Raised Up on Eagle’s Wings!

by Gaila Oliver | Jan 5, 2018 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, Betsy had me grilling some chickens, and whilst I was involved in that, a fast-moving front blew through, a lot quicker than the TV weatherman had forecast. There were just a few scattered raindrops, then the wind switched around out of the north northwest, and picked up to 25 or 30 knots. I retreated to the screen porch, just going out every 15 minutes or so to turn and season the chicken breasts.

As I walked out the screen door onto the patio, I caught a movement up above the pecan tree that towers over The Store, our guest house, which used to serve as the old Brownspur commissary store. I glanced up, and froze. Just above the height of that tree, and a few feet over toward the Mammy Grudge, hung a hawk. He had his wings spread but was not flapping or gliding with them; he had evidently found some kind of an air pocket, or air foil maybe (I don’t know what that is, but my son-in-law is a pilot, and I’ve heard him say it, and it sounds cool) and was just flatout standing still in the air, 75 or 100 feet up. I watched him for several minutes, and he never moved a feather, that I could tell, nor did he drift backwards atall, in the face of a high wind. Awesome!

But as I watched, here came another movement above the trees on the Mammy Grudge ditchbanks, approaching the hawk from behind – a full-grown bald eagle! We’ve seen him before out here; matter of fact, he almost got to be the Guest of Honor at our last Thanksgiving Dinner, by coasting in low just above the ground and flaring up to land in a cottonwood not 50 yards from my deer stand. I had not seen a deer, but the prospect of an admittedly illegal wild turkey for the holidays made me ease my 30/06 up. Even after I realized it was an eagle, I still had to wonder briefly if eagles are white meat, like hawks and owls?

Anyhoo, this eagle had survived deer season, and had showed off for me and Betsy on the balcony several times, so we know he lives close by. Now he was apparently coming to hover with that hawk, over The Store. He flapped his great wings very slowly, and it almost seemed like he was sneaking up on the hawk. Do eagles know that hawks are white meat too?

But when the bigger bird was maybe four feet behind the hawk and still moving, the smaller predator sensed him, obviously, for he suddenly folded one wing, swooped downward in a starboard turn, and grabbed a piece of that 30-knot breeze to scoot back across the Mammy Grudge. If the eagle was stalking his supper, he was out of luck.

He was not after supper. Apparently all he wanted was that particular magic spot that the hawk had found, for he continued to move forward until he was exactly where the hawk had been hovering – I mean, I’d been watching for five minutes now! That big black bird got to the exact spot, then froze in the air, wings spread, but he never flapped again. Only thing he did differently than his smaller buddy was, he spread his wingtip feathers out, but then just became motionless – yet he never moved backwards with the wind atall. How do they do that?

Awesomer! On a Sunday afternoon, God was showing me something new again – two great birds who just hung suspended, wings spread but not flapping nor gliding in the air currents. There seemed to be just this little invisible space (to my eye, anyway) up there above The Store pecan tree where nothing was moving, in a 30-knot wind that was getting stronger.

I watched until I got scared that the chickens might get a little too brown, then when I moved toward the grill, the eagle saw me, dipped a wing, and departed off across the Mammy Grudge. Doggone, I hated to interrupt his afternoon flight!

Ever wish you had wings? There’s a song we’ve done in the Kairos Prison Ministry on a weekend with juvenile offenders: “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky….” And there’s another one which sings: “God will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn….” Been there; seen that!

Cotton Caroling & BONFIRES!

by Gaila Oliver | Dec 29, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, the SBC Powers-That-Be decided that it was NOT a sin for men and women to study the Bible together, and started Couples Sunday School Classes. Since Betsy and I had been the Youth Ministry (volunteers) for nearly a decade and several young married couples had come up through our Youth Program, we were asked to start a Couples Class at Leland FBC. So we turned the Youth over to another couple and cranked off a Couples Class, using some of the techniques that had worked on building the Youth group, as well as outdoors here at Browenspur.

