Relative Something

This morning the firearm deer hunting season opened in Wisconsin. The entire month of November echos with gunshots as hunters engage in some preseason shooting practice and adjustments of their aiming sights. Those sounds rarely happen earlier than sunrise, nor all around us at the same time, so this morning is notably different.

Locally, the hunt legally commenced at ten minutes before 7:00. I heard the first shot at 6:55. The culling of our deer herds is underway. I’d like to imagine it as some of our neighbors now being blessed with food to survive the winter, but I know that isn’t the present reality.

Earlier this week, our neighbor whose family owned much of the land around us, including our twenty acres, called to ask permission to hunt on our property this year. He started by asking what we were doing up here without horses anymore. It occurred to me that he never specifically asked to hunt on our property when we had horses.

The very first time we met him after moving in, he opened the visit by asking in the form of a statement, “You aren’t going to post the property no hunting.” ?

Welcome, neighbor! That was a fine ‘how do you do?’ I remember needing to pause to determine he meant it as a question.

Luckily, both Cyndie and I have a pretty good sense of reading intent and suspended our first impressions, allowing him time to feel comfortable and to get to know us as non-threatening to his way of life. In the seven years since that day, we have had nothing but positive interactions with him. Despite his ever-present initial gruffness, he has always been incredibly generous with helping us in times of need.

There was no way I felt a need to deny him the chance to hunt where he always had before just because we now owned it. Such was the case this week when, knowing there were no horses to disturb, he asked permission to enter our land to hunt deer.

Orange clothes are the fashion fad of the day. Cyndie donned a bright orange vest and put one on Delilah for their morning walk, which was altered to avoid our woods. Down the driveway and around the field to the north and back to the barn to open the chicken door on the coop.

In that amount of time, they heard two gunshots from our neighbor to the south, followed by about eight other reports from the distance around us.

Moments ago, Delilah broke out in a flourish of alert barking at the window in the sunroom, which normally means a squirrel (or squirrels –the other day there were six hopping around in the grass just outside). This time it was a bright orange person walking through the woods owned by our neighbors to the north.

“Good dog!”

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