When hunting with dad, he always brought his kindling hatchet with us on hare hunts in case we needed a fire to get warm. I’ve been thinking about that this holiday season.
Recently, I was talking with some fiends who were introducing their young children to the “Elf on a Shelf” in order to encourage their kids to behave. As I understand it, the Elf is a plastic toy, and it resides on a shelf or flat surface in the child’s bedroom. From there, it functions as some sort of snitch, notifying Santa if the kid is bad. To perpetuate the ruse, the parents will move the toy every night, after the kid falls asleep, thus giving the impression that the elf had whisked off to the North Pole and returned whilst the youngster slumbered.
“Think the toy will encourage good behavior?”my friend asked. Apparently, his boys had been giving him some trouble.
“Why not go with a real attitude adjustment,” I said.
“Like what?”
Der Belsnickel accosting naughty child as KristKindle and father watch from background.
“Belsnickel,” I said. I could tell by his face he was not familiar. So I explained it to him. Belsnickel is a tradition imported from Germany, and he is a mild form of Krampus. My ancestors in Germany would have Krampus, a horned, demonic looking figure come to the house on the night of December 5th and scare naughty children. Keep in mind, Germany gives us the not so comforting story of Hansel and Gretel as well as Little Red Riding Hood—stories that have the eating of children built into the actual narratives.
Belsnickel is a less intimidating tradition, and Belsnickel is a helper of Santa Claus, but he also comes on the night of December 5th. Belsnickel was just a disheveled, less regal version of Santa, nothing like the horned Krampus. In expectation of Belsnickel, you put your boot on the porch before going to bed and when you wake up on the 6th you can gauge your holiday status. If you were a good kid, you got a piece of candy or small toy. If you were bad, you got kindling or coal. I often received kindling. The intent was to scare a kid straight, having less than three weeks to move from the naughty list to the nice list for the bigger holiday, Christmas. I never really thought of the coincidence that the wood was identical to the kindling in our basement, as we heated our house with firewood. Transitioning from elementary to middle school, firewood became a major consumer of my time. As well as beagles, which dad and I raised and ran all year long. Firewood warms you many times, as they say and dad would fell trees and cut them into round. The rest was often my job. I would put the rounds in the truck, unload the rounds when we got home and split them into pieces. Then I loaded the split wood into a wheel barrel and transported that wood to stack it against the inside of the fence in our yard—creating a perimeter of cords of wood by autumn. In small amounts that wood got hauled to the basement and stacked neatly. Then it would be burned. I handled that wood eight times before it heated the house. Kindling was free slab ends from lumber yards that gave away the pieces trimmed away when they cut the boards to length. It split easy with a hatchet and a big bin of kindling was always present.
Acquiring firewood was the main way that we found new rabbit hunting spots. There might be a bunch of timber killed by gypsy moths or an ice storm. Some logger might give us permission to get tops from a logging job and we would locate a large area of early succession growth that held lots of rabbits. As soon as hunting season opened, we would know lots of places to hunt. Sometimes we found spots for the elusive snowshoe hare on these expeditions to gather wood. Here in Pennsylvania, we are at the Southern limit of the varying hare’s territory. In fact, it is only the northern part of the state where they are found. Back then, we could harvest two per day for the one-week season, which started the day after Christmas. Thirty-six years later, it is now a 1/day limit.
It was the highlight of the year, hunting with dad and listening to the hounds run out so far that we could not hear them anymore, then the baying would eventually be heard again as the hare returned, the voices of the hounds getting louder as they got closer. We always talked about those days afield as hunting ghosts. We lived amidst snowshoe hare, a creature so secretive and removed from populated areas that most people never saw one. Dad and I would drop our hounds on a powdery snow the day after Christmas, the dogs would enter the hemlocks and other swamps while we waited for the chase to circle back. Dog training technology wasn’t as sophisticated then and we had no training or tracking collars. Hare run much bigger circles, more akin to the size of a deer’s circle. Lots of guys never ventured into the big woods seeking hare with their beagles because chasing deer with dogs is illegal, and hare live in places that contain way more deer than hare! Dogs had to be trained. A hare will routinely run out a half mile before circling back and a circle over a mile isn’t uncommon.
Dad always brought his kindling hatchet with us on hare hunts in case we needed a fire to get warm, especially if we had to catch dogs before dark and wound up getting wet, or if we needed a fire to stay the night. Flashlights and even heavy coon hunting lights were carried to avoid that scenario and even though we tried to quit a couple hours before dark, the hare would not always cooperate with our wishes. Backtracking our footprints in the snow with a flashlight to get back to the truck was something that always made dad nervous. There were no cell phones then and even now the phones often don’t get a signal where the hares reside.
At lunchtime, dad got that “hare hunting hatchet” out of his vest and made a fire. Hotdogs or bratwurst were cooked on a stick, and we drank coffee from a thermos. We would kick snow on the fire after eating and return to the process of trying to intercept the hare and get a good opportunity to place it in the game vest. Dad and I shared long conversations about serious things, including his survival of cancer. He had an artificial bladder on the outside of his body, installed after surgery removed tumors (the entire blaster) and chemo knocked residual malignancy back into remission. He talked about wanting to get my sister and I raised before he died. That was what inspired him to fight cancer. He was 45 years old when I was born, and my friends had grandfathers his age. We talked about my future, and how I would be the first in the family to go to college. Every winter we hunted hare, and every winter we talked about the future. In the summer before my senior year of high school, he removed the big wood stove from the basement, replaced it with a small pot belly stove intended to heat the basement only, and installed a high efficiency natural gas furnace. “My wood splitter is moving out next year,” he said, referring to my going to college.
I was thrilled to go away to school, and I really didn’t miss home—except for the beagles and the time I spent afield with dad, conditioning our little pack of hunting dogs. While 6 days of hare hunting was the highlight of the beagle year, there was also the longer cottontail season and, in the summer, we would go to the beagle club in the cool morning air and let dogs chase on the dew drenched ground. We would sit on the tailgate and listen to the music at the beagle club and discuss the big questions in life. He was a quiet man, and I only really remember him revealing private thoughts and personal matters while beagles sung the ambient music that echoed as our “elevator music.”
During my first semester at college, dad’s arthritis got bad and his back was giving him trouble. One surgeon wanted to perform back surgery to rectify that problem, but my father didn’t want to miss that much work. I came home for a few weekend hunts and I also come back to help with the firewood—it didn’t take much to heat the basement and keep it dry. A small fire drove away the humidity, and that was important, because all of his tools were there.
I remember being home that December and dad was in a lot of pain. “You check your boot?” He asked me, his face wincing.
“Huh?”
“Today is the 6th. Belsnickel.”
“Ha!” I laughed, “It has been a lot of years since Belsnickel came here!”
“I am sure that your boot is on the porch,” he grimaced, holding his back.
I brought the boot inside, reached in and felt wood right away, “This is a big piece of kindling!” I said and pulled out his hatchet. It caught me off guard. Dad looked at me, “I ain’t sure what is going on with my health, but my days in the big woods are over. I want you to have it.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything, just keep it with you whenever you enter the hare woods.”
Over that Christmas break, I hunted hare alone. Dad had to work and was exhausted after his shifts.
That April, we learned it wasn’t arthritis aggravating his back.
That June, my sister graduated high school, making her officially “raised” as per dad’s desire to live long enough to see his children become so.
Dad departed this world that August.
Belsnickel is coming—in just a few days. And that hare hunting hatchet is one of my most prized possessions.
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