THE TRAINED EYE

I stopped hunting in the mid-70's when I moved from NY to SF. I was living in a little woodstove heated shack with my 19 year old wifey, on  dead end road in Bearsville. I had at my disposal  hundreds of acres of woods just out my door. Since I had grown up hunting in a small town, I didn't really appreciate my circumstances. I was just starting to mature as an artist, teaching a class in lithography in Woodstock and working as as a carpenter. Life was good, but rough for a young couple. Gas had just doubled in price from 25 cents to 50 cents per gallon AND you had to wait in line to buy it. I needed a change. In the spring of 1975 we packed up the truck and headed west. I wouldn't seriously hunt again until the early nineties, back in NY.

Art and hunting have much in common. Failure is the biggest commonality. But the by products of that failure- hard work and training are close seconds. In order to make good art you must fail consistently. When you do succeed, you immediately recognize it. All the missteps provide you with the proper training to once in a while make the "right" decisions. Others may not see it as such, but fuck them, you're the expert.
   With hunting it's the same. The one thing you can be sure of every day you walk in the woods is that failure is accompanying you. The only thing you can hope for is the rate goes down over the years. That's where the trained eye comes in. Yesterday I was driving by the local diner and I spotted my old friend and deer hunting guru Savage Lynch holding onto his tracking dog Bonnie in the back of his pickup. I pulled in. He was about to go on a track for a wounded 10 pointer a local kid had shot the night before. I was going to go for a burger at the diner, but tracking a wounded deer was way more fun. Lunch could wait.
   Another tracker and dog joined us and we took out after the blood trail. The kid said he hit him behind the shoulder, most likely taking out one lung. Deer are incredibly resilient creatures. They can run for miles on one lung. He had shot the deer on a local ski slope, jumping it once late at night and eventually losing the trail on the clear slope. The two dogs and trackers hit the woods while I kept my eyes glued to the ground looking for blood. After a couple of hours Savage bent down and lifted a leaf. In a landscape of fallen leaves, with tiny spots of red, Savage had spied blood. Then Gretchen (the other dog) yelped, keying in on another tiny spot of blood. We had the track again.

I'm sorry to say we never found the buck. We all hope he survived the shot. Tracking is as challenging and almost as much fun as hunting. I may have a trained eye when it comes to art, supermodels and hunting, but when it comes to tracking I bow to Savage. The one thing you can be sure of in art and hunting- the training never stops.