When I remember my best days of hunting, the memories dawn mostly cloudy and gray.
I’m thinking about the gray days and cloudy skies preceding a storm. Every hunter knows that animals sense and instinctively move in advance of a storm. And I think the same urge stirs within me.
Give me an unbroken sky white as a bed sheet; it makes me feel so alive. I like my woods a little misty and my fields wrapped in a frosty October fog. Give me a downpour looming in the forecast. Maybe even a little rain the night before your hunt. That’s the best: listening to the raindrop sticking on the window, falling heavily at first, then ebbing away to a drizzle just before dawn.
I like those chilly autumn days between storms. “Partly cloudy skies with a chance of rain.” I almost quiver when the weatherman says that or warns of a front blowing in from the northwest.
Instead of holing up someplace warm and dry, I want to be outside. I want to be out stalling. A favorite whitetail swamp I hunt is best seen during the hours before it rains, especially up under the white pines, the golden ground where the fallen needles make my footsteps seem lighter, quieter, than a fox. It’s like hunting in that middle zone, a dawn that seems to linger on forever, not quite night and not exactly day.
In the swamp, farther down the hill near the beaver pond where the aspen trees, crooked and white as skeleton bones, bend along the muddy bank, I once came upon a woodcock taking a sip of rainwater pooled inside a curled maple leaf. A wind blew that fall day, a good strong wind, all at once and from everywhere. Leaves swirled and filled the air like ticker-tape in a parade. Those from the aspens, each colored like the sun, mixed with orange leaves from the sugar maples and coppery ones tumbling down from the rusty tops of oaks. And that woodcock, when it finished drinking, fluttered upward, itself looking like a windblown leaf against the autumn sky.
I remember another encounter, the only time I will ever again be so close to a coyote. I was still hunting through a jumble of blowdowns where deer like to sleep during the day. The place was nearly impenetrable. Cedar trees crisscrossed helter-skelter along the creek bottom. I picked my way through, a random course that at times left me looking more for a dry place to step than for deer. From grassy hummock to rock to stump to fallen tree … Overhead, the treetops waved in the breeze with the rhythm of a metronome. What a holy silence, a church-like quiet.
I heard a stick snap, just a little pop, but how the sound resonated in the clarity of that atmosphere, as if ringing across water. Just in front of me a coyote appeared — a ghostly flash materializing from the jackpines to leap onto a fallen cedar where it stopped and fixed me with inquisitive eyes. A grayish dog, flecked with black and yellow, he considered me for a moment until I foolishly tried to draw my bow. In that instant he was gone.
My first taste of real stillness happened just before a storm, when I was sitting along a deer trail, still as an owl. I remember that evening on the mountain and how nothing moved, nothing at all, for what seemed like hours. And then a bird — a nuthatch — lit on a nearby branch. I pressed my back into the rough bark of the tree while the bird cocked his head to ponder me. I saw a little gleam of light in his black, beady eyes and marveled at how weightless he appeared, especially when he hopped down and wrapped his tiny feet around my arrow. He pecked once at the wooden shaft, murmured in confusion, then scooted down closer to the broadhead and pecked again before launching himself away in a dipsy flight. I’ve never felt, though how I’ve longed, for such stillness ever since.
I come closest to feeling it every winter, the season with the most gray of all. You know that day in autumn, a day leading the hoary, edge of winter, when the next storm could bring snow as easily as rain. I try to stop listening to the radioman about this time out of fear he’ll ruin the surprise. Yet my aim is always to be outdoors when the first snowfall comes, to walk through the trees when that magic moment happens and the big flakes fill the air.
Gray days like that put me in a mood to drift through the woods without a sound, to feel a slight as the nuthatch that perched on my arrow, as natural as a raindrop inching down the uneven bark of a tree. For a little while, maybe, I imagine myself as not altogether of this earth. When the forest is rapt with silence, it is easy to disappear for a while, to move with a stillness of body and mind that seems effort less, my spirit adrift among the clouds.
More than any other time, the woods before a storm remind me of poetry. I’m remembering now a line I’d like to share, from Alaskan John Haines: “Out there a flickering pathway leads toa snowy grave where something in me has always wanted to lie.”
Born in Bryson City, North Carolina, Jim Casada has had a long career as a teacher, author, and avid outdoorsman. He grew up in a time and place where families depended on the land and their community to survive. Many of the Smoky Mountain customs and practices that Casada reflects on are gradually disappearing or have vanished from our collective memories. Buy now
