Published: October 03, 2008 12:26 am            

Foreseeing a very different Autumn

My brother, Ron, and I will not be hunting Colorado’s aspen and sagebrush patches this fall and that saddens me. We agreed to take a year off our usual mountain hunting so that he could complete a move to their new home and I could experience the early days of Mississippi’s bow season and also catch the early squirrel hunts.

So we didn’t apply for elk tags. In his case it would have been money wasted anyway because Ron died in July.

How I would cherish being there with him this fall among the elk and mule deer where we have spent some of the best moments of our lives hovering in tents beneath layers of fresh snow or leaving our tracks in morning frosts. If I should go alone I know I would look for him there and I believe I would find him in many of our special places. Yes, there would be terribly lonely hours for me, but I could chat with him now and then over a campfire on a chilly night and rest beside him on a boulder after a long climb.

           

Last Elk

 

I want to go back next fall to where, on our last successful hunt together, he shot the huge cow elk that fell in deep sagebrush. I want to stand there where I waited in pitch darkness for him to walk out to get the ATV. I want to see the headlights of his ATV winding through the sea of brush, guided by my tiny blinking LED strobe light.

And I want to go there on the back side of Barbers Basin to the log on which he sat when he shot his first elk, the 5 X 4 bull that charged in to his bugle tube that I taught him to use just days before. He taught me far more than I taught him, but in this case I lived in Colorado and had hunted its elk.

I want to relive the whole day when I stayed behind in camp so he could seek out the biggest bull of his life with no encumbrances from an excited brother who might stumble on a rock at the wrong moment. I knew there were giant bulls in the burn and I told him how to get there. I had come the 1,600 miles with him without a license of my own just to be with him when he downed the monster harem master that would have scored in the 360s or 370s had he not had seven broken tips from fighting other bulls.

           

Homeland Memories

 

But this fall I will do my daydreaming here where he and I have waited in a hundred places for feeding or mating-minded whitetail bucks that sift among pines and oaks. My mind will go back to those days when seeing a deer track was worthy of our chatter around the fireplace in the old cold camp house. And to the times when the lanky Walker hounds flew through the flatwoods with the speed of leaves in a windstorm, their keen noses held high, catching the scent of a fleeing buck whose crashes through fallen treetops alerted Ron and me on stand and caused us to forget that we were freezing.

If I go to the still water this fall where we cast surface plugs to the shallows in autumns past, I will marvel again, as we did often, how dark the fall water becomes, stained by falling hardwood leaves. And a rising bass will recall for me the hundreds we celebrated together in the little tipsy johnboat.

Were it not for the marvel of memories, Ron and I would never again be in the little boat together, just a few feet apart for hours on end simply fishing and loving each other. Thank God that we found time to have those hours together to build the memories. Thank God for memories.

        

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