We turn off the main road and onto the ice-crusted one-lane drive that meanders to the hill Dad calls the โSheshequin Propertyโ. Itโs named after the Township itโs in, all the way on the northern boundary of Pennsylvania and far to the east. We bought the 23 acres from an aunt and uncle about 10 years ago. Now Dad and sometimes my cousins come up and hunt it, stopping in to check on the neat, musty little hunting cabin my cousin built just big enough for two bunks and a wood stove.
The land is about one tenth of the hill the locals call โBald Mountainโ. Thereโs a long, flat field on top of it that used to be thick with brush and the occasional dead deer, piles of dried bones sprinkled with little mounds of hair that youโd stumble over; then somebody brush-hogged it down to ankle-high stubble and made it bald once again. Down the hill on all sides of the field is old-wood forest. The big oaks stand comfortably apart, and in the occasional stand of pine you can feel the sound sucked up when youโre walking on a carpet of drying needles. Itโs steep but not too steep, except in the back (considering where our propertyโs situated) where thereโs a big flat steppe that drops off like the deep end of a pool.
Today two inches of snow covers all of it. Even with a gray sky everything is bright. Harsh white glares out from between the trees on the wooded hill, and the glow coming up from my feet is so strong when I step out of the truck my mind feels tricked: my eyes squint like Iโm at the beach, but itโs eight degrees out. Stiff breeze.
Dad and cousin Mark set to grabbing their rifles out of the back seat and pulling blaze orange backpacks to throw over shoulders in blaze orange coats. The stock of Dadโs gun is a dark marbled wood and Markโs is a salt-and-pepper plastic compound. Both guns are black powder rifles โ flintlocks.
I last hunted five or six years ago. Iโd shot a few deer with a rifle, but of all the times Iโd been out with my black powder rifle, Iโd never fired the thing at a living animal once. I just hadnโt seen that many deer, and when I did they were always brown streaks galloping by, flying their bobbing white tails like funny little flags. Of Dad, my cousins and my uncle (even my great-aunt had gone out with us a few times), not a single one of us have killed a deer using our historical tools. Lots of guns, as we tell the story, not going off.