I loved the hunting stories my father used to tell. They were always full of imagery of the surrounding country. His stories were full of hiking along the ridge, walking over the saddle, pussy footing through the valley or ravine; what types of vegetation, like the tall thin 30 year old firs that he called peckerwoods, jack pine, Juniper salal, grove of alder, a clear cut or clearing or pushing through devils club; what the weather was like, was it foggy, misty, sunny; and what he was thinking of as he looked for clues, a track here, a bed there, a piece of fur caught on a branch, using this knowledge to try and outwit his prey; then the pause, movement, sighting , how many shots. It always amazed me the details that went into the trajectory of the bullet. Where it entered the body, what it hit, ricocheted off of a rib or shoulder blade. These details were spoken of with surgical precision. It clipped the aorta, broke a rib, lodged in the scapula. The knowledge of anatomy would make any biologists proud. The stories always ended with the sounds the animal made, how far it would run before bleeding out and finally the details of how big, how many pounds and the effort to carry it out of the brush.
My father wasn’t unique in this story telling. All of his hunting buddies would tell similar tales with the same attention to details. The stories always talked about the type of gun, the weather, time of day, type of brush, whether they were tracking or on a stand, how they either outwitted the prey or how the prey outwitted them, the sighting, how many shots, and always with that surgical precision of the bullet’s trajectory.
I don’t know if modern day hunters tell stories like my father and his old hunting buddies. The attitudes seem different than theirs were. For my father and his friends hunting wasn’t so much of a sport, although they enjoyed it, but it was a way of life for them. Not going hunting every hunting season would be as bad as my mother not attending church service every Sunday. He looked forward to it, planned for it; even if he was just going to hunt in our “back yard”.
My father always thought that a few pennies for a bullet were cheaper than buying beef at the store. When I was older I often wonder about that. Most of the time he didn’t bag a buck; a good portion of the day was walking around in the woods, and spending money for hunting license, tags and the gas to get to wherever he was going. He loved hiking, and sometimes I think that hunting was more of a pretext for tromping through the “puckerweeds”.
My dad grew up during a time when there were no poaching laws. There must have been a transition between hunting when he wanted to and when the police was enforcing the poaching laws, as some of his stories where of outwitting and near misses with the game warden. But mostly, they were stories of hunting, the challenge of outthinking the prey, and the respect for them.
Hunting was a way of putting meat on the table, it was his lifestyle. I gather that he was a better hunter when he was younger, in terms of bringing home something to eat, than when I knew him as an older man. In all the years that I knew him, I can only remember one deer and one elk; one a forked horn, the other a spike.
Why was he not more successful when I knew him? Did the world change that much? Did he take on more family responsibilities? Was he more respectable? Or did he enjoy the journey more than the destination?
Deer wasn’t the only thing that he hunted. He was a Marine in WWII in the Third Marine Division. The stories are few and seldom involved combat. He was trained to fire rockets, at that time a top secret weapon. But he would jokingly say that they remembered to send him to the Pacific but forgot to send the rockets, so they handed him a rifle and told him to “go get ‘em”.
Of course “them” was the Japanese. My father never passed down any racial prejudices, or at least none that I am aware of. Although I always got the impression that he judged people not by the color of their skin but by their actions, always giving strangers the benefit of the doubt, generous to people in need. Still I never remember him ever referring to the Japanese as anything but Japs.
I have always wondered how he felt about the Japanese. Once when I got the chance to peruse through his old high school annual from Gresham, I realized that Japanese students made up a significant minority of the student body. Nobody talks about the many Japanese-American farmers that lived in the Gresham area; most of these third and second generation Americans were rounded up soon after Pearl Harbor and ship to internment camps during WW II. Some returned after the war, most moved to the nearest town or city that was near the camps. My father has never mentioned his Japanese classmates.
He wasn’t part of the operations for the more famous battles on various Islands in the Pacific. He was in on Guam. They would battle the opposition into submission and then go in and take out pockets of resistance before leaving to find the enemy again on another island.