That first Christmas of the CCSS, I was still farming, and we took our Class Cotton Caroling. We still had some of the smaller 3-4 bale trailers on our plantation and I saved a trailerful of first picking cotton (as opposed to scrapping cotton) for the event. About a dozen couples climbed into the soft white fleece and burrowed in against the cold. Roy Smith and Charlie Murrah brought their guitars, and we drove slowly along Deer Creek Drive in Leland, with the lighted floats and Christmas trees in the Creek, singing carols. It was another 6 miles out to our home at Brownspur, where I had a bonfire ready to light in the persimmon grove. There was a little excitement when Teddy Miller, who had lost a leg when his chopper was shot down in Vietnam, got down from the trailer without his prosthesis, and cried, “Oh, no! I’ve lost my leg…again!” Several of the guys climbed back in and found where he had hidden it in the cotton.

We touched off the bonfire, and passed out hot dogs, marshmallows, willow sticks to cook them with, and hot chocolate. It was a clear, cool, starry night, and the screech owls and hoot owls joined in our caroling around the fire. “Silent Night” was never sung more beautifully! When the fire began to die down, Teddy led the charge to remount the trailer for the ride home, but the Couples Caroling gave way to Couples Cuddling for the ride back to town, everyone nestled into their holes in the warm cotton. It was a great night.

My cousin Mountain Willy once pontificated on a night in that same persimmon grove: “God does not subtract from man’s allotted time on Earth those hours spent around a good campfire or bonfire.” I’d like to think that’s true, but ain’t found that exact verse’s location in the Bible yet.

Happy New Year. Come to the Brownspur Bonfire and the MWHF Museum!

The Pillar Of Fire

by Gaila Oliver | Dec 14, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

I have sat in duck blinds, deer stands, dove fields, and turkey blinds, to watch sunrises for over half a century, man and boy. I continue to be amazed at the things I see that I’ve never seen before, after all those years. It happened again a few years ago.

Adam and I sat in a duck blind on New Year’s Eve weekend, even though we knew when we left the house that the pothole would probably be frozen up. It was, too. But we were already up, had had breakfast and coffee, and I had a full thermos of Slung Coffee with me. We resolved to stay for a while, at least until the coffee got drunk.

I was on the second cup, teetotally undisturbed by ducks, when the sky began to turn pinkish in the east. Adam is colorblind, so cannot appreciate the subtle nuances of a sunrise like I can, but he was at least paying attention. When a shaft of pink-orange light suddenly appeared from below the horizon, he was as puzzled as I was.

How to describe it? Well, a cloud front had come in from the west, covering about 90% of the sky. The remaining clear 10% was, of course, in the east. The sun was still below the horizon, but right over it, this single shaft of light shone straight up from where the sun was obviously fixing to emanate from. Hold your hand out at arm’s length, sticking up. Sight to the horizon over it. Now, close your thumb and little finger in. No, still too wide. Fold in your ring finger. That’s it!

The shaft of pink-orange light was just that wide, shining straight up from the as-yet unseen sun, up to about ten degrees on the clear horizon, just under that cloud bank. Only that single shaft. Now, seeing a single beam of sunlight is not that unusual, right? Everyone has seen the sun shining down like that through a hole in the clouds.

Right. But this beam was shining UP! And there were no clouds between the sun and the horizon. It SHOULD have been a bright semicircle of light, glowing pink-orange to herald the coming dawn. NOT one solitary shaft of light!

My son and I remarked on it, and tried to figure a logical explanation. Maybe it wasn’t the sunrise atall, but a fire, or a searchlight just below the horizon. As we watched and speculated, of all things, the shaft of light grew – but not wider: taller!

Now it moved its beam up onto the base of the clouds, higher and higher, until that single beam was stretching up probably 20 degrees over the horizon. More than ever now, it seemed that it was in all probability a fire of some kind. While Adam couldn’t tell the color, I had never seen a pink-orange searchlight, so it had to be a fire.

