Like His Own Backyard

There is a particular ridge that straddles the border between New York and Vermont where I find myself spending a fair amount of time in the fall, hunting for grouse and woodcock. Everything lives on this ridge-deer, turkeys, moose, bear and all manner of smaller animals. There is good cover with plenty of water and food. Lots of berries and gnarly old apples growing on the trees in an old, gone-by orchard that is still hanging on. And more nuts than I’ve seen anywhere in Vermont. The butternut trees grow down at the base of the ridge, along the bank of a small stream. Higher up, there is a stand of shagbark hickory.

As often as I have walked under those trees, I’ve picked up fewer than a dozen hickory nuts to stick in my vest pocket and inexpertly smash with a hammer when I get home. For a long time, I thought it was the squirrels that had beaten me to the hickory nuts. They have to make a living in the woods, after all, and I’m just out there for recreation. So they get out earlier than I do.
But the squirrels do have a human competitor for those hickory nuts. For a long time, I didn’t know this. Then, one day when I was hunting the ridge with a friend, we walked through that stand of hickory trees and, as usual, there wasn’t a single nut anywhere on the ground.

When I mentioned this, my partner said, "Then Dickie Davis must have been through here. The squirrels will miss a few but Dickie is a vacuum cleaner."

"Sure," I said. "Don’t know why I didn’t think of that earlier."

So the next half hour or so, we talked about Dickie Davis, one of those people who gets talked about a lot by people in these parts who like to get out in the woods to fish or hunt or simply … get out in the woods. We talk about Davis the way musicians will talk about someone who has perfect pitch and can effortlessly play any instrument or a ballplayers who can hit, run and throw and never needs coaching. We say they are naturals or that they have a gift. They make the rest of us feel mortal.

My own first glimpse of this gift occurred several years ago, by accident. It was a fine spring morning. The sun had not been up very long and I was pretty far back in the woods, so I didn’t expect to see anyone else. I had been hunting turkeys without any success. One had gobbled from the roost, before dawn, and had answered my calls for a half-hour or so. But then a real hen turkey had begun calling and her music was evidently more seductive than mine. The gobbler flew off the roost in her direction. He gobbled once or twice after he was on the ground, then shut up. For the next couple of hours it was just me, the crows, the songbirds and the black flies.

I finally got up and started back for the truck, not feeling any particular sense of disappointment. Turkey hunting goes that way and if you can’t take a gobbler’s rejection, then you should stay in bed. And, anyway, there are no bad mornings in the spring woods and this one was especially fine. The air was cool and clean and the woods had that tender green tint that lasts for only a few days. There were chaste, white blossoms on some of the cherry trees. Trillium and other flowers were blooming. A small stream ran along next to the logging road I was walking and it sparkled in the early light.

What could be better, I thought, than to have the woods to yourself on a morning like this.

But, then, I didn’t have them to myself.

Up ahead, there was somebody climbing up the stream bank to the road, then walking toward me.

I felt a momentary, absurd sense that I had been intruded upon. Then I wondered who the intruder was and what he was doing in my woods….

Stratton Magazine – Southern Vermont's Journal of Living

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