I have hesitated several days putting this up.  Originally I posted it on D&DH under this thread:

Rituals of Reverence

I went back and read it the next day and thought, “Dang!  Shaman, that ain’t right.”  There’s something wrong with it.  I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with what I’d written all at the same time.
Well, as I always say:  I learn more about myself in a day afield than I learn in a year doing anything else. Please bear with me while I get this all sorted out.

There was a time when I did the “Last Meal” ritual. I tried it in a couple of different forms over a few years, and then finally gave it up.  It was just one of those things that did not seem to fit and got discarded along the way. I tried whooping it up a time or two and later decided that wasn’t a good idea for me either.

Back in the early days, getting a deer seemed like such great luck.  It seemed as if lightning had struck.  Of course in those days, most of what I knew about deer hunting had come reading Outdoor Life and other magazines in the barber shop and not from the woods.  It all seemed so unattainable and unreachable.

Nowadays, most of what fills my head when I’m hunting is thirty years of being there.  About a third of it is pretty meager and silly, about a third of it is tainted, in one way or another, with fallout from my marriage to my first wife, Satan.  It is only in the last third or so that I finally started to live the dream, and started sharing it all with my sons.

Deer hunting for me has become a normal part of Fall.  It has become highly routinized.  The rest of the year can be somewhat chaotic, but Deer Camp has settled into a system.  In fact, I would say that the entirety of my life in the last three weeks of November is walking a thin line between ritual and superstition on one hand and practiced routine on the other.

To a large extent, it has to be. Take underwear.  If it gets down to the Eve of the Opener and the underwear isn’t all packed in the right bag and segregated just so, I run the risk of leaving a set or two back in town.  Somebody might have to do without.  Ditto for socks. Ditto for ammunition.  We’ve had it all happen sometime in the last decade.  My sons are starting to pitch in and help out, but it is still largely just me doing the outfitting.

Over time, it becomes routine.  Over time, it becomes a ritual.  Now, we hit the door at 1900 Lima. Everyone knows the drill.  I turn on the water.  Moose and Angus unpack the truck.  ‘HillChick works with the food.  Once the water is flowing, I go to work on the garbage bags filled with clothes and start setting out the Opening Day piles for three hunters.  An hour later I walk out to meet KYHillChick, who hands me a stiff scotch. I leave behind , 3 piles on 3 chairs, 3 rifles on the rack, three gear bags with 3 sets of ammunition.

Opening morning is no different.  We each have our Opening Day stands, our Opening Day hats, our Opening Day socks.  There is even a spot on the track going back to the stands where we stop  and take a breather and look at Orion for a minute or two.  I don’t know about the kids, but I say a prayer.  Ritual?  Superstition?  Well, it’s about halfway back to my stand.  I stop and take a few minutes, take off my hat and gauge how fast I can push the last half of the walk without sweating.

And it goes on like that.  There is the ritual order of ascent into the stand.  If it isn’t done just so I can find my walkie talkie buried under 3 layers.  I can find my safety strap buried on the bottom of the gear bag.  I can find the strap by which I haul up my gun run round my ankle. If I forget the ritual snack times, I can find myself getting too dosed on the coffee and getting shaky and weepy and having to pee at the most inopportune moments. Truth be known, I owe my first deer to an overdose of coffee on the Opener, but that is a long story left for later.

When the deer finally do come out, there really isn’t much desire for ritual left in me.  What was it Alphonse Soady said?  “Ya bring yur gun up, put your finger on da trigger and take a deeeep breath to steady yur nerves.  ”  That’s ritual enough, Eh?

So there’s a dead buck on the ground.  I call back to the house for pick-up, gather up my gear  and probably have twenty minutes  or so to sit and ponder life, just me and the big dead deer.  What do we talk about?

Usually  I get to rattling on about, well, pretty much what I rattle on about here.  There’s a lot of looking back now.  I’m 52.  I’m well past bitchin’ about life with Satan.  I’m no longer big on proving anything.  There’s less ahead than behind for both of us, and it’s darn silly to be asking a deer for career advice, let alone one that’s dead.

“. . . So you gotta understand,” I said, “It isn’t that I don’t respect your opinions on career development, but. . . well, you did manage just now to walk out in the open  in plain sight of an occupied tree stand on Opening Day. You can prattle on all you want about what color my parachute is, but -”

That’s about the time I start hearing the truck. The rest is mostly just small talk, with a long sigh here and there.

There is one ritual that I save for the dinner on Opening Night.  It isn’t for the deer, but it is reverence to us.

quote:

“He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, And point a finger at his mounted antlers saying ‘These wounds! These wounds, I gave on Opening Day!’ For he today that sheds blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And Gentlemen all now in bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks that hunted with us on Opening Day.”

Okay, it’s ripping off Shakespeare.  It shows no reverence for the deer.  It probably has no real business in this thread, but  after 30 years of doing this I am frankly more awed by  the guys who go out and face The Opener than either those that stay home and watch football or the hapless animals that have the bad luck of ending up in somebody’s sights.  We don’t care what our boss thinks. We don’t care what our wives think.  We don’t care what the rest of society thinks. We don’t care what plans were made for us.  We don’t care about the weather.  We don’t care if we don’t see a deer.  We don’t care if we miss.    It is we, we happy few, we band of brothers in orange, that poke our finger into the cold wind and say: “I’m going hunting.”

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