by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

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The last few weeks I’ve spent the better part of my days out at the family farm near where my parents live. It’s deer season until the end of January, and I grew up hunting with my Dad, so that’s what’s on my mind lately. Honestly, I didn’t exactly relish deer hunting as a kid. I wanted to be with my Dad, but as a wriggling eight-year-old boy, I didn’t get particularly excited about being set in the woods and expected to sit there alone and perfectly still for, on average, three hours. Also, my Dad was pretty gung-ho about hunting back then, and so we were usually up and in the woods well before sunrise.

And it was usually very cold. I could never get warm enough. Now, as you can imagine, that made sitting still that much harder. Shivering and wiggling were means of survival in the midst of a long, chilly morning, I reasoned. Being just a young’un, I didn’t yet partake of a morning cup of coffee, so I’d also get really sleepy on the deer stand a lot of mornings.  

One of the only times growing up that I actually saw a buck of any size, was when it woke me up from a nap. I had climbed down from the twelve foot high ladder stand to sleep a while on the ground. Better to interrupt a hunt with a nap, than snooze your way off the side of a high platform and wake up dead. At any rate, I woke up on the ground eventually, with a big eight-point buck just a few feet away inspecting the strange creature he’d discovered laid out at the base of a tree. I gasped upon waking and startled the big fella, and we both froze for a moment. I don’t know what he was thinking. I was thinking, “can I get to my gun?” But it was a few feet away leaned against a tree. No chance. As soon as I moved, the buck darted away. I don’t remember if I told anybody about that until much later. I’d fallen asleep on the job, and, almost to rub it in, a prize buck had stopped by to make sure I knew it.  

You may think, if you’ve played any deer-themed video games or watched a hunting show, that deer hunting is action-packed. You may be under the impression that the woods are positively crammed with the critters. The truth of deer-hunting is that it is wonderfully boring. It mostly consists of sitting incredibly still, totally silent, for a very long time, while nothing much happens. You begin to memorize the trees. Your eyes catalogue every twig that looked like a deer for a few seconds, but wasn’t. Your mind marks every twitch of a leaf that wasn’t, in fact, a deer’s ear or tail, and learns, over time, to disregard the sound of all two-hundred deer footsteps that wound up just being squirrels dashing through leaves or birds hopping across the forest floor. It takes a long time to learn that you almost never hear a deer coming. In fact, you almost never see the coming either. Deer don’t walk up, they materialize. They are silent forest shadows creeping warily across tree trunks, just darkening the world around them enough to graze the eye.  

I hunted for six-and-a-half hours in one day. I saw one bobcat. I memorized a lot of trees. But every hunter knows that most deer encounters last a few seconds. It’s like waiting hours in line for the rollercoaster, and, when those few seconds finally arrive, I’m not exaggerating when I say that the feeling is the same. I cannot explain why the human heart beats like it does when shadow-buck materializes out of nowhere in the woods, like this creature slipped through some fairy-portal that happened at that moment to criss-cross our dimension. I can’t explain how impossible it is to slow your breathing, keep your hands from shaking (even twenty minutes after the deer has vanished again). I also can’t quite explain why you want to kill something so clearly majestic and gentle. But, for whatever reason, you do. You feel like, if I could just stop that thing in its tracks, I could get at that beautiful magic—hold onto it somehow.  

They call it buck-fever. It’s enough of a rush to keep you coming back to sit painfully still for ridiculously long amounts of time, in extreme discomfort. You go hunting for that. You go hunting for the pulse-pound so loud only the crash of a gun can out-boom it.  

But, truth is, you also go for the stillness and the quiet, which is 99.9% of what hunting is. For instance, I’ve hunted entire seasons and not killed anything. In fact, seen almost nothing. And, I have grown to love the very things that, as a child, frustrated me. Sometimes I actually enjoy getting up that early and climbing a tree stand before the sun is even up. It can be kind of game to slip through the woods as quietly as you can. And I have developed a taste for sitting as still as I can and memorizing trees for three hours at a time. I never would have thought that could be the case. 

It’s only been in the last year or two that I decided to buy a few trail cameras to leave out at the farm. They’ve got fancy ones that’ll send instant videos to your cell phone anytime a deer passes by, but I bought a couple of the cheapest, simplest ones I could find. Now, it’s part of my schedule to go switch out the SD cards on the trail cams, come home, and check for deer videos. It’s like Christmas morning, y’all. You never know what may have walked past in the last week or two! A pair of racoons waddling by? A coyote startled by the infrared lights? A big buck? A brand new fawn barely getting his legs under him? There is a whole world going on that would otherwise go unseen, but there’s a tiny portion of the forest where the goings-on of that secret world are whispered. 

Your whole life your own two eyes may only be able to see a tiny portion of the good that’s going on in this world. Buechner famously said that, “what’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”  

From the deer stand I can hear the jets overhead and some big motor rumble down the gravel road not far off. There are horrible things going on in the world. Things that keep me from sleeping some nights. But they won’t amount to anything in the end. I am hunting for the things that will. I am out in the long stillness picking out the slender trail of the quiet, enduring things. Up before daylight, keeping watch in the cold for the dawn that may bring a longed-for glimpse of the Forest King with his spreading crown, as he steps from another world into this one. 

The post S6:E2 – Sitting very still, very cold, for a very long time appeared first on Matthew Clark.