Seeing the Deer. “Did you see that deer?” Jesse said as we started the turn off the four-lane. A note of pleasure in his voice. “Uh-huh,” I said, using the old Abenaki word for yes that has with become so engrained into English that we take it for granted. Or is such a natural, human sound of agreement that there’s a sort of ancient universality to it? Like that quick intake of breath when we see something that surprises or delights us. “It was just standing there, right by the edge of the road. Its head up like it knew to wait to cross until the cars have passed. It had a big rack. I couldn’t count them, but I saw at least 4 points.” Oligen. Good. Comforting for both of us to think that deer was recognizing the danger of the passing cars. That even now, on a cool autumn night when the heat in its blood was urging it to run, to clash its antlers against those of other males, to mate and pass its life on to another generation, it was still aware of the new dangers we humans with our vehicles have brought to this land. I sat up, pushed my hat back on my head. No longer half asleep but scanning the road before us. We were driving back home from a storytelling performance at the Pequot Indian Museum in Connecticut. Three hours of driving into the early autumn evening. We’d passed through a small rain storm. And ahead of us was a clear wide strip of sky, grey clouds resting on the horizon, the red lava of the westering sun cutting through. “It’s going to be a great sunset,” Jesse said. I nodded, not mentioning to him how once again I was hearing his namesake’s voice in the way he talked. Jesse Bowman Bruchac, my mother’s father, used those same soft tones. And though his vocabulary and his patterns of speech were different, that reverent love Grampa had for this life, the beauty around us, the infinite gifts we may receive each moment that we breathe—those are fully there in my younger son. As well as the tendency to forget more mundane things. A gift which his older brother Jim and I, have also been blessed with. No need for me to worry about that sign of senility. I was born with it. If you wish to see a brief (or not so brief) look of panic on the face of a Bruchac man just ask this simple question: “Where did you leave the car keys?” Were it not for wives, co-workers, or such simple exercises as AlwaysLeavingTheKeysOnTheSameHook, all three of us would spend more than our usual two hours a day of aimlessly wandering about looking for. . .what was it we were looking for? Forgetfulness. I confess to it. Yet memories of other things, of people, of places, of lines of poetry somehow don’t get lost in that cerebral labyrinth. And all it takes is one phrase, one word, a scent, a sound, a certain slant of light to bring something back with such vividness that for a moment I am there again. “Did you see that deer?” My grandfather speaking those words. It was not yet dawn. He and I were alone in his old blue 52 Plymouth. I was only seven years old and had never seen a deer in the wild. Understand that this was 1959. At the edge of the time when the woods were returning and deer herds were beginning to rebuild in upstate Saratoga County. Just twenty or so year before that, deer had been so scarce—from overhunting and deforestation—that when a hunter brought a deer in to hang it up in front of Cote’s Store in Greenfield people flocked in from thirty miles around just to see it. 1959. A far cry from today—to use a poetic phrase my Grampa often spoke, more or less, since his grammar was often a mix of near-Elizabethan and the common tongue of the hills spoken by those like him who’d never had much schooling, but could say well enough what they meant. “That were a far cry from today,” was how he’d put it. Just as he’d say, “I be only an old man, but I sure as blazes knows what I know.” Today, a new century and more than five decades later, I see deer all the time. I make a note each evening of how many I’ve sighted (often the same ones on different days) on my seven-mile drive up to Bucket Pond. 51 this October just ended. And last year in that same month it was 48. My grandfather missed that return of those animals he loved—and had hunted when he was younger. We all still ate venison regularly, but that was from the deer my taxidermist father had hunted far to the north or in other states. Or, my father having lived through the Depression when one learned to make use of every bit of food available, from the neck meat he salvaged from the deer heads other hunters brought in for him to mount. Our freezers were always full of packets of such stew meat. Missing those deer as he did, Grampa was also aware of what his grandson was missing. And that was why he woke me long before first light. “Come on, Sonny. Get yerself dressed.” My eyes muzzy with sleep, I did as he said without asking. Whatever the reason was, I always trusted my grandfather. Only half awake, I stumbled a little as we went out to the car, his gnarled hand, brown as a cedar limb, holding my arm to steady me. And then we drove toward the dawn. Toward Vermont where I knew Grampa had relatives. I remember thinking that maybe we were finally going to meet them. But we stopped on a winding road, halfway up a hillside. Turned off the headlights and it was misty dark. The engine ticked a few times like a tired clock and then it was silent. All I could hear was my own breathing as I waited for whatever was going into happen. Then Grampa leaned toward me. “Look-see out there,” he said, pointing with his chin. I leaned toward the windshield, staring out into the misty dark. And ghostly shapes began to take form, moving slowly as I watched. “See ‘em there? You see them deer?” And I did. There were deer all around us, grazing on the frost-flecked grass. And as I watched I heard my grandfather’s door open. The dome lights didn’t come on. He’d flicked it off. He slipped out of the car, his steps more like gliding than walking. Leaning forward, hands clasped, he moved in among those deer. And they kept grazing, as unconcerned as if he were a relation come to visit. It was so like a scene from a movie or something that might come to life in your mind as you read it in a story, that I didn’t think to join him. I just watched, knowing I was meant to remember. Remember, Sonny. Something of the quiet, deep power of this land. Something of an old way that was not truly old. Something that was missing but not really gone. Not just held in the pages of books. In fact, thinking of books, that image of my grandfather would resurface again in my writing years later. First as a poem called “Seeing the Deer,” and then in a scene in my novel HIDDEN ROOTS. Only a moment, but just as the ripples from a single stone can reach distant shores, a moment that has never ended. In a part of my mind my grandfather is still there. Walking with those deer, a young man again. Disappearing over the hills with them, held forever in the embrace of a land that has never forgotten those who first loved it and drew life from it. Nolkak ta Alnobak. The Deer People and the Human Beings. Seeing the deer. Seeing our own untamed hearts.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 17:01:42 +0000
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