WOODY HARRELSON

 

SHEWHO'S UNUSUAL ANIMAL FRIEND

 As I'm spending almost every waking hour trying to put an arrow in one of two giant bucks I've spotted in the past week Shewho has been having her own unique encounter with wildlife. It started with a rustling in the dry leaves before that big storm hit a couple of weeks ago. Emerging from the dry brown, yellow and red dappled ground across a little feeder stream running alongside Shewho's driveway, came what is locally known as a "partridge." Instead of exploding from the underbrush or puffing up and "drumming" in warning this bird began cooing and came straight for Shewho's feet. If you google the roughed grouse or "fool's hen" you will find many instances of the species interacting with humans. This interaction is most commonly attributed to a hen protecting her nest or a male staking out his territory. The little birds are known to get right up in a human's grill and ward them off. In rare instances they seem to want to make friends. Such was the case with "Woody Harrelson."

    After a couple of days sussing each other out, Shewho named the bird Woody and they have become best of friends. Now I have a cat. Who ever heard of a man and feline bonding? I know it's rare. But there you have it. Cheeky and I are very close. So realizing the unexplained mysteries of the animal kingdom can manifest at any moment I believed Shewho when she told me of her new friend. This damned bird had absolutely no fear of humans. I met Woody and he seemed just as willing to trust me - a born in the blood killer. Years ago I had shot one of Woody's relatives back in the woods. Partridge are delicious! They taste a little like bacon. I didn't tell Woody. He came to me almost as readily as Shewho and I pretended I worked for PETA. But it was obvious we did not have the same deep connection. He just wanted to talk to Shewho.

     Day after day Woody showed up to hang with Shewho. He looked her straight in the eye, chirping and chortling as if he had something very important to impart. Then he jumped on her arm, snuggled in her lap and followed her right into the kitchen. As the cat skulked under the furniture hoping to get a clean shot, Lassie stuck her long nose almost in Woody's ruff. The dog was curious and the bird was fearless. It's gone on like that for a couple of weeks now. Shewho will go out her back door and call "Wooooodyyyyy...." and that bird will come sauntering through the leaves and stand at her feet looking up at her. Woody makes Shewho's  friendliest chicken seem standoffish. This is such a gift, to have a wild animal trust and bond with a big brained, apex predator like a human. How long will Woody stick around? It's anybody's guess. Partridge stay through the winter. We are all hoping for a long and mystical relationship between woman and beast.          

HOLLIE

 PHOTO: Marianna Rothen

BRAND RE-BRAND

 Long before the internet, social media and a world where everybody has their own personal "brand," I registered my brand with the State of California. It was called the "pointed cane" brand and my herd consisted of one cow. Those were the days when news and entertainment came by broadcast TV and porn still was contained on the printed page. Something called a VCR had just been invented. These days everybody has a cell phone, FB page, Twitter account and actively promotes the brand of "self." In the span of forty years we have turned from a society of receivers into one of mass transmission. Warhol's egalitarian  declaration of a universal "15 minutes of fame" and Joseph Beuys' prediction of "everyone an artist" have both come true. In this rush to total inclusion, a world where everybody has something to say, where anybody with enough botox can be an "influencer" unintended and unforeseen consequences have eclipsed the benefits. We are locked in an age of look at me. LOOK AT ME!!!!! Affirmation comes in the form of "likes," "friends" and "followers." 

     Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as "Meta," as if this move did anything but seize the news cycle for twenty-four hours. Chicken shit. Chicken salad. As I've mentioned too many times to keep track, my deep dive into family/American history has revealed many parallels and analogies to today's world. One major similarity is how seemingly groundbreaking and positive inventions always have a counterbalancing dark, negative side. Take Ann Osterhout Edison's mother-in-law Minna Miller Edison's father Lewis. Minna was the daughter of Lewis Miller the inventor of the first combine-harvester to put a blade in front of the oxen or horse. With Miller's invention U.S. crop yields exploded, feeding the world. The price of corn and grain plummeted putting thousands of farmhands out of work. The increased soil erosion helped create the dust bowl. The rich girl Minna Miller married Thomas Edison who we all know accellerated the destruction of the planet (both physically and morally) with his Jazz playing phonographs and electric red light districts.  Zuckerberg, Musk, Bessos and all the rest of these well branded and re-branded douche bags are doing exactly the same thing. Who would've argued with "everyone a transmitter" in 1979?

    Meta will now target kids, the primary victims of FB and Insta-neurosis. Don't worry it's "meta." It can't hurt them. It's like vaping, wine coolers or fentanyl....harmless. Phew! Thanks Mark. Maybe it's time to buy another cow.    

   

     

     

AMY

 PHOTO: R. Kern

FOUR THAT GOT AWAY

     In the twenty-six years I've been deer hunting, four of the biggest bucks I ever saw and had a chance to kill all got away without a scratch. Let's take them one at a time.

