APPALACHIAN RAGE
What’s that?”
James quieted us with a motion of his hand as he cocked his head and strained to hear over the crackling of the ice-covered branches. “My feet are freezing,” Paul blurted out, ignoring the hint to be quiet. Oblivious as usual to what was going on, I couldn't help wondering why he even came hunting, the way he was forever complaining about how hard it all was. Rotund to the point of being unable to move quickly or quietly in the woods, he was always needing help getting over a fence where he had stuck or being pulled out of a brush pile into which he had fallen. He never hit anything, although he did share in whatever game the rest of us killed. That alone could have been enough to have kept him coming along as it put food on what, in his single mother’s house, was a pretty barren table.
“Why don't buy you some boots and stop complaining?” Ron snapped.
An embarrassed hush fell over the group giving James his desired silence. We shuffled around, not meeting each other’s eyes, as we waited for someone to say something that might soften the hastily-spoken words. Ron was always the first to lose patience with Paul, but there was no call for him to say what he had. Some topics weren't to be brought up, one of them is how bad off somebody’s family was.
There was no sense in making someone feel worse about things that he might already, and we all knew why Paul didn’t have boots. It was for the same reason Jack and I didn’t have any either and why our feet were just as cold as Paul’s. Two socks, a bread loaf bag over that, covered by yet another sock and all crammed into a low-cut shoe had to do. The difference between us was that Paul didn't mind complaining while there was no way Jack or I would breathe a word about being cold. Letting people know you had less was just as shameful as bragging about having more.
“I thought I heard a motor,” James said, and Ron's blunder was forgotten as we all strained to pick up any bit of foreign sound. With a couple of years of age on the rest of us, James was more experienced in the ways of the woods and nearly always the first at seeing signs of a game or telling when something wasn’t quite right. He was our natural leader, and even when he was a little too heavy-handed and aggravated us, he was the standard against which we measured ourselves. Being second to him at hearing something was still worth some bragging rights, but as hard as we tried, no one could pick up a hint of anything over the chattering of winter birds and the clattering of frozen limbs knocking together in the breeze.
One by one our attention drifted back to finishing up the packing of our few belongings so we could start for home.
We were at the edge of Cumberland Mountain, Mountain, an area which once had echoed with bawling farm animals, yelling kids, and laughing and cursing adults scratching a living from the thin soil of their steep and stony fields. A day had come, though, when the worn land would no longer feed them, and the people had loaded up their few possessions and moved to town. They left behind, to serve as signposts for our wanderings, gardens of nameless headstones planted in lonely little plots, close by dwellings reduced to piles of rotting boards, overgrown flower beds, and fruit trees gone wild. With fences rusting away under the accumulating humus of generations, generations, property boundaries disappeared. The land became again a commons, wandered over by those who needed it for hunting, collecting herbs and ginseng, or as a place to hide their moonshine stills.
Like our fathers before us, since old enough to pack a rifle, the five of us had been coming regularly to this now unpopulated area to get meat for the family table. We had arrived yesterday morning with spirits high as we walked in from where we’d left the car.
The first flakes gently drifting through the branches raised our hopes for a light tracking snow to help us in finding game. A deer or two was in all our dreams, to give bragging rights to the shooter and meat for Sunday dinners for our families through a long winter. Failing that, which more than likely we would, a trunk load of rabbits and squirrels, with maybe a few quail thrown in, would go a long way to helping out.
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