It seems that most of the major battles had definitive battle lines, which were absent in the mop up stage. My dad and his fellow Marines looked for hidden groups in the jungle, in the mountains, holed up in caves, pill boxes, hiding and striking where they can. I have no idea which is worse, facing an enemy across lines or looking for ghosts in the jungle.
Although my father never talked about being involved in any major battles, according to the few stories about the war he must have been part of some initial attacks. I remember him telling me about sitting in his fox hole, with the Navy guns firing overhead at the hillside in front of them. He said the ground looked like the waves of the ocean from the percussions.
My sister, when she was around 10 years old, asked him what war was like. He told her gruffly that it was a lot of noise and watching your friends get killed around you.
He told me one story from the Pacific about combat. As far as I know he has only told one other person aside myself. I don’t know the circumstances or why he told my sister, or why he didn’t tell my brother. I have no idea if he has ever shared this with my mother or not.
It was one summer day when I was about 12 years old. I was helping him dig the basement for our house. He would raise the house with two old screw type house jacks, inching the house up, brace it, and start again. Eventually he had the whole house up on stilts, with enough room to dig the basement and build the forms for the foundation. We had taken a break and I still don’t remember what we were talking about for him bring up one of the few stories about WWII, and even rarer yet, a story about combat.
They paired the Marines up in what my father called foxhole buddies. These men would do many things together on the battlefield; eat, sleep, take turns at sentry, watch each other’s back and dig a hole in the ground to get below the bullets whizzing overhead.
My father never told me the names of his foxhole buddy. I don’t know if he had many, did they switch, were they close? Did they talk about home, sitting in the dirt, waiting for something to happen? They were just known as foxhole buddies.
During the mop up phase they would find a pill box, the fortified caves the Japanese built, taking one Marine from each pair of buddies to form a team to attack the pill box as the rest stayed back for support. They would take turns, you on this pillbox, and then switch for the next one. On this one occasion it was the other man’s turn to go. I don’t know if only one Japanese soldier was left in that pill box or a group. He never said whether only one shot rang out, whether it was a gun fight, was it a rifle? or a machine gun? In any case his foxhole buddy caught one of the bullets, jumped up and ran back to my father. He caught him in his arms, his buddy was about to say something, and then bled out. And in true hunter’s fashion, my father described to me the trajectory of the bullet, how it entered his buddy’s chest and clipped the aorta.
At the time I was much too young to appreciate this story. I was thinking ‘cool, just like the movies!’ But as I grew older I wonder what he was thinking of. What would it be like to make friends with someone, live through bullets going both ways over their heads, sharing a desire to live, and then have them die in your arms, knowing that you face that same fate every day you are out there? How many years did it take to tell this story to his children? I remember him saying that he made a point to hate every place they sent him. When he told my sister this story he mentioned the light going out of his friend’s eyes, just like the animals he had hunted. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason he did not bring home as many deer as he once did, was maybe, he just wanted to hike in the quiet woods.
jrschenck
Wow, quite a story. Thanks for sharing it. Your father told you more than my father told any of us about his wartime experiences. I asked him once what he did during the war, and he said “tunnel gunner,” and no more. He never talked about it.
On any given mission, about 1 in 10 did not return. How do you remain or get close to someone when the odds are that they will die sometime before the mandatory 20 missions are completed? Or that you would die? Or losing so many friends and comrades? My father, if I remember correctly, participated in 35. He was shot down twice, once behind enemy lines. He beat the odds, only to die young in the safety of America. I did not get the lessons or insight that you did from Uncle John. He lived behind a wall because he needed to.
My father also hunted. He usually got his deer. He rented a meat locker in Troutdale–home deep freezers were not common in the late ’40′s and early ’50′s. He didn’t talk about it, but he was a crack marksman. I think that killing the animal was not the point, but providing for the family was. He also fished, and harvested smelt each year. The smelt runs were enormous then, and the number of people fishing for them were fewer. Dried smelt, salmon, trout, and venison were cheaper than meat from the butcher. My mother had a garden, and canned vegetables. Dad was also a crackerjack mechanic, rebuilding the engine on the ’49 chevy, and did all of his own maintenance and repairs. It was a lot of work, but it made the money go further, and it seemed to me that we lived fairly well, or at least as well as our neighbors.