From the Nov./Dec. 2007 issue of Sporting Classics.
The Good Book says Adam named all the animals a couple of days after Creation. They got run by him like a circus parade. Fishes of the deep, birds of the air, beasts of the field, Adam named them all. But nowhere in all this great stomping, screeching, flopping, flipping, slithering melee did Adam find one single animal that suited him. He must have complained.
Be careful what you ask for. The Lord registered the complaint, caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. When he awoke, Adam was short a rib. But there was a woman lying beside him and he was astounded, as we all are yet. “Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,” he stammered, and a candid discussion of those words would likely not be printed here.
Maybe you think this is just folklore, or maybe you count those innumerable “begats” and conclude that it all actually happened exactly this way four thousand, four hundred and forty-odd years ago. Don’t matter. One way or the other, the truth jumps right off the page and smacks you square between the eyes. If you have a woman and you like to hunt and fish, sooner or later, you gonna have trouble.
Don’t ever call me sexist. I am overly fond of Adam’s Rib, and my enthusiasm has gotten me into no end of trouble. I just want to lay it out straight and true and tell you about what happened when I fell in love and got all hung up on hunting black bear the same year.
This was way up in Minnesota, in that big blank spot between Bemidji, a town you can’t name drunk and Bwabik, a town you can’t name sober. Rundown farm towns, run-down mine towns, rundown sawmill towns, and you’ll know you’re in poor country when you see folks cutting pulpwood for a living.
Over in Leonard, population 48, they celebrated with the annual Hard Times Bash—beer garden, street dance, wild rice and Indian fry-bread. Three million acres of tax forfeiture, lakes and rocks, aspens and spruce, and here and there uneven fields of oats and scrubby corn. Deer, moose, and upwards of ten thousand black bears.
You could not run bear with hounds like they did up in Ontario, where you cruise downwind of the islands and slip the leashes when the dogs test the wind and try to jump out of the boat. But you could shoot them over baits, go figure.
We had a string of bear baits stretched across three counties, along a hundred miles of gravel roads—after you drove a hundred miles to get there. A ton of meat scraps some years, all in five gallon buckets on pack frames, humped down to the edges of muskeg and bog. We chain-sawed logs to cover each bait, logs too heavy for coyote, wolf or wolverine, though the fishers could snake meat out whenever they wanted. Always birch or the palest popple so you could tell one end of the bear from the other when the light dropped off towards Can’t See.
We had it all figured out. There was a quota system and a lottery to feed it. Your chances of being drawn were about fifty-fifty. Two of us got to shoot, the others got to track and drag and skin—and there was enough bear sausage and excitement for everybody. Bears coming up treestands, bears laid up in thickets plotting revenge, bears up trees, bears in the water, bears uphill and down. Bears growling, busting brush and bluff-charging, bears not bluffing at all. There were a dozen kills in seven years and only one bear lay down dead on the spot like you would wish they all would do. We swatted mosquitoes, got all ate up with ticks, followed blood trails with flashlight and pistol, sawed roads to get the carcasses back uphill when we were done.
There was me and Leon and Runty and the Gandershank, a tobacco-chewing malcontent briefly married to Leon’s sister, a nurse who might have come in real handy had our escapades borne predictable results. They did not, a God’s wonder. But there was another fruit dangling from the vine. My woman was heavy with child.
We kept one eye on the calendar and one eye on her belly. Runty was part Indian. “The time is full,” he said.
“How in the hell did that happen?” the Gandershank wanted to know.
“The usual way,” I said. “What else is a man supposed to do at twenty below?” I didn’t say anything about Adam and his missing rib.
“Damn inconvenient,” Leon mumbled.
It was. Baiting began August 15 and between sundown and dusk on September 1st you could hear rifles cracking all through that country, laying up meat for the winter. Three-quarters of the bear were taken in the first two days. The season went on and on, but if you didn’t score before the grouse hunters hit the woods two weeks later, you might as well pull your stand and take Runty’s advice: “Go like wind to liquor store.”
That gal was tougher than pig snout. She went into labor picking string beans and when she had three contractions just getting up the front steps, I knew we were in for the duration. I eased her into her bed and turned on the lights but the lights did not come on. Beavers had dropped another tree onto the lines, I reckoned. Turned out I was right, but that did not matter right then. Way out in the country, no power equals no water. But there was a canning kettle still steaming from the last run of beans. I washed my hands, fired a Coleman, hung it on a nail. It quivered and hissed.
That’s when the pickup came a rattling up the drive, with Leon, Runty and the Gandershank all camoed up and loaded for bear, as they say. Rifles, ropes and come-along hoist, chainsaw, axes, flashlights, pistols, three coolers of ice, one of beer, and maybe a jug hid somewhere in the pile.
I hollered from the porch. ‘I’ll be with you boys soon as I can!”
“Get your britches on,” the Gandershank hollered back. “You gotta be on your stand in two hours!”
“My britches is on!”
I’d like to tell you I was scared, but I wasn’t—at least not at first. I’d pulled my share of calves bare-handed, and once even helped a Percheron mare who had to be hoisted back to her feet with block and tackle, and thank God for that convenient oak limb. But calves come into the world feet first as if they’re diving into it. They are slippery, hairy, brown and white, not dead-and-dug-up blue like my son in the light of that Coleman lantern. That’s when I felt like the Death Angel had a hold of my throat. I barely heard the pickup horn and the Gandershank bellering.
I cleared my son’s mouth with my forefinger and he gave a soft gurgling cry. He second cry was stronger and his third hurt my ears. And then he pinked up quicker than a sunrise sky.
I tied the cord with fishing line, cut it with my skinning knife. Then I wrapped him in a towel and walked outside.
“What you got there?” Leon asked. “You been fishing?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and I caught me a boy.”
Leon whistled. “He’s a cute little skutter. He gonna grow up to hunt bear too?”
“I hope he’s got better sense,” I said.
“You do it yourself?”
“Yep.”
“Damn! That’s something.”
“What else could I do?”
Leon again. “I reckon you ain’t gonna crawl up that stand.”
“Don’t reckon I will.”
“Shennobs,” Runty said, lapsing into Ojibwe, “we will not hunt today.”
The Gandershank appeared distressed, but only briefly.
“OK,” he said, “have a beer.”
I had three and the boy never said a word.
A couple days later, when we finally got around to taking him to town, the nurse wanted us to sign some papers. Name? I gave him mine. Place of birth? Home. Date of Birth?
Missed birthdays or missed bear hunts? For the rest of my life?
No, not the rest of my life. Pen in midair, I paused to consider. I knew right then someday I would give it up. I’d either get too damned old or more likely come to the obvious conclusion that it would be much better to quit right before I got scratched up, instead of right after. This is exactly the way it worked out when I came to be working with the DNR, targeting bear that had been breaking into houses. The 400-pounder that would take a bullet and then take to a tree and drop among us like snarling black lightning. But I did not, could not, know this there in that nurse’s office twenty-five years ago.
I looked at my woman and she looked at me and her eyes said Don’t You Dare.
But I did anyway.
The boy never took to hunting bear, good thing. But he raised hell with the mallards with the shotgun I gave him the day he turned sixteen.
That’d be August 31. +++
Painting: Clearing By Evening by Lanford Monroe