Nope – well, in a manner of speaking, it was a fire – it really was the sun. Just the very tippy-top of the sun soon glowed at the edge of the horizon, verifying that it was the source of the light shaft we were witnessing.

Yet at this point in a sunrise, it’s supposed to be a glowing semi-circular halo. This day, though, it was sure different. There was absolutely NO halo – the sun was a third of the way up, and though the sun itself was understandably bright, the main glow from it was still only that single shaft of light, now turning from pinkish-orange to faded red, then to darker red, stretching now maybe 25 degrees up over the horizon.

The sun was halfway up before the glowing shaft disappeared, to be replaced by your standard, garden-variety semi-circular halo, which became a circular halo as the sun cleared the earth briefly, before the clouds began to obscure the whole scene.

You probably think I’m going on a little too much about this phenomenon, but as I said to begin with, I’ve seen a LOT of dawns, yet never one like this.

Okay, here’s where we get to the religion part, so you can go on to the shoe ads if the mention of religion offends you.

The two of us in the blind that morning were both facing life-changing decisions. Both of us have strong faith, and have known the Creator personally. Both of our decisions involved God-based dichotomies.

Was the Creator speaking directly to us? Was He clearly saying, “Follow Me!” Was he laying it out for us at the end of the 20th Century as He did for the Hebrew children wandering in the wilderness 3400 years ago? “A Pillar of Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night”: Could that be it, just for us two Neill men?

Well, did anyone ELSE see it that morning?

The Gun Is Just an Excuse to Be There!

by Gaila Oliver | Dec 8, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

Last weekend of last deer season — a not-so-good deer season, for me. We’d had ‘way too much rain early in the year, which flooded the swamp we generally hunt in, and kept it flooded for over two months. That’s not a condition we’d usually complain about, but this year, instead of knee-deep water, it was 20 feet deep! That might still have been okay, but we never got ducks: too warm, in spite of having plenty of water early for a potentially great duck season.

In the Good Old Days, we’d have turned to the ditchbanks and loaded up on rabbits and quail, which had been moved out of their regular habitat by all the water. Now there are so many coyotes, that the rabbits, once hemmed up on the ditchbanks, were scarffed up by the wild canines within a couple of weeks, and the fire ants have decimated the quail population.

So, the last weekend of the season, we hied ourselves out to Cousin Jack’s place, close to the Big Hongry Territory. Early that Saturday morning I slipped across the heavily-frosted pasture toward a favorite clearing just across a little branch.

Well, “little branch” may not be a correct description. Though the water trickling down the stream was clear and less than two feet deep in most places, with plenty of sandbars to step across on without getting your feet wet, the almost-sheer banks were about 15 feet deep. I paused at the top of the bank to check out the easiest place to cross. Yet before I could move, a movement around a bend caught my eye. It looked like a bow wave of a ship, and I eased my gun up, thinking I could be back at the cabin for breakfast, if a buck just hove into view 30 yards away between those steep banks. Sure enough, brown fur was visible at the water’s edge!

Swimming brown fur. It was an otter!

We’ve always had otters in the Mammy Grudge at Brownspur, and I’ve spent many an hour watching them play. Most wild animals have a well-developed play instinct, but God gave otters an extra dose. Several times I’ve seen otter families spend hours on a mud-bank water slide, the adults obviously wetting themselves down and slicking up the banks before calling their pups to join the frolic. I once watched an otter couple make love with such abandon that if I had had a video camera, it might have been a pornographic film. Yet I had never watched one catching fish before, except for one time seeing an otter swimming away from a beaver dam with a probably four-pound bass in its jaws. I couldn’t paddle fast enough to catch it, either!

