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A Pre-Season Ritual
There is magic in the sky tonight, born of Canadian prairies, borne by north winds. Two fingers of bourbon and a single ice cube go in the glass before I go outside to take up my yearly vigil on the night of the first hard cold front to listen for geese migrating. Lowering myself into one of the white rocking chairs, I sit and sip and wait for the migration's vanguard to pass. From high and lonely places they sing, but who these days hears their song? The hunter does. The Lab at my hip, Cade, so recently just a pup, has come to understand why we are outside waiting the first faint fanfare of fall. He knows now, after a season afield, that his life is tied to these visitors as surely as mine. Ears perked, head cocked, he peers curiously at me, a bourbon-sipping, Drake-clad madman sitting in the cold wind when mama is curled up warm abed inside. With a shrug and a wag, he dismisses this frivolity and lies down at my feet. I ponder the act of migration. Assisted by GPS and radar and air traffic control, how difficult is it, really, for men in airplanes to cross counties, states, countries? What feat is it for man to accomplish what feather and sinew have done for ages? We pride ourselves on our place at the pinnacle of creation, yet a bluewing teal smaller than a football can fly in one leap from prairie Canada to the Texas coast's rice fields in little more than a day. The sacrifices, of time, of money, of relationships... they come back to me on cold October nights while others dream. I am paid in full on nights like these because it is at this point that I begin to participate in nature in a way the average man of briefcase and business suit and season tickets and luxury car can never and will never understand. Others chase tenuous, fleeting things in life. I chase the things the cave painters chased, fanning a flame deep down in my soul that has burned as long as the birds have ridden north winds. A long time passes. The lights of the neighbors wink out one by one, leaving only Cade and me to listen to the wind in the dark. I walk to the porch rail to light a cigarette and as I sip the bourbon in the oft-refilled glass, the dog comes to perfect heel, cocks his head and casts his eyes inquisitively skyward. As if on cue, the geese call out to us. Specks. A lot of them. Their laughing, trilling call rises above the chilly swishing of the wind. Perhaps we shall meet, the geese and I and the now tail-wagging bundle of Lab nerves at my side, but the instruments I will bring to bear on the geese are trifling and weak against thousands of years of instinct. But I will lie in muddy fields, stand in frigid, waist deep water, hunker in ice-sheathed blinds all winter long just the same. To seek shelter in a warm house with the television and a hot meal like others do would make me a stranger to myself because in the end, what I will find this winter in shivering misery punctuated by handfuls of feathers is me. The really real me separated from office life and purchase orders and the stresses and nonsense that close my mind to the world around me. The crux of the sky's song is that I am here and the birds are here and we have closed all of creation to meet, one on one, and dance the endless dance of predator and prey. Maybe one day soon I will win. Just as likely the birds will laugh and wheel into the sky just as I laugh on the ground at the ineffectiveness of my spread or my calling or the willful inaccuracy of my shooting. No matter. One day soon, the birds and I shall meet and one of us will be the victor. The ancient dance will go on and I am a part of it and that, more than anything else, is the heart of things, as sure and true as my love of the ancient song in the sky that I listen for tonight. Until that day, I simply listen, thankful for the music the north wind has brought for millennia; music that only I and a few others still listen for, know, love. It's about to be a beautiful time of year. |
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