REMEMBERING NOVEMBER

Lovell in October

There’s a familiar feeling I get in the fall when the air is cool and the wind is blowing. Fond memories are triggered from over forty-three years ago when I moved my young family to rural Lovell, Maine from Massachusetts. We got to our new old house in August, 1977 and by early October we were settled in. I had a few weeks in my new job behind me and took my shotgun into the woods after school to hunt partridge.

Western Maine in October

It was only a short walk to the overgrown farmland down the street that was promising habitat, but I only had about ninety minutes before the sun set and I would have to walk home for supper. No one freaked out to see a young man carry a shotgun down the road. In the Massachusetts I had left, some might have called police but that wouldn’t happen in Lovell. My formerly-rural town twenty-five miles outside of Boston had turned into a suburb while I was growing up. It changed and I didn’t belong there anymore. Rural Maine became my home and I’ve been here ever since.

My house in Tewksbury now

As a boy in then-rural Tewksbury, Massachusetts, I would accompany pheasant hunters in the woods near my house. I don’t remember their names; I met them while in the woods with my homemade slingshot and pockets full of smooth stones of appropriate size and shape. I was a hunter too. They knew that when noticing my armament and demeanor. Memories of one guy are still vivid. I saw him before he realized I was there. I was waiting to get a shot at a squirrel when I heard him in the dry leaves.

He asked me where I’d seen pheasants and I directed him to an area along a stone wall. I walked along behind him looking to right for squirrels and was startled by a shotgun blast I wasn’t expecting, but turned my head around to the left quickly enough to see an explosion of feathers. The shotgun fascinated me and I would have loved to have one of my own. My father wasn’t a gun owner and my mother, despite my begging, would not let me have a BB gun; hence my slingshot. Over and over, I practiced enough so I could hit what I was aiming at. After that, no squirrel was safe.

Lovell in November

November in Lovell, Maine was wonderful. By the time I got home from school — I was a teacher — there was very little time for deer hunting after Daylight Savings Time kicked in. I had to be out of the woods when the sun went down, but Saturdays and Veteran’s Day I was out there sunrise to sunset. Sundays, the family and I worked on the woodpile. When my brothers moved to Maine a few years later, we hunted together and that was nice. After a while though, I preferred going out by myself. 

I liked the solitude. Seldom did I see a deer but I explored a lot of territory. Leaves were down and, while walking for miles up and down hills, I could see a long way. After supper I would re-study USGS maps of the area and commit them to memory. Though I saw no houses or people where I went, I did see cellar holes. Those wooded hills had once been cleared of trees and covered by farms. Stone walls snaked up and down the hills. Crops grew and animals grazed. The walls were still there. Strands of rusty barbed wire seemed to grow out from the middle of tree trunks like dead branches, but the hills were all wooded again. Farm families who lived and died there were long gone.

Eventually, though, I stopped hunting. Maybe it was because my daughters refused to eat venison. They could always taste it, even in meatballs spiced and cooked in spaghetti sauce. Maybe it was because my testosterone declined with age. I don’t know, but I just lost interest. I still like to shoot in the woods, but now it’s with a camera. I still shoot squirrels which can cause a lot of damage to my property and the other properties I look after. In a way, I’ve come full circle. I can still hit things with a slingshot, but it’s a store-bought one now. I use it to dissuade Canada geese from coming ashore on the lakefront property I manage — and I prefer a .22 for squirrels.

The Buck

Never did I see a whitetail buck act that way. Not that I ever saw too many of them over the years — I didn’t, especially not in the woods. Driving up Hatch’s Hill Road as I do several times a week, I got a half-second glimpse of a six-point buck out my passenger-side window. Rather than slow down, I went to the top of the hill and turned around in a driveway to go back and see if he was still there. “This is dumb,” I said to myself while executing the turn. “He’ll be long gone by the time I get back,” but there he was, looking right at me from behind a tree.

He’d climbed a steep bank and hopped a stone wall, but he stuck his velvet-antlered head up and looked at me without a trace of alarm. Still seated in my truck, I took out my camera, unlocked the lens, and took a few shots as he casually turned around and walked deeper into an overgrown field and out of my sight. I pulled to the side of the road and set my brake, got out, and climbed the steep bank after him to try for more pictures. Sure enough, there he was again standing broadside to me and munching on some shoots. I took several more shots.

All the while, I’m thinking: “This is not a game farm. I’m twenty feet away from a healthy, whitetail buck in the wild and he’s not a bit afraid of me.” At that point, he assumed an undignified posture and began urinating while I continued snapping pictures.

When he was finished, he just sauntered away, casually biting off more shoots as he went along, occasionally looking back over his shoulder at me. I continued snapping pictures.

Never once did he raise his tail in alarm to show the white underneath. That’s the part we humans usually see as those aptly named whitetail deer jump away from us. That was usually all I saw when I hunted them; by the time I got my gun up, they were gone. Whitetails were generally safe when I was in the woods but I was always excited to get out there again every year as November approached — until about twenty years ago, that is.

I’m not sure what changed, but the urge to hunt left me. My brother(s) would call and I’d tell them I wasn’t going out. “What?” they’d exclaim. “What’s happening to you?” Maybe it was remembering all the energy I expended hiking up and down hills all day and not even seeing a flag — that’s what we called the white tails we’d see on deer bounding away through the woods away from us. Maybe it was because I’d think of how much wood I could have split and stacked in the woodshed before snow fell instead of spending the entire day in futile pursuit of the elusive whitetail. Maybe it was because my testosterone levels were diminishing and my inner caveman was subduing itself commensurately.

Even after I’d become more prosperous and could afford to burn oil instead of wood, the hunting urge didn’t return. Something basic had changed in me and I haven’t gone deer hunting since. I still shoot squirrels with my .22 and chipmunks with my pellet gun because they’re both troublesome rodents who damage property. I still shoot porcupines and groundhogs. I still trap mice and flying squirrels because they all invade the properties I manage and my own as well. But I don’t hunt deer anymore, and I think the buck I photographed sensed that. He knew somehow that I meant him no harm.

Squirrels, however, know I want to kill them. When I step out of my truck with a rifle they run. They don’t just climb a tree either. They run along the ground into deep woods where they’re safe — and they don’t stop long enough along the way for me to get a bead on them. This year, there are more squirrels than I ever remember and it’s harder to keep the population under control.

Shooting them guarantees they won't return

For that matter, there have been more cones on the white pines — and more needles fell from them this year as well. More seeds fell from ash trees too. Never have I seen so many. Many things go in cycles and I guess I’m no different; I’ve rotated out of my hunter phase. I eat more vegetables because my wife insists, as long as there is a serving of meat with them. I don’t have to kill it though. I’m content to buy it at Shaws or Hannaford. If I couldn’t do that, I’d be sufficiently motivated to resume the hunt.