Idyll Banter (2003)
“Actually, that’s not completely true: I walked around the woods a lot with an unloaded eight-and-a-half-pound gun slung over my shoulder and sat for a long time on a snow-covered boulder the size of a school bus.
My friend, Lincoln’s Bob Patterson, was doing the hunting. Most of the day I was simply trying to make as little noise as possible and to figure out how to tell Bob that I needed to mark a tree really badly, but given the amount of buck urine we were wearing I was concerned this would ...undermine our efforts.
Deer, apparently, have a pretty good sense of smell, and would be able to tell from anything I happened to leave on a beech tree that there was a human in the woods who had eaten Lucky Charms and coffee for breakfast.
I had a wonderful time that November day, even when I was sitting on that frigid boulder: I had clipped to the back of my belt an orange pad filled with pellets that apparently help preserve body warmth as they’re compressed. (Here, of course, is a real technological breakthrough: For once heat is being propelled against the human bottom in the woods, instead of the reverse.) This was the first time in years I had been in the woods in the winter without wearing cross-country skis, and I had forgotten how magnificent the experience is—and how different it is from tromping around the small forests of Vermont in the summer or fall.MoreLess
My friend, Lincoln’s Bob Patterson, was doing the hunting. Most of the day I was simply trying to make as little noise as possible and to figure out how to tell Bob that I needed to mark a tree really badly, but given the amount of buck urine we were wearing I was concerned this would ...undermine our efforts.
Deer, apparently, have a pretty good sense of smell, and would be able to tell from anything I happened to leave on a beech tree that there was a human in the woods who had eaten Lucky Charms and coffee for breakfast.
I had a wonderful time that November day, even when I was sitting on that frigid boulder: I had clipped to the back of my belt an orange pad filled with pellets that apparently help preserve body warmth as they’re compressed. (Here, of course, is a real technological breakthrough: For once heat is being propelled against the human bottom in the woods, instead of the reverse.) This was the first time in years I had been in the woods in the winter without wearing cross-country skis, and I had forgotten how magnificent the experience is—and how different it is from tromping around the small forests of Vermont in the summer or fall.MoreLess
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