Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

A Special Incident

SAM BEVARD A Special Incident From the Maysville Ledger-Independent (May 29-June 5, 2003) JOHN HAD BROKEN into a light sweat before he reached the ridge. Summer had strong influence in mid-September, but a front had brought mild weather, presaging fall, so he wore a long-sleeved camouflage shirt to abate the early morning chill. Day was sifting through the trees along the hilltop. He watched the recurring struggle between darkness and light, as he had done at the start and end of so many days. Its luminescence was beginning to reach the earth in the deep woods around him. Cardinals had already saluted the new day, and it would be only moments until crows added their shrill reveille to the chorus of day-sounds. Above him, where the woods broke into a small upland meadow with scattered hickories, there was a snort and a crash. Two white forms floated away through the trees like disturbed ghosts and vanished over the ridge. "Deer," John whispered under his breath as he paused to rest and take survey of the awakening forest around him. The year was aging and another season of growth was slipping into silence. Walnut and buckeye leaves were yellowing and falling, and mast trees were beginning to drop their fruit. It had been a good and gentle summer, unusually temperate and with timely rain. Hickories, oaks, and walnuts were packing a modest crop, which in most areas was hanging on the trees or lying on the earth undisturbed. Squirrels were scarce, thinner in num2 2 0 bers than he had seen in almost thirty years. The dearth of food the previous season had decimated them during a hard winter. John sat along the meadow where he could scan the wooded bluff below him. There was no wind, and only a light fog, just enough dew to beat a regular cadence of dripping moisture drops. Behind him in the valley, sounds of awakening—cattle bawling, occasional human voices, and engines told that the settlement was getting started on a new day. He thought of Bob and Wilma, down there in their home, and he wondered if Bob recalled days when he had been able to take his gun to the woods. Bob was bad off, and according to neighborhood reports, Wilma worse, though she was able to get about and do a few household tasks. Both were well up in years, but not all that many seasons back, John had found Bob one morning, posted at a shagbark hickory, waiting for the two grays cutting in the tree to offer a shot. The two hunters and their quarry had remained in stalemate until John repositioned to a site from which he was able to snipe both squirrels. Feeling that Bob, who was very fond of fried squirrel , had "dibs" on them, John had surrendered both to the older sportsman. Now, Bob would never hunt again. He had been a lifelong outdoorsman, with a gift for catching fish and the grit to duck hunt on the river in single-digit cold. John climbed to the ridge and left the timber. He stood taking in the sweep of the long grassy ridge to left and right. The slope to his front was thicketed, and it descended into a deep hollow, a drain that did not run directly to the creek in the main valley. Originating under a U-shaped open ridge, it flowed parallel to the valley, feeding one of the creek's larger branches. The glade below John on the hollow's left side was mostly in second growth and trashy woods. Many years of change had worked on the hills since John had last been down that hollow, but he remembered how a pretty woods grew right along its bed, and the early October morning one weekend during his college years when he SAM BEVARD 221 had shot his limit from among scores of squirrels working the oaks and hickories. He had not planned to descend into that little vale, but a quiet urging, the woodsman's need to revisit scenes of past happiness, caused him to strike downhill and enter the brake. There was a burst of wing beats, and a grouse rocketed from a grapevine in the top of a pole-sized ash. Flushing the grouse made John's entry into this old territory worthwhile, for changing times had not been good to...