by Reg Darling
-Late Season-
A few days into Pennsylvania’s late archery season, I went out with my bow ostensibly seeking fresh venison, but also because bowhunting is my sweat lodge. The bow revitalizes my roots in the Pleistocene and, in the late season, it helps me shed the brutality of my rifle.
Fresh tracks warmed me with alertness until late morning, when cold finally leaked through wool into my blood and thoughts. I built a fire. A passing raven announced the unique silence of winter woods. The fire’s murmur and crackle were a strange lullaby.
I needed stillness more than meat, senses more than thoughts freighted with words, worries, and distraction. I was weary of issues and opinions, of myriad constant reminders of our powerlessness in the face of money’s leaderless tyranny. The dialogue between the forest’s silence and the fire’s soothing song was more subversive than anything I’ve written.
The endangered thing we must preserve and protect with wild land isn’t a bird, bat, or mussel; it is the remnant wildness languishing in our over-civilized hearts, the anarchic edge of resistance to all tyrannies large and small, the wild mind wandering in the smoke of a campfire, silence defined by a raven’s voice.
. . .
James Morrison Memorial Bridge at Kinzua.
copyright Reg Darling
Reg Darling is the author of Hartwell Road and Coyote Soul, Raven Heart. His articles have appeared in several national hunting magazines. You can visit him anytime you want at his web site.
Copyright 2010 by Reg Darling. All rights reserved.
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