"Summer"

I step outside and immediately am met by a blast of thick, moist heat as if I’d opened the oven door. The July air labors under the hum and drone of an entire neighborhood’s stock of air conditioners. The leafy green tops of the pecan trees look like they’re melting as they shimmy and dance behind the waves of heat rolling off the rooftops. The thermometer has been stuck in the 90s for more than a month now and promises to remain there for at least two more. It is summer in Alabama. The worst time of the year for a hunter. The sport fishermen no doubt regard summer as the zenith of their calendars, but with gas prices what they are these days, I cannot imagine that even they are glad summer’s here. Rarely will you hear me exclaim much happiness over the arrival of summer, however, regardless of the price of a gallon of regular unleaded. Call me crazy, but I simply do not like it.

In the Deep South, summer is a sweltering void on the hunter’s calendar. A time for gin instead of bourbon, when hardly any game is legally in season and no sane person would feel any desire to go after it even if it were. While some folks hunt feral hogs in the summer, they typically do so only after stepping out of air conditioned trucks as they amble through the woods. It is too hot outside to do much of anything relating to the hunting camp, and even the heartiest of folks would quickly be run out of the woods by the deer flies, yellow flies, mosquitoes, snakes, ticks, chiggers, wasps, and bull gnats. I am convinced that only Yankees accomplish any real summertime scouting. Hunters like me suffer through summers thinking back on the past year’s hunts and looking forward to the next year’s while quietly celebrating each day’s passing, knowing that every day thereafter gets shorter and shorter as summer slowly succumbs to autumn.

Being unable to hunt or enjoy the woods this time of year, I rely heavily on old friends like Gene Hill, Tom Kelly, and Bill Heavey to get me through. Their words keep me focused on the fairer seasons and cooler pursuits when the mercury rises. Idyllic scenes in the hunting prints and wildlife art that adorn my home remind me of the times I live for and offer a place where I may get lost for a while.

As the calendar marches into late July and early August, I will clean my shotguns (again) and make plans to shoot some trap and skeet in preparation for the first dove split. The first of September will still be oppressively hot, but dove season is the traditional and ceremonial harbinger of all the hunting that is to follow, and signals the true beginning of the end of summer – a light at the end of the tunnel and a time for those of us who live to pursue game to don our camouflage and shoulder our shotguns again. A few weeks later I will get out my hunting gear to take inventory, make some minor repairs, and begin getting things in order for the coming deer season. The rifles will need sighting in, although my wife’s Winchester Model 88 shouldn’t require any adjustment; her 110 yard shot on a doe last January illustrated that, in the proper hands, the lever action can hammer nails.

When all is in order and I am prepared to begin another season afield, I will cross out the advancing days on the calendar and patiently but excitedly wait for the grandest time of year to arrive. Wait for the wind to shift out of the north . . . for that first nip in the air . . . for the air in the neighborhood to carry the sweet aroma of green wood smoke to my nose . . . for the trees to become set ablaze by turning leaves just before they fall . . . for the sun to begin retreating sooner and sooner . . . for the bark of the shotguns’ reports throughout the pecan orchards near my home . . . for driving a muddy truck for three months . . . for the freshest and most tender of venison filets . . . for evenings spent gathered around the gambrel . . . and for summer to finally be over so that all I love can come around again.



(c) Roger Guilian 2006