Today I was riding my four wheeler slowly across the rolling fields of my farm to check on the cattle. The air was crisp, and there was just a hint of fall colors beginning to show in the woods, a few orange leaves clinging to the maples and the faintest touch of gold spreading through the oaks. As I eased to the bottom field, Something caught my eye — a massive deer rub on a cedar tree bigger around than my leg. I stopped and stared at it for a moment, amazed. I’ve hunted a long time, and knew it took a big buck to tear up a tree like that.
But what struck me most wasn’t the size of the rub, it was the feeling that didn’t come. Back in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, deer hunting consumed me. It was all I thought about, all year long. I can still remember one season when I hunted thirty something days straight with my bow, rain or shine. There was even a year I quit my job the day deer season opened. That’s how crazy I was about it.
I guess filming for Knight and Hale for fourteen long years, sitting in deer stands all across the United States, finally burned that fire out of me. I hunted in just about every kind of country there is. I’ve spent bone chilling mornings in five degree weather with a twenty mile an hour wind cutting through me in the open plains of Kansas. I’ve climbed the steep, rocky slopes of Montana’s mountains just to hear an elk bugle at first light. I’ve sat for hours in the deep hardwoods of Missouri, waited out snowstorms in Illinois, baked under the southern sun in Mississippi, and crawled through the cactus and mesquite of Texas. Back then, every hunt felt like an adventure waiting to happen. The long drives, the early mornings, the smell of campfire smoke in the air—it was all part of it. Those days were thrilling, exhausting, but thrilling.
Now, at my age, I don’t have the same desire to chase those moments again. Still, when I saw that cedar tree today, a part of me wished I could feel that old excitement again. It’s a strange kind of sadness, realizing the fire that once burned so bright has dimmed to an ember. But maybe that’s just how life goes. The passions that once drove us eventually give way to quieter joys.
These days, my son Jake hunts the farm. Thankfully, he’s not the obsessed kind like I was, just steady and patient. Every once in a while, he’ll get a good one, and when he does, I still feel that old rush, not in my hands or my trigger finger, but deep in my heart. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, the fever passes from one generation to the next. And as I rode away from that cedar tree, with the woods glowing in the late afternoon sun, I realized something. The fire’s still there. It just burns in him now.
