Long Seasons On the Manor

I live for it. Annually, over 11 months, I wait and then put in barely two afield, and even then usually only on two days a weekend -- all that effort of packing, travellling hurriedly, hauling myself in over the mile of rough ground to reach coarser comfort relative to sleeping on the road itself. I've been doing this for 24 years now and secretly consider that the length on my season on what has for over 100 years been known, landowner in and landowner out, as The Manor.

Last year I promised myself that, upon the opening of the panolply of game seasons on September 28, 2004, I'd be out there nearly every weekend, just doing it. That promise did not account for several things well beyond the needs of spousal contentment: the wider family obligations, roof work, plumbing, yard work -- all those things we invent by virtue of being blessed with property under the umbrella of love. And my mother, 82, has been ill since June and staying with us or needing our attentions on and off throughout the late summer/early fall. More love.

In the meanwhile, the rains of this wetter'n wet year washed out the wood road into the cabin and, after three years of speculating on the need, it was decided that the bunkhouse we were supposed to add on in May would be built in September, when I couldn't make it up to give a hand...although that wasn't the reason.

When I finally made it up, October was fading and the skeleton was up on a sturdy foundation of poured cement pilings and nailed to the main building, complete with rolled roofing. There was much yet to be done installing a couple of windows for light, setting a door, insulating the walls and ceiling, finishing the walls, and putting up at bunkbeds for at least four people at a time...a rollaway and a counch thought to be adequate for overflow, although i do doubt it: too many of us are waxing "retired."

I was able to give a hand after all. And before anyone else arrived for that Great Raising I started in on the road, tiling in a water bar where the worst runoff accumulates into a roaring periodic stream, and made sure the water would deflect itself off into the woods and downhill toward the bed of a real rivulet that might profit by collecting it. Then I cleared about 30 feet of road that had washed out near the top of that incline, manhandling rocks into ledge cuts that are the footing of the road, and shovelling roadside banks atop the rocks to replace what had been carried off. I busted my ass for most of five days making that level and recovered over the next five before setting to again, this time finishing up by rounding out an overtight corner in the road that had become more than a moderate problem -- well, to me anyhow.

I had cut down a two-foot diameter sugar maple weed, wounded in its youth by a lumbering skidder, that had grown up to make a corner in the road to bend dramatically. I stacked the wood, and began to pile rocks I pulled out of the road before I quit from exhaustion and a need to get back home at the end of my first visit. When I returned I set to again and thought the job would take about a half day. At the end of the second day there was something akin to a quarry piled up nearby from among and under the roots, my chainsaw "blade" was burned out, the surrounding road was in good repair, only half the stump was gone -- Well...that helped some.

But in exasperation I had taken up a splitting maul to chop out a burl in the roots that would not give to either chainsaw or axe: the resonance wave travelled up my arm like a osilliscope graphic and exploded in my rotator cuff like a bunker buster missile -- and sprained my thumb. I was ruined for work but worked through the pain until I dug out the burl like a crazed dentist named Holliday blowing off away blue smoke at the OK Corral but I was "done" well before that achievement and in agony all night long.

Opening Day I awakened at about 4:30 a.m. to give succor to a moaning friend who, likewise, was suffering with a bad back that had awakened him in agony. After coffee, by 5:55 he was in a treestand not far from another friend who overnighted with us and I was on a ledge about a long quarter mile off, with the land/cabin owner ensconced on the "front" ledges of what we call "the potato patch."

Per usual, there was a helluva lot of shooting at dawn, but nothing came by any of us, and by 8:30 the rising winds over the edge of the ledge I sat on had me pretty well cooled off from any ardors that had kept me at full brew until then. Still, I didn't move until 9:30, at which time I stood up...and near fell down. It took me half an hour to feel like I was "on my feet," and by that time I had stumbled downhill into the hardwood bowl over which I had recently looked out, then up over a hemlock ridge, and back to the cabin where I made coffee for those not yet quite back in from the field.

We had a good breakfast of mule deer sausage and elk steaks (both the gift of my fellow back pain sufferer from a recent hunt he had made in Wyoming) with eggs amid laughter and impatience to get back out there, which we soon did.

This is the season of my life: hunting season. I haven't fired a shot except to sight in for the last three years. Everything is great. I could be better, but the hunting season is wonderful and in two more days, after a total of nine days of ThanksGiving holy day celebrations and vital recuperation of my aching shoulder, I'll be back On The Manor.