This hill otter was swimming along either side of the deeper pools, poking his (yes, it got that close!) nose into underwater pockets and beneath drift piles and around stumps, moving swiftly enough in a couple of circuits of each pool to drive the resident panicked perches into the middle. Then he’d dive into the school of fish, which would literally explode into the air, the fish desperate to escape. But the otter was too quick; he’d always come up with a perch, then swim over to a sandbar to eat it. He’d hold the head between his paws and start eating at the tail, shearing off bites and chewing them well before swallowing. When only the head was left, he’d shove it into his mouth, chew briefly, then gulp it down with his head nodding up and down, whiskers clearly visible. He caught and ate one larger bream straight down the bank from where I watched, motionless and fascinated. He never saw me.

I never got to my stand until almost ten o’clock. I watched that otter work that little branch for his breakfast for most of the morning, then when he went out of sight back upstream, I finally crossed the branch, but sat on a log close enough to see the otter if he came back.

I have often maintained that, for most hunters, the gun in hand is merely an excuse for being in the woods, observing God’s Great Outdoors close at hand. No, I didn’t get a deer. So?

MAJOR

by Gaila Oliver | Nov 16, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

He came to us by way of a friend who knew that we have a great deal of experience out here at Brownspur in rehabilitating injured or immature wildlife. Since he originated at the farm that Big Robert used to call “The old Millsaps Place,” and since son Adam graduated from Millsaps College, playing a lot of championship baseball there for the Millsaps Majors, we named him “Major.”

Major was a half-grown great horned owl, who apparently came off second-best in an encounter with a catfish pond paddlewheel. He had major equilibrium problems when he came to Brownspur, to the point that we sometimes wondered if his owl momma had maybe had an affair with a vampire bat, or something similar. He’d be calmly sitting on Adam’s gloved hand, and would start to lean slightly forward, without noticing, it seemed. He’d lean until he actually fell over, but his claws would cling ever-tighter to the supporting hand, and there he’d be, hanging upside-down from Adam’s hand, apparently content to survey the world from this batlike position. After a few minutes, Adam would gently push him back upright, and the process would start all over again, though maybe backwards this time.

We have previously hosted and rehabbed a full-grown great horned owl, a nearly-grown barred owl, four screech owls, and two full-grown hawks, and all but one of the hawks and one screech owl recovered and were released back into the wild. At any rate, we have owl rehab experience, which needs to be done under the supervision of a vet, as per the law. Major flat needed the rehab. The first few times we tried to turn him loose, he flew smackdab into light poles and trees.

Adam took him under his wing, so to speak, and became Major’s momma in the young owl’s eyes, that was obvious. When Adam would walk out of the house in the morning or after he got home from work, we could hear Major popping his beak like a 22 rifle shot, in greeting. They had a game, in which Major would run to the corner of the pen when Adam opened it, and do a little dance, then hop aboard the extended gloved hand and ride. He loved to visit the Swimming Hole and had his own special perch in a small cypress there, from which he’d survey his family afloat, like a lifeguard. The mockingbirds who nested in the big cypress never adjusted to having an owl for a guest, and harassed Major hatefully.

We essentially emptied the freezer of squirrel and rabbit, which he preferred by far over chicken. Adam would perch Major on his hand (ungloved, after the owl showed he’d not hurt him) and offer him pieces of meat with the other hand. He’d mock-roughly grab the meat and swallow it down until he got full, at which point he’d still reach out and grab the meat, but would hold it for a moment in his beak, then drop it to the floor for Blondie, the Lab, to clean up. Eventually, Major learned to perch on Blondie’s back, but the Lab wasn’t atall comfortable with that.

My guess is that his momma had done this to get the little owl ready to leave the nest and attack paddlewheels, but he had the funniest ritual: Adam would place his finger against Major’s upper beak, and the owl would lower his head and push so hard against the finger, that if Adam suddenly moved it, the owl would fall over forward. He’d let us stroke his head, and loved for you to scratch the back of his head, but you had to approach him from the front to do it. To sneak up and reach out to scratch from behind was to invite a snap that might bring blood. An owl’s beak is a powerful weapon, like his talons. And don’t touch his (or her?) breast!

