A Reverie on Failure Part 13: Imparting Experience from One Friend to Another Friend

Photo by Tyler A. McNeil, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

November 23, 2020

There is no way you can call me an expert hunter or, for that matter, an expert woodsman. I don’t see as many deer as I should. I don’t manage to summon those I do see. I miss certain shots. I have a limited skill in sign reading and tracking, and after the second night out, I’m ready for soft bed and pillows.

On the other hand, I am an experienced hunter and woodsman. I know certain things about deer and about the outdoors that can only come by experience. Even the questions I have for actual experts have come about from experience. Moreover, reading experts is not so impenetrable for me as for the inexperienced novice, as I remember being. So now it is a privilege to add a little counsel to a friend who is less experienced than I.

I am envious that he is a faster learner than I.

Commentary

As we saw in my last entry, experience and expertise are worlds apart. Experiences are the cinder blocks for building expertise, but without the wisdom to come out of the woods during high-force winds, those cinder blocks are basically useful for lawn decorations, stands for junked cars. Wisdom, however, is usually in the telling, not the explication, and, hopefully, the wise can take the telling of my story to heart, and build with my experiences, something in the way of a mental bulwark: “No, when the wind is whipping through the woods, do not tie yourself to a tree, like a dumbbell. Remember the tree that almost killed him, Mister Experienced Hunter and Woodsman.”

A friend of mine knew the guy in Wisconsin—friend of the family, actually, who accidentally shot himself to death with a rifle while crossing a fence. It is inculcated into us, by our grandfathers, by our firearm instructors, and by the state itself, which requires extensive hours of hunter safety training in order to purchase the license to hunt—it is inculcated into us to unload your firearm while crossing or passing over an obstacle. Experienced hunters rarely do so. Why? “It has never happened in my experience that a firearm has discharged accidentally.”

Indeed, my Wisconsin friend lost a friend, and that fellow left behind a wife and three young children, because when the experienced hunter set his rifle on the fencepost, leaning the barrel away from him, the firearm hung on a briar, by some miracle tangled itself around the safety mechanism, and then grabbed the trigger. When the experienced hunter pulled up on the barrel and away from his face to dislodge it, the briar asserted its leverage, twisting the barrel toward the experienced hunter, and his life ended within a second or two. Yes, when I cross a stream or climb a fence or a big log, I stop, unload my firearm, pass over the obstacle, pause and reload.

It’s a real pain in the ass, to be honest, but that phone call from Pete haunts me.

John is an experienced hunter, one of my teachers, in fact, and I was following him across a swollen creek last turkey season. He lost his balance momentarily on a slick log he couldn’t see, and I found myself looking down the muzzle-end of a loaded shotgun that was attached to him, but no longer under his control. I yelled at him. “Dude!” I said. He swore, “Sorry.”

All right, but experience isn’t always about life or death. Sometimes it’s about practicing with your firearm so that you do not cleanly miss the deer you see in plain sight at short range in the middle of the day (I’m giving my less-experienced friend a hard time, now. All in good fun, pal). Sometimes it’s about setting up here and not there. Sometimes it’s about idiosyncratic noises of that particular section of that particular woods (a creek hits a log in such a way to cause a sound like an animal making tall grasses whisper as it passes through). The range of experience multiplies with each year I hunt, and fail, and succeed. My friend doesn’t have the opportunity I do, to tromp around in two separate acreages any day I have free time for weeks at a time. His time is limited to a specific few days once per year. This last season, for example, we had a blizzard on one of the days he was able to be here, and we watched football indoors. It was fun, but it wasn’t experience-gaining, except for NO DON’T GO INTO THE WOODS DURING A BLIZZARD.

And then there’s attitude. My teachers, John and Mike, are infinitely patient with me. I say and/or do something stupid between a million and gajillion times a year, awkwardly trying to apply what they’re teaching me, but neither of them ever laugh at me, not until I laugh at me first, and then they pat me on the back (For context, Mike is twenty-one years older than me, and John is a few years younger than me) in a good-natured teasing. Neither of them have ever been cross with me, or yelled at me. In other words, they’ve been my friends. And what do I know about being a friend?

Now that it’s my turn to impart…uh…something to my own protégé, of sorts, what can I learn from John and Mike about being a friend? In this way, too, I’m sure I stumble, but the absolute last thing I’m going to do is even allow a condescending thought to stray into my field.

See, actually encountering “nature” at its most raw, that is, as competing for apex predator, makes the simple act of death-dealing into an intersection of complicated relationships. First there is the intersection of life and death, after all. Second, we have neighborliness. Third comes wildlife conservation. Fourth comes tradition. Fifth comes friendship, and on and on, in no particular order, simply intersecting. Here they all are, with guns and blades and flesh and bone and mist and wind and smiles, joy and disappointment. Friendship, I suppose, is a primary relationship among all those which are intersecting out in the gray fields of predator and prey.

“When the wind shifts at sunset, as it invariably does, make an effort to look to the paths parallel to your scent plume.” Is he ready for that little nugget? I dunno. I just remember that when I was ready, I heard it from John and Mike, one nugget among very many invaluable gifts to me, difficult to sort through, but a veritable treasure, something more valuable than gold. And so I impart it to you, my friend.