Sounds from the darkness, strange and wild. The kinds of sounds that ignite fear in the childhood imagination. Back leaned into bark, eyes seeking shape and form from morning mist. Boots in the tall grass, on the muddy ground. The dogs anxious, panting. This is the time we dream about; that time just before light cracks the day, when all things are possible.
All the stories told around the campfire begin this way. We know not what will come, where the dogs’ noses will take them and us. Will warning come first of the approach? Wings, whistles, footsteps on leaves, muffled sounds that drive the remnants of sleep from our foggy heads. All the senses dulled by lives detached from earth, air, wind, and water waking in soft electric flashes, coming back to us slowly here where the trees swap sweet breath with us and ripples on the water at our feet pass back and forth communicating that tactile connection from which some have become so estranged.
Slowly, then suddenly, the light comes shining off the dew hanging from a spider’s web or glistens in the frosty crystals that blanket the world, except where our footsteps have trod, marking our pilgrimage to this place where our souls belong. And there it is, a scent on the wind. The spicy air of the grass, the pine, the turned earth. There is the twitch of muscle in the pointer’s shoulder; the raucous hammer of a turkey’s voice through timber; the scurry in the hedgerow; the thin sound of duck wings folding close on a current of air.
And so, it begins.
We are here for one reason. A calling older than conscious thought. We don’t like to think about what it is we are doing, not really. All things rage against the dying of the light. That’s why we must allow ourselves to feel that twinge when the trigger is pulled. The taking of life is something that comes to us reluctantly, in a glimmer we push from the front of our minds. Thus we do so with care and respect for which there is no other word than sacred. And in that sacredness is where we find we are fulfilling that for which we are meant.
There are those who say we don’t have to do this. But they do not hear the same calling in their bones that we do; that calling from deep within, that we must follow blindly, into the fields, the mountains, the woods, the prairie, and the bottomlands. It serves a purpose in this world, our taking part. We answer the calling in search of meat, of fellowship, of kinship, as stewards, as caretakers, as participants giving thanks for the individual, as we take, in service to the population, the community, and the system that drives the world’s turning.
There’s a gilded moon out there under which wild things roam, awaiting the sunlight that will crack open the day. And we will be there waiting, watching, listening, and taking part. This is hunting. But we must also remember the value in acknowledging that nothing goes gently into that good night and that these experiences are one way in which we rage against the dying of our own light.
And in this, we are human.
About the Author
Lenny Wells is a Professor of Horticulture and Extension Pecan Specialist at the University of Georgia Tifton Campus in Tifton, GA. He writes and farms pecans on a little over 100 acres of family farm.