Major eventually learned to accept, but never really liked, bike riding with Adam. Not on the handlebars, though: he still wanted to be on that gloved hand. He hated motors, and after he once panicked at the approaching lawn mower, we had to mow completely on the other side of the house from him. Adam once left for a four-day visit with Mountain Willy, and I took over the feeding duties, but he was sure glad when his real momma came home!
Well, Major finally recovered, after spending the summer with us, and we turned him loose. Now and then, we still hear him popping his beak in greeting. He was a pleasure to have for a guest, except for the mockingbirds and blue jays!

Wildlife Bad Guys

by Gaila Oliver | Nov 9, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

We’ve all known forever that it’s a tough world out there beyond the back porch. We can’t keep cats around out here at Brownspur since the coyote population built up to the point that the wild canines run in packs regularly. Matter of fact, keeping beagles isn’t really an option either, unless you keep them penned up, and who wants to keep beagles penned up if you live in the country? The Labradors are big enough to fend for themselves, but the beagles are too small to stand up to a pack of coyotes, especially the miniature beagles we used to have.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that, since the coyotes have taken over, we don’t have the problem we used to with packs of wild dogs, which have no innate fear of man. At least coyotes aren’t a real threat to maul a person, far as I know. Watch now: having said that, someone will call to say their Aunt Lilly was eaten plumb up by a pack of coyotes last October in Goose Hollow.

Obviously, the food chain in the wild means that Brownspur bunny rabbits and field mice, as well as house cats away from the house, will be killed and eaten by larger predators like coyotes, the occasional wolf, foxes, bobcats, hawks, and owls. It’s the way the world works, ever since Adam & Eve ate the Apple. Man as a predator is also figured into that equation, though most Americans do most of their predatoring at the local grocery store. Truth be known, in modern America those of us who hunt for food are looked down upon especially by many city-dwellers as blood-thirsty Neanderthals who need sexual counseling.

We’ve gotten too far away from the last generation, when if you wanted fried chicken for Sunday dinner, Junior had to go catch a pullet, wring its neck, pick it, gut it, chop off the feet for later chicken-foot soup, and whack it up into recognizable parts for flouring and frying. Those were the days when the pulley-bone was the choice piece on the platter, and Momma would pick some lucky kid to pull the pulley-bone with her, to see which one was going to have good luck and which would get married first. Whatever happened to the pulley-bone in the buckets that fried chicken comes in today? The youngest kid used to have to settle for the parson’s nose, the last piece over the fence.

Can you imagine sending a modern teenager out to catch a chicken, kill it, and clean it for supper?

Oh, well, I didn’t start out to go there. What I wanted to tell you about was a meanie out here at Brownspur: an uncommon predator that we’ve caught killing out of Pure-D meanness, not for food or self defense.

We’re always conscious of wildlife predators out here, which includes the denizens of the yard. Of course, that sometimes includes the coyotes on a late-night pass, as well as coons, possums, skunks, and even a mink, when the peaches start falling. Those are the predators which wear fur, plus the owls and hawks, and the more-than-occasional snake. Used to be, I encouraged the blue jays to congregate around the house, because although they’re raucous, they will congregate and raise Cain when they spot a snake in the yard. Then I can get a hoe and see if it’s one of the poisonous brand which needs to be eliminated entirely, or sometimes a too-large blue runner, chicken snake, or spreading adder that needs to relocated a mile away. A big snake can make you hurt yourself!

But no more will I encourage jaybirds. Adam and Greg were out at the Swimming Hole one afternoon and noticed a blue jay swooping and fussing out by the apple tree, so they hustled over, expecting to encounter a snake.

But it was a baby dove, which was just big enough to flutter out of the nest, but needed a few hours to master flying safely. Despite the efforts of the mother dove to distract the jaybird, the blue one was attacking the little dove viscously. By the time the boys rescued it, the damage was done. The blue jay had pecked in the back of the baby dove’s skull. Had to be out of sheer meanness! I never saw that before.

