Grumpa Joe's Place

GREAT WHITE HUNTER

Those long, hot summer days on the farm challenged my imagination to the limits. Every day I had something to do, yet it felt like I had nothing to do. I call that boredom. One of my favorite daydreams was to be a pioneer. I dreamed of carving out a place to live in the wilderness. My games all centered on pioneer life.

The back acreage on the farm was very wild. Gramps had a small vineyard and an apple orchard, followed by a field of blackberries and another of boysenberries. Behind that, the farm was more primitive. My seven-year-older brother Bill has a different recollection of the farm. When he was my age, Mom and Gramps tilled the entire acreage. They kept chickens, pigs and a cow. Gramps also had a horse named Nellie. By the time I was born and old enough to recall, the neat little farmstead had reverted to nature. It was wild and very overgrown. Witness lines still defined the fields. A path coursed between them, but not much else.

The soil was extremely sandy and dry up to the edge of the woods. At that point, the terrain dropped into a wetland. The grasses that grew there were easily two feet taller than me, and the large swarm of Mosquitos and bugs attacked me each time I went exploring. The forest folded around the wetland. A creek wound its way out of the grasses and disappeared into the forest, dividing the property. The geological map of the area indicates that the creek is intermittent, meaning it dries up during the summer. I never saw it completely dry, but often I could jump across the flowing water. Most of the time, crossing the stream meant finding a log jam to balance on as I stepped from log to log. It was never really deep water, but who wanted to get wet. If I came home with wet socks and shoes, Mom would know and lecture me on the dangers of being in the woods alone.

Once across the creek, I climbed a sandy knoll and came out of the woods into a sandy lea. The forest again surrounded the opening. It was in this clearing that I explored the fringes near the trees. I often picked up items of interest as I walked. One time, I picked up a funny-looking grey stone. The surface looked chiseled. I didn’t think much of it at the time so I dropped it into my pocket and forgot about it.

As I explored the woods and the clearings, I was always on the lookout for animal tracks. Yet, in all the years I spent on the farm, I never spotted a wild animal. I found tracks in the sand every time I explored in the back. Deer tracks were abundant, and once I found some huge, wide prints that I imagined were from a bear. Most likely, they were from a large dog.

Later, I pulled the stone from my pocket and looked at it more closely. Every day, I looked at the stone. Finally, I realized that I had found an arrow point. That really got my juices flowing. My play shifted from pioneering as a settler to that of the Indian. I hunted the forest for slender Sassafras trees, which I fashioned into a bow and some arrows. The best I could find were sassafras trees. They were very straight, but brittle. When I put tension on the stem to bend it into a bow, it would snap. Gramps watched me, and noticed my frustration. He disappeared for a short time, and came back with willow stems that were the right size. They were very flexible. He helped me make a bow. Making the arrows is another story. Finding stems that are perfectly straight without a bend or a kink is very hard. I did the best I could to make arrows from both sassafras and willow. I stripped all the leaves and the bark from the stems, then notched the heavy end to fit the string. The bow and arrows took me several hours to make. I could hardly wait to test them. My arrows didn’t have a flint stone tip or a feathered quill. When I shot one, it cartwheeled or flew sideways till it dropped. Playing this way taught me that the Indians knew a lot more about making bows and arrows than I did. It didn’t occur to. me that they spent generation after generation perfecting the art on a daily basis. Nor did it dawn on me that when the weapon is the primary means to secure food, the hunter tries harder to succeed. My attempts to make a bow and arrows went on and off that summer, and a few summers after that.

Each time I uncovered an arrowhead, my interest in making bows and arrows renewed. The year after I found my first arrowhead, I came upon another one. This time, I picked it up much closer to the house. The new one was easy to identify because it was more complete and had grooves at the base for tying it to the shaft. It was in excellent condition. Only the tip of the point was missing.

Indians were skilled at tracking animals, so I began to do the same thing. Whenever I found deer tracks, I followed them until I got lost in the brush. It wasn’t long before a pattern emerged, and I knew exactly where to find tracks. Even with all of my tracking and traipsing through the woods I never spotted a living animal on the farm.

Years later, after Mom and Dad retired to the farm. Dad told me that he saw deer come up into the yard to eat apples from the trees in the orchard.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Characters I knew, family | Tagged: Arrow heads, making a bow and arrows, Tracking animals | 1 Comment »