1. 1997- I had just started bow hunting and was in my brother Ross's tree stand on my brother Bird's property. Bird had been having trouble with trespassers. The day before the gun opener I went for an afternoon sit in Ross's stand with my borrowed bow. Around 3 pm I heard a shot. It was close. Turkey season was open but this sounded like a rifle. I got down from the stand and walked down the wood road, thinking somebody may be in Bird's stand. Oh yeah, I left the bow in Ross's stand. From the top of the hill I could see Bird's stand. It was empty. The shot must have come from elsewhere. Since I was on the ground I decided to take a leak.....as I looked around I saw the back of a deer just below me. I followed his spine to a large neck and biggest set of antlers I had ever seen outside of a Field & Stream centerfold. What did I have in my hand? Not a bow. The buck pranced away never to be seen again.

2. 2014- By now I had killed quite a few good bucks and even arrowed one of my biggest with the compound bow. I was hunting a stand on a friend's farm where the previous year I had shot my biggest buck ever with the muzzleloader. It was the first really cold morning of the season and the leaves were like walking on potato chips. I heard the deer coming for thirty seconds before I saw it. Just in case it was a buck I was already standing, bow in hand. The rack was the first thing I saw. It was a big, heavy main frame eight point. He was coming right underneath my stand. I froze. He stopped. Looked right at me. Then he lowered his head unconcerned, turned and presented me with a perfect quartering away shot at ten yards. I drew back and found I couldn't. The right leg strap of my tree harness was snagged just above my knee. It's amazing how much you use your right leg when trying to come to full draw. I obviously did not know this at the time. A force greater than my own was at play. The buck looked back at my futile struggle, snorted and disappeared. I sat down defeated. From then on my leg straps are  cinched as tight as a dominatrix's corset.

3. 2016- Same friend's farm. Also, like in 1997, I was hunting the last day of bow season. My nephew Wade had come up to hunt with me because Bird didn't want him shooting a nice buck on his property the day before the gun opener. I was hunting a stand we call "the office." This was a spot I shared with Savage Lynch and his brother Milawyer. It had been an especially slow season, with little deer movement and no good bucks. I didn't have much hope for even seeing a doe. But Wade wanted to hunt so what the hell, the weather was perfect, clear, crisp and cold. Once Wade was set in Milawyer's sky view ladder stand I headed for the office. I had an old pair of tattered wool gloves and a warm jacket. No sooner was I settled in when I heard footsteps coming right for me. The deer was a monster, a heavy rack and big body. I stood up came to full draw.......let me back up a bit. I'd just had eye surgery in my left eye. This was not my shooting eye, but with a deer this big I wanted to be sure to put a good hit on him. So I was mentally checking off all the boxes. I had plenty of time. He never knew I was there. When he turned at fifteen yards I searched with my good eye for the leveling bubble on the bow and couldn't find it. Rattled at my blurry vision, I slowly tilted the bow from side to side before settling the pin. A dangling wool finger from my ratty gloves caught the release and the arrow went wild. The buck spun and ran back the way he had come. Instead of coming up on Wade with bloody hands and a big smile, I told him the whole sorry tale as we walked back to the truck. I could have been the hero uncle. Instead I was the goat.

4. 2021- This one is so fresh it hurts. Ok. I admit it. I'm getting old. But what the fuck? I'm not ready to stop bow hunting. I can still move hanger stands around in the woods and climb in them in the dark. Two out of six arrows went in the bull at thirty yards. I stopped practicing there. Don't mess with perfection. A week ago Friday I was hunting in a location I can't tell you about from a stand nobody knows is there. This was my second season hunting this spot. Last year I'd seen a nice ten point early in the season but never saw him again. I kept an eye on that spot and damned if that same ten didn't pop his head up at 200 yards  and give me a good look. He'd grown. The next afternoon I changed tactics and climbed a different stand the other side of his bedroom. I hoped to cut him off. It began to rain so I screwed in a swiveling tree umbrella. Cozy and dry I sat through the afternoon seeing nothing. Fifteen minutes of shooting light left I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and all I saw was antlers ducking under a hemlock branch twenty yards behind me. I turned back and froze in my seat praying he hadn't made me.  I waited what seemed like an eternity when finally I saw the massive body emerge five yards from my tree to my right. I stood up. Drew back. I settled the pin where I hoped he would step and waited......then that tree umbrella tipped and just kissed the top of my bow. It was enough to distract me and I lost the tension on the back wall of the bowstring. When the string went slack the buck spooked. I bleated him stopped. I still had a shot broadside at 30 yards. But, for the life of me I could not get the drawstring back a second time. He snorted in disapproval of my very existence and vanished in the brambles. Yeah, I suck. I know. But, no time to wallow in it. Less than a month before the shooting starts. Game on.           

