From the Oak Tree

Most deer hunters spend a lot of time in trees. Once you climb a tree and spend a few hours there, it’s a home. You can always find that tree again, even when it’s dark. Your mind somehow absorbs the contours of the land and the placements of the trees.

December 2006. I found the oak tree and climbed slowly and stealthily. As the sun came up, something was not right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. First, there was the richness of the reds through the dark tree trunks at dawn. That didn’t happen every morning, but often enough — so that wasn’t it.

It had been a long, long month since I hunted from that tree and as the dark shapes clarified in the growing light, I was surprised at how far I could see through the woods — but that happened every year as the leaves fell, so that wasn’t it either. The nearby stream, so deeply worn through its banks that I could only hear it from the stand, sounded the same. Even the squirrels continued their busy rounds, hurrying along the same fallen tree trunks.

I tried pretending a little longer that I didn’t know what had changed. That’s the way it is with grief, I’d already learned, you can only let it in a little bit at a time. So here it was, finally, undeniable — the last time I was there, I still had my mom. It wasn’t the woods clearing that had changed. It was the whole world.

People tried to say the right things. At least she didn’t suffer long, they said, and I thought, but one minute was too long. At least she lived a long life, they said, and I thought, but it should have been many years longer. I knew they meant well, so I smiled and thanked them.

Your mom didn’t hunt, in fact, no one in your family does. In past years, you told your mom white lies about hunting; that you were going to be hunting deer in Canada when you’d really be hunting bears and wolves, for example. That you only hunted from the ground. That you never hunted alone. Now I miss her worrying.

There are favorite pictures to save always. In one, she is a young woman, with wavy brunette hair past her shoulders. She holds a favorite Scottish terrier, and poses at the wing of a small plane. She got her pilot’s license as a teenager, back in the 1930s. In another, she smiles from behind a microphone, ready to go on the air with her radio show.

My mom never understood my hunting thing, but she supported it. I always thought we were so different, but I understand now that wasn’t true. My spirit of adventure comes from my mom, and she instilled that spirit into me with a bonus — she believed in me.

Few loves are stronger than a mother’s love, both the giving and receiving of it. The ups and downs and sheer business of daily life can insulate and defer true feelings. But here, in the peace of the woods, high in a tree, even 10 years later it is easier to remember about the kind of love that never ends. I can feel it, like a constant, from her to me and back again.

The world can change in between the times I climb a tree and hunt, but the breeze as it slips through the hemlocks is like a whispered language I am beginning to understand. There are things you can always find again, even when it’s dark.