This Hunting Season

As this beautiful Indian summer fades to clear, cold starry nights and hard frost mornings. Gunshots begin exploding in the many acres of woods and state lands that surround my home. Another hunting season has rolled around. Hunting season was always a big thing with the Swan family. A Swan tradition. I have fond memories of my father leaving the house all dressed in his hunting clothes. Red and black plaid wool jacket, pants and cap, shot gun in hand. I would just stand there dumbfounded at this transformation with him going from slick business man suits with the smell of Niagara spray starched shirts all the way down to his shiny black wing tipped shoes to this totally out of Gary Swan character, scratchy Woolrich almost comical mighty hunter. In his rubber hunting boots, he would meet up with his brother's Ken, Dale and Bill and my grandfather and head up to their sacred hunting ground not far from our home on Swan Hill Road...a place they called Buck's Nob. To this day I really wonder if Dad liked hunting. I tend to think not, even though I don't remember him ever complaining about it. When my brother Gary came to hunting age and showed no interest in it, Dad didn't seem upset that the tradition would end there. Though Nancy's husband Malcome was eager for the huntsman ways and Dad eagerly trained him. Our home on Swan Hill Road was a new split level house with the garage perfect for hanging the gutted deer. My job was wrapping the meat in the stiff white freezer wrap paper held together with brown masking tape. It was with great importance to be part of this family ritual and getting to hang out with the men...my Uncles. The mighty hunters. I remember them reminiscing about the old days when the deer were hung in front maple trees (for the town to see no doubt) of the maple trees that shaded my grand parents house they called the Country Side, and how they would have to set up a table outside for the meat wrapping party. It'll be a mystery forever I suppose to know if Dad really had the hunting bug. He did shoot a deer and the deer head hung over every fireplace we ever had with his kid's graduation tassels hanging from the points of the antlers. For some reason I have this picture of Dad sitting under a tree somewhere munching on candy bars, while doe's (girls he used to call them) curiously wandered up, smelling his unloaded shot gun while his brother's were out on a yonder wooded hillside hoping for the big buck to come over the rise. Dad would trudge home early afternoon's, serene from his day in the woods, empty handed but uncaring. I remember standing on the couch and looking out the big window that was over garage. The same window were I saw him get out of the car in a blizzard clutching something that was stashed in his black overcoat which turned out to be kitten's for Nancy and I. But during hunting season he always managed to save us a candy bar...if we could find it in the red and black coat of many pockets.