Back Cast
An old box fixed at the corners by packing tape holds years of keepsakes from my childhood that Mom deemed important at the time.
Newspaper clippings, a 1960s Topps collectible coin featuring Detroit Tigers leftfielder Willie Horton, a bar receipt signed by Steve Prefontaine (look him up) that Dad scored for me in 1975, and on it goes.
One of my favorites is my third-grade report card that, written neatly in cursive in the margins, includes a short note to my parents that declared that I wasn’t, well, the quickest of learners.
I dig this memento mostly because I can imagine Mom, a fun, humorous woman who died more than 20 years ago, chuckling to herself as she dropped it into the box, knowing that years down the road I’d find some humor in it.
I have and I wish I could tell her.
While I’ve since graduated from glasses that were held together by black tape during most of my elementary school years, I haven’t completely shaken the slow learner tag.
Quick story.
Earlier this winter during one of those mild, sunny January weekends that felt like a small reward for what we’d endured thus far, I drove to the squirrel woods in the Missouri River bottoms knowing it was a fool’s errand.
Even so, I had to get out of the house. I wanted to spot a fox squirrel sunning itself high up a cottonwood, it’s orangish coat giving up its whereabouts from 50 yards out. I wanted to lean against the rough bark of a burr oak tree, shoulder and aim my .22-caliber rifle with purpose and pull the trigger. I wanted to skin a squirrel or two, no matter how troublesome that so often is, with a new knife the kids got me for Christmas. I wanted to end it by slowly cooking a squirrel concoction that I’d likely be the only one eager to eat, which I’d be fine with.
What I got is what I expected. A painfully slow, knee-deep, and deeper slog through the woods that, if I didn’t know better from many successful hunts over the years, had never, ever held a squirrel and most likely never would.
I did see a bald eagle silently glide by as I was resting against a tree pondering my retreat from the woods. While cool, especially when you consider that such a sight was noteworthy when I started writing about the outdoors in North Dakota 30-plus years ago, it wasn’t what I’d come for.
The next day, leg-tired, a little less enthusiastic, but still wanting to drop something wild and fresh into the big slow cooker rather than dig out vacuum-sealed grouse, pheasants, gifted goose breasts or venison from the freezer, we pulled on long underwear and laced up winter boots for another day of it.
During the drive to another block of public land that boasted a cottontail population that was seemingly riding the high end of the cycle last winter, I envisioned us bumping rabbits, maybe even a couple reckless enough to linger within shooting range before ducking into thick cover.
I also pictured us laboring through snow deeper than we’d want or could negotiate to simply pull the trigger. My third-grade teacher, if she were riding shotgun, would have likely added: Didn’t you learn anything from yesterday?
Apparently not.
How I wanted the hunt to play out ended when the deer trail petered out and I sunk into snow up to my pants pockets. My son continued, not because he had something to prove, but simply because he could. He returned less than an hour later.
He bumped some rabbits he said but had to bust through waist-high snow to do it and never fired a shot. He did sneak up on a turkey sitting in a tree, he added, but like the eagle, it’s not what we’d come for.