The Last Hunt

The Last Hunt

Bow season opened in Georgia on September 12. A few years back I had a total shoulder replacement, which meant giving up my beloved Mathews Solocam for a Wicked Ridge RDX crossbow. I like to tell people it was an upgrade. It wasn’t. It was just another concession to old age, one in a long line of them. Old age does not negotiate.

I have been hunting all my life. In the category of “If you could do something in your life again, what would it be?” It wouldn’t be graduating from the University of Georgia or even the birth of my children. It would be tagging along behind Pa, my grandfather, with my little .22, while he hunted squirrels. Pa kept hound dogs penned up at the farm, and they were not pets. I never once saw one in the house, not so much as a paw across the threshold. They existed for only for only one reason – hunting. Pa loved to hunt squirrels, raccoons, possums, but rabbits above everything else. The rabbit hunts were festive family affairs, with relatives showing up from all over the county. Now the grandchildren of those relatives have since grown far too sophisticated to hunt, a fact that saddens me. 

In those days it was all small game. There were no turkeys in Georgia — except the two-legged kind, and Pa had strong opinions about them too. if you ever saw a deer you would talk about it for a week.

When World War II came, nearly all of Mother’s relatives packed up for the auto companies in Detroit, selling off their land as they went. They tried to get Pa to join them. And so he did for a trial run. He went up to the big city, where he could make more money in two months than he’d make farming all year. However, within two months, Mother said, he was back in Gray. The reason? He couldn’t find a place to hunt rabbits! Detroit had a lot to offer a black man in 1943. Rabbits were not among them.

In 1971, for dietary reasons, I gave up eating meat entirely, determined to lose weight. I finished my dissertation while at the University of Konstanz am Bodensee, in Germany. By the time I joined the faculty at the University of Florida, I weighed 235 pounds. I quit eating all meat took up running and the weight came off. By the time I got to the University of Tennessee in 1987, I was down to 165 pounds and feeling fairly pleased with myself. That was also when a friend I’d been fishing with talked me into a deer hunt, and that rekindled something I didn’t know had left me. I agreed to go, out of love for the outdoors. I vowed that if I killed anything, then I would eat it despite not having eaten any red meat since 1971. Although I did not see anything that first hunt, I was hooked – so to speak. The peacefulness was intoxicating. My mind was clear and more than once I found myself academic problems that I had been wrestling with for weeks – without an conscious effort.

From that day forward, venison has been the only red meat I eat, although I’ve since developed a fondness for pork steak from the hogs I’ve killed as well. I rediscovered the farm around the same time, when my mother started asking me to drive her there once a month. I love her home house. It is full of memories of Mary (my grandmother insisted we call her that) cooking and my having to churn the butter and the ice cream. She used to put her arms around me and say “this is my boy.” Indeed, my brother Charles Eldred was named after Dad’s family – Dad’s father was Charlie and Dad was Eldred. And I was named after Mother’s: Harriet was my mother and Alonza Barfield her dad. I am Harold Alonza. When Mary suddenly died from a massive stroke when I was six, the mortuary brought her home to lie in the parlor until burial. I made them put me a cot next to her. I only left her side to go to the bathroom. I still remember the coolness of her forehead.

I told Mom that if I was going to keep coming to the farm then I was going to renovate the home with air conditioning, a new kitchen and bath. She said “No you don’t. We are leaving this house like Pa left it. Build your own.” So I did. I also put up tree stands strategically located around the farm and although I hunted Tennessee and all around the world, I always came back to the farm. Back to home, nothing was more satisfying that being on my ancestor’s land watching its animals move through ground that has always belonged to my family and, in some truer sense, to them as well.

I bought a tractor and put in food plots. Every one failed, spectacularly and without exception. I genuinely cannot explain how my grandfather grew such beautiful crops walking behind a mule with a single-blade plow, while I, with diesel horsepower and a soil test, could manage to grow only weeds. It must be my brown thumb.

Still, I have lovingly tended those 126 acres for decades, and I know that Pa would be proud of me for it. I only kill sparingly and I hold myself to standards that occasionally cost me a season’s worth of meat. I never break up a family unit, and no buck under six points. This has meant some lean years. Last year I took only one doe in bow season, which meant Lili — my last remaining German shorthaired pointer — and I went most of the year without any red meat between us. I tried giving her lean ground chuck but she refused to eat it.

Now I am 81 and physically challenged by my arthritic knees. I no longer can walk to most of my tree stands. Even if I could, ladders have become a challenge and forcing me to only hunt out of two accessible ground blinds. That restricts my range of vision making the days of harvesting four deer (even though Georgia allows 10 does and two bucks) long past. It is now a challenge just to walk to those two blinds even though I now use a cane. Also last year it was also a challenge after I shot the deer and field processed it, to load it into the bed of my truck after dragging it with the ATV back to the house. I sat on the tailgate afterward longer than I needed to, not because I was tired, though I was, but because it felt like something worth celebrating.

So it goes, one day at a time. One hunt at a time. Pretty soon I will have only the memories. I guess I could always put out corn behind my house – Georgia now allows you to bait for deer – and sit on the back porch and shoot them. But that violates a family code. Pa gave sanctuary to any animal that wandered into the “yard” – including rabbits. That’s actually a little more than an acre of mowed grass. I do the same saying “In the yard they are safe but if they go behind the barn, then they are mine.” In Pa’s memory I won’t resort to violating the sanctuary of the yard. Some things I just won’t do, even when my knees would thank me for it.

When will it all end — my hunting days? I don’t know. But I feel it coming, the way an old person feels weather changing before it arrives. And I have a feeling it will be soon. Here is the home house.