So, it’s open season out here on blue jays. I am aware that they are probably a protected species, so undoubtedly the game warden will be over to visit. Yet doves are also protected under the game laws, until the season opens. Therefore, that blue jay was breaking the law itself. We held court. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and executed. Selah.

The Scariest Jack-O-Lantern!

by Gaila Oliver | Nov 2, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

For years, my youngest daughter has belonged to a cult of pumpkin carvers. These young people take great pride in the production of Jack-O-Lanterns at Halloween, even to the point of purchasing special sets of pumpkin-carving tools to work with. They even have contests to choose the most intricate and scariest of their productions, which are sometimes accompanied by props, such as hers was this year.

In addition to carving a web across half the pumpkin, which really looked scary when she placed a lighted candle therein, she made huge black tarantula-looking spiders out of pipe cleaners that were clinging to the sides of the web, just waiting for an unwary victim to get close enough for them to get their fangs into. You didn’t even want to go into the same room with it!

A few days after Halloween, she set the pumpkin out on the back porch to await the sad fate of Jack-O-Lanterns the world over: I was to set it out with the rest of the garbage that week, on collection day.

That day rolled around, and I got the garbage together from the rest of the house, took it to the kitchen door, and was fixing to take it out onto the back porch, but fortunately I glanced out there first, and froze. At the foot of the chaise lounge, its black and white fur rippling softly in the morning breeze, reclined a skunk!

We have always had skunk problems in the country; comes with the territory, so to speak. Once Betsy went across the covered walkway to our guest house, “The Store,” for something at night, and when she opened the door to return, a skunk sat in the middle of the boardwalk, regarding her nonchalantly. She yelled for someone in the house (me or Adam) to come to the rescue, but I was reading in the den, with the stereo up loud enough for me to hear, which means loud enough for the neighbors to listen, too, if they want to. She ended up spending most of an hour besieged in The Store, and was sho’nuff hot at me for not coming to the aid of a fair damsel in distress, no matter that I had no idea the fair damsel was in any distress atall.

Labrador Boo once chased a skunk away from entering the back porch, but the skunk took offense and sprayed both Boo and the porch, which meant bathing both in tomato juice several times over the next week. We decided it might have been cheaper to let the skunk walk through the screen porch undisturbed. I know Boo concurred.

Yet here was a skunk apparently napping on the kitchen end of a 50-foot-long screen porch. I couldn’t get out the door without arousing it, though I could see the close screen door hadn’t been pulled closed the night before. Yet shooting him there was unthinkable. Skunks don’t take kindly to shooing, either. What to do?

I turned and went through the house to the garage door, and slipped outside there. Going to the door from the garage onto the back porch, I gently eased that door open and propped it with an anti-freeze jug. I peered in, but could barely see the black and white fur rippling on the other side of the chaise lounge. I turned and exited the garage, slipped around to the screen door from the porch onto the boardwalk to The Store, and eased it open, taking the spring loose, so it would stay thataway. Now the two doors at the other end of the porch from the skunk were open for its exit, if I could arrange that.

Okay, now I needed to open the screen door opposite the kitchen, which was only maybe ten feet from the reclining skunk. Using the rosebush for cover, I snuk silently toward the visitor, knowing that if it was aroused, the screen would give little protection from the stinking spray. For the last few feet, once I had to leave the rosebush’s cover, I went to hands and knees. Finally, I was at the screen door. I reached out and snagged the bottom of the door with my fingernails and began to ease it open, peeping fearfully at where the skunk rested as the door gradually swung to reveal the black and white fur… that from this close appeared to be more grayish. Maybe an old skunk? I eased the door more open, squinting with concentration. The fur WAS pretty gray.

Then I saw it had an orange base, barely visible.

Pumpkins, when set out unattended in the Southern heat and humidity for several days, produce the most beautiful mold, fully two inches of hair-like fungus that starts out rather tarantula-black at the base, but gets lighter as it gets longer, becoming almost white.

