Circling Home

I'll Take My Stand

The most fundamental and important truths are still to be found in the life around us, in the significant distractions of any odd moment in pasture or woodlot, river bend or forest. christopher camuto, Hunting from Home I’ll Take My Stand I’ve only been hunting once in my life. It was when I was fourteen , and my brother-in-law’s brother Ned took me into the stark, spindly woods of southern Spartanburg County near Pacolet . This was somebody else’s land, but we walked through the broken fields and woods full of rabbit tobacco and broom sedge as if we owned it. I had a borrowed .410 shotgun resting on my shoulder and red shotgun shells in my pants pockets. Squirrels and rabbits were our quarry of choice. My brother-in-law’s family worked in a cotton mill and still ate small game. We walked all morning through the cold, passing old fence posts and scraps of barbed wire sunk into trunks of trees. We climbed through the fences and stepped over red clay gullies, relics of the decades when cotton farming burnt out the topsoil. Everywhere there were clay crystal ice ridges. When stomped they quickly melted and left wet red smears on my boot soles. We crossed the burnt brown broom sedge and watched for 150 rabbits. When we passed into the shadows of trees we looked up into stark blue winter sky shot through with the terminal branches of native hardwoods. It was beautiful and, being a city boy, I loved the woods as I loved nothing about the wornout streets of the old grown-over-by-town mill village in Spartanburg where my mother and I lived. We came up empty most of the morning. When we’d made the turn for home Ned spotted a nest high in the crook of an old oak and told me to shoot up into it. He wanted me to at least have the sense of hunting before we headed back for dinner. I’d been working my cold feet all morning to stay loose, and so hefting the gun and squeezing off a shot warmed another part of my body. I had an easy shot, straight up, and the .410 didn’t kick much. Even I could hit a stationary nest the size of a globe. The nest exploded. Twigs and leaves came floating down. In a strange surreal moment not one but two squirrels tumbled out and hit the ground, like socks filled with marbles, in front of me. Ned picked the carcasses up and stuffed one into each pocket of his old brown jacket. Dried squirrel blood lined the seams from other morning hunts. He laughed about how we’d have squirrel brains and eggs for breakfast, how his mama would make squirrel dumplings for supper “just like chicken dumplings.” When I recite my hunting story I think of the haunting scene at the conclusion of “The Bear” in Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, when young Isaac McCaslin follows the sound of someone beating metal on metal through the big bottom and finds Boon Hogganbeck with his back against a big gum tree full of forty or fifty squirrels, “one green maelstrom of mad leaves, while from time to time, singly or in twos and threes, squirrels would dart down the trunk and whirl without stopping and rush back up again.” Boon was sitting there as Isaac approached, his gun scattered about him in pieces and the old man hammering on the breach of it with the barrel, shouting at the boy who I’ll Take My Stand ° 151 approached him, the one he had helped teach to hunt, “Get out of here! Don’t touch them. Don’t touch a one of them! They’re mine!” I tell this story to establish that I am not really the hunting kind, though I am susceptible to its pleasures and comforts. I’m no Isaac McCaslin or even Boon Hogganbeck, and most of the thrill I’ve felt for hunting comes from reading literary sources like Faulkner and Hemingway. I’ve never even sat in a tree stand, or stood in a duck blind, or shot a turkey and removed the chin hair to hang from the rearview mirror of my pickup, never listened to what my friend James Kilgo in Deep Enough for Ivorybills calls “the song fest,” the...