   

ECLIPSE

 PHOTO: Marianna Rothen

THE SPORTING LIFE

    I never understood why people call hunting a "sport." Sports are games that humans invent to entertain themselves and sell TV air time, usually where death is not the desired outcome. These days, like many things, hunting has been co-opted by Evangelical Christian Republicans as a rural American right of passage. Watch any hunting show on Youtube and you'll see waving 'Merican flags, dewy-eyed children and many thanks given to the Lord when one of his beautiful creature's guts are exploded with a full metal jacket .30-06. But strip the Second Amendment, vaccine hesitant, bone-headed, NRA, Trump insurrectionist rhetoric away from hunting and you'll start to get at its essence. It is as old as time. Before fire, before belief systems and art (that both represented the hunt on those cave walls) a hunter killed anything from a mussel to a mastodon to feed his hunger. Hunting was a matter of life and death. 

    I grew up hunting birds with my father and helping my grandfather butcher other hunters' deer kills. My grandfather didn't hunt. He had spent his poverty stricken youth subsistence hunting anything that could be put in the pot. Born in 1900, by the time he was a teenager one was lucky to see a deer track in Orange County, let alone a decent buck. Hunting on an empty stomach is about as far from "sport" as you'll get.  My grandfather was happy to let others hunt and for ten dollars (plus the hide) we butchered their kills. By the 1950's, when I was born, the deer herd was still so thin around Montgomery that the townsfolk had to travel to Sullivan County just to see a whitetail. By the time I was old enough to hunt "big game" in the late sixties, the deer herd was beginning to rebound. I couldn't wait.

   But coming of age during the Vietnam War and the hippie heyday of Woodstock left me facing a dilemma. I questioned the need for killing a deer as some of my friends and relatives were dodging bullets in Da Nang. Nonetheless, I loaded my gun and followed the old man and my brother into the woods. It took a couple of years in the tree until I got a shot at a deer. Then, instead of pulling the trigger I whispered "bang" and shouldered my rifle. This was the beginning of my years from 1970 to 1994 of "hypothetical hunting." It drove my father and brother (both serious deer hunters) crazy. 

   Then in 1994, still living on the Lower East Side I decided to actually go hunting with the purpose of killing and eating something. I started with squirrels. They are surprisingly tasty. I was OK with killing a squirrel. Then I shot a turkey, a couple of pheasants, and by the winter of 1994 I had killed my first buck in Lake Otsego. That's another story. The point is despite my earlier reticence to kill, by the late 1990's I had turned into a serious hunter. Over the years I only got more obsessed. I relearned how to hunt, taught myself how to shoot a bow and these days spend as much time in the tree as I can. It has become such an important element of my personality and work as an artist and writer that I can't foresee ever ceasing the activity. Yet, there are times (like last week) when I had a giant ten point buck five yards from my tree stand, drawstring back, waiting for him to take one step into the open....... when I question the whole process. (to be continued)           

LAND BACK

 

I'M BACK

     Where have I been? Physically I haven't gone anywhere. But mentally I've been riding the time machine 300 plus years into the past.....again. I realized my first attempt at writing my family history was less than successful so went at it once more. This process requires much reading, writing and editing. It still isn't done but I think I have a better handle on it. A little mental space has opened up so it being the first month of the 2021 bow season, I decided to return to HWS.

    Trump is gone (sort of). The pandemic persists. Biden is a disappointment and Dave Chappell is in deep shit with the trans/woke community. Alec Baldwin killed his DP on his movie set and I reached out to the one Hollywood functionary I know to find out how such an avoidable accident could happen. Here's his response:

 Mike

      A complete and utter fuck up. These people were terrible, bottom of the barrel crew. The AD will be held accountable and the armorer girl will be held accountable and rightly so.

1. Live rounds are prohibited on film sets.
2. A professional set does not allow functioning weapons, we exclusively have guns with blocked barrels. 
3. Someone used these guns for target practice with live ammo. A criminal act in itself.
That’s how the live round ended up in the gun.
4. Not even a blind person confuses a live round with a blank! They are totally different as you know.
5. The AD took the gun and handed it to Baldwin saying it’s “cold” but he didn’t check it. That is criminal negligence. I check every gun religiously on my sets each time it is handed to an actor, I announce to the crew what I have seen (how many rounds are in the in the gun, etc) and invite any crew member to check for themselves before the gun is handed over. It is a “bulletproof” system.
6. Baldwin is a producer on the film. He might be in trouble as well.

Too bad I missed Sam’s party. But I wrote her.

Good luck hunting 

Urs

    Hunting? I know it's only October, but I've already seen two big shooter bucks and have a couple of good stories to tell. Oh yeah, I'm also trying to give some real estate back to the Lenape Indians. We have a lot to talk about. I'm thrilled to be back.