I gathered up the remains, for the garbage truck, then went to beat my daughter.

Fall Smells & Sounds

by Gaila Oliver | Oct 9, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife

Lyme Disease victims almost never reach REM sleep, so I am a usual light sleeper, and don’t dream. Rapid Eye Movement stage of sleep is when most dreaming takes place, so I knew I wasn’t dreaming when I awoke in the middle of the night last week, and faintly smelled woodsmoke.

Having been through two costly house fires, I am especially attentive to the smells associated with house fires: woodsmoke and propane or natural gas, which smell similar to me. Without moving, just trying to extend my nose outside the light blanket we were sleeping under with the windows open, I was pretty sure I wasn’t smelling wood afire that belonged to me and Betsy. This had a twang of campfire smoke maybe, and was pretty far off, smelt like.

I have read that when a person loses one sense, other senses grow more acute to compensate. My hearing has always been poor, since early bouts with ear infections, plus shooting right-handed shotguns left-handed. Naval gunfire might have contributed as well. Whatever, my smeller seems more sensitive than other folks’ olfactory talents. But I clearly heard at this point what had awakened me: a screech owl sounded off again from the persimmon grove across the driveway.

There just ain’t a better fall sound than a screech owl’s quavering cry, that some of the little predators can stretch out longer than they look like they’d have breath for. The owl in the persimmon tree was answered by another from back toward the Mammy Grudge ditchbank, behind the house. Screech owls not only make wonderful pets, but they seem friendly in the wild, often coming to perch close to a campfire and enter into the conversation at night. I drifted back to sleep, thankful for the serenade, blending with nightsongs of crickets, frogs, and katydids.

Investigation the next morning revealed unto me that the woodsmoke came from behind a neighbor’s house, across the pasture where we’d dragged up broke-off pecan limbs after Hurricane Harvey’s winds. As I figured that out, I was standing under a vine-covered hackberry tree, and the smoke smell mingled with the tangy odor of possum grapes hanging from the vines. I just made a trip with a couple of friends to visit a burn-victim friend in Memphis, and Betsy had sent us off before daybreak with a bag of biscuits slathered with pear honey or muscadine jelly, along with two thermoses of my Slung Coffee. JuBaby made the remark as we breakfasted on the road at sunup that he gussied up his muscadine jelly with juice from possum grapes: “Gives it a little tartness,” he boasted. I had never heard of doing that, though I’ve eaten lots of possum grapes.

The smell of woodsmoke and possum grapes also mingled, as I crossed the yard, with the aroma of ripe persimmons. Uncle George Vickers, a former resident of Brownspur, used to make persimmon beer that he aged in buried kegs. I have also eaten persimmon bread, but it takes a LOT of persimmons to get enough pulp for that or persimmon preserves, because of the many large seeds in the fruit: as in the old country saying: “He was shiverin’ like a dog passin’ persimmon seeds!”

I didn’t shiver that badly, but I did experience that delicious little dancing across my spine that my grandmother used to say was “A goose just ran over your grave.” I breathed: woodsmoke, wild grapes, fallen persimmons, the scent of ripe cotton before defoliation, the heavier odor of harvest dust from corn and beans being combined down the road. Betsy had just finished a making of pear honey back in the kitchen, and I had tested it with my last cup of Slung Coffee, the empty cup still swinging on my finger. It was a cacophony of autumn smells!

It was missing one thing. I thought I’d go back into the den and take my left-handed Remington 870, “Southpow,” out of the gun cabinet, picking up a couple of shells. There was a squirrel that needed a scare out on the Mammy Grudge ditchbank, for Betsy begrudged him the pecans he was invading her yard to pilfer, when he should have been content with the pignuts in his own back yard. The smells that were missing from this almost-perfect-smelling morning were the combined aromas of gun oil and burnt gun powder. I figured to make it perfect!