the bejabbers out of me if he ever caught me stealing anything.
These people were as much a part of November as the sleepy possum in the persimmon tree; the cold, clotted lumps of earth in the sere cotton fields; or the delicious, frightening loneliness of the swamp on a deerstand; or the burning cold of a turkey blind on a cold morning as you waited for the big toms to come.
Perhaps I spent more time with the Negroes than with the whites, largely because in my neck of the woods there were more Negroes than whites. I was at home in the abodes of Big Abner and Aunt Florence, and they allowed no stranger to trespass on my quail reserves. I ate with them, and on occasion when caught out too late to get back to the Old Man’s house slept in their tiny clapboard or rough-log houses. I suspect we were pretty well integrated before they made a law of it. At least nobody ever brought up the subject of who was white and who was colored, when we shared the squirrel-head stew or the possum and sweet taters.
The crowning aspect of my November was the big camping trip, when the Old Man and a couple of cronies permitted me—if I had been a good boy about splitting kindling and cleaning fish and gutting ducks and plucking birds—to go along sometimes on a week-long campout, where I would split kindling, clean fish, gut ducks, and pluck birds, with a few additional duties, such as skinning deer and squirrels and fetching water and washing dishes. This was now the perfection of a boy included in an adult world, where men cursed openly, told man-type stories, drank whisky, and appeared to accept the boy as a man, while tactfully forbidding him to cuss, drink whisky, or tell off-color yarns.
The fruition in weather and sport was something unbelievable. October had beckoned, but November delivered. Only a true idiot can appreciate the predawn misery of a duck blind. Even in the South—as far south as Louisiana—it is black and miserable in the morning, with the cold graved into your bones, and the torture of whistling wings of unseen ducks is something more than exquisite. Then comes the faint dove’s breast pink of dawn, and then the rosy red, and then you can see the ducks. You can shoot. And miss. And occasionally hit.
Perhaps jubilance is the word that describes it all. There was the nocturnal stupidity of coon hunting, when the hounds were as apt to raise a skunk as a coon. The tumbles we took seemed fun, and certainly the streams we fell into were part of the obstacle course.
I was one time in a friend’s house in Texas, where the doves were swarming like locusts and the wild turkeys consuming a ton of purloined food a week, just waiting for Thanksgiving. I was prowling around, bird-dogging some dead doves, when a remark the Old Man once made struck sharply home. I had turned up a rattler the size of a log, and just before the lady with me blew its head off with her new gun I remembered the ancient remark.
“In November,” the Old Man said, “even the rattlesnakes don’t like to bite people.”