“THIS
IS
THE STORY OF TWO DEER HUNTERS WHO
ENTERED THE WOODS
IN THE NIGHT …”
Those
are the first words of a framed poem hanging in my home study. The
handwritten note on the back of the frame reads, “The result of
a deer hunt with Jack Byrd at Kyle Norman’s cabin on November
16, 1964.” The framed poem was presented to my dad, Bob
Daniel, at the Old Hickory Council of the Boy Scouts of America’s
annual dinner later that month. Why such a presentation? Because
Dad was the District Executive for the Old Hickory Council, and he
and his friend Jack had a remarkable experience during that fateful
deer hunt.
My
dad grew up in rural Person County, North Carolina. The oldest of
three boys, he plowed fields behind a mule and worked from sunup to
sundown on a tobacco farm which was, when he was young, the sole
livelihood of his family. He and his brothers were expert hunters
and fishermen before they reached their teens. They had to be,
because the family depended upon the fish and game they brought in to
supplement the family dinners.
The
Boy Scouts of America was a good fit for Dad. He loved the outdoors,
he loved kids, and he was a great leader. I was only two years old
when he went to work for the BSA, a job he once boasted paid him
eight thousand dollars a year. Eight thousand dollars! A veritable
fortune! So much more than his own father ever made in a single year
farming tobacco. But he still hunted and fished, and we ate
everything he brought home. Eight thousand dollars a year might have
seemed like a lot to him in those days, but it still helped the
family food budget to have a steady supply of meat from the field and
fish from the lake on the table.
Dad’s
passion for the outdoors, honed during his formative years, was a big
part of my own childhood, too. I grew up hunting and fishing because
Dad wanted me to know the same joys he knew as a kid. I could dig my
own worms, bait my own hooks, and fish for hours alone by the time I
was old enough to cast a line. For Christmas when I was eight years
old, I got my own shotgun – a small, single-barrel .410-gauge
beauty with which I hunted rabbits, squirrels, and doves until I was
big enough to hunt with something bigger. But Dad never took me deer
hunting before November 16, 1964, because I was too young. And even
though we still hunted birds and small game after November 16, 1964,
he never took me deer hunting after then, either, because he never
went deer hunting again.
The
story began with a 3:00am wakeup call. I was nine years old, a light
sleeper, and I heard him rummaging around the house that morning,
getting ready to leave. Jack came by to pick him up. They pulled
out of the driveway about 3:30am, headed for the woods adjacent to
the new Camp Raven Knob facility in Surry County. Dad was excited. So
excited that he forgot his glasses. That didn’t help.
To
hear Dad’s telling of the story, the two of them set up on
separate hilltops in the woods an hour or so before daybreak. They
weren’t using tree stands. Dad’s hilltop looked out over
a steep ravine on one side and out across a few acres of plowed
fields on the other, belonging to a small farm. Way on the other
side of the farm was a big, penned chicken coop.
Jack’s
hilltop was just across the ravine. The two of them were separated
by only about thirty yards. Close enough that they could call to
each other, if they wanted to. Dad and Jack set up and settled in
before the roosters began to crow.
They
sat there in silence, waiting for the sun to come up. Dad was mainly
a small-game and bird hunter, mostly because he could hunt small game
and birds almost year-round and it required a lot less in terms of
expensive equipment and preparation time. He didn’t have
nearly as much experience with deer hunting, although he had bagged
several bucks over the years growing up and the occasional doe during
legal “doe days.” But Jack was a big-time deer hunter. And this spot,
he was confident, was a deer favorite in the early
morning hours. They came out, he said, near sunup, to graze at the
edge of the woods where the fields took over from the trees. So they
waited.
Just
as the eastern sky began to lighten up, Dad heard a shotgun blast
coming from the far edge of the farm on the other side of his
hilltop. It was immediately followed by a “squalling roar,”
to quote his words. “It’s a bear,” he thought. “The farmer caught him
in his chicken coop.”
He
was right. But just then, he didn’t know that the farmer was
using buckshot, and he hadn’t killed the bear; he’d only
wounded him.
Now,
everybody who has ever encountered a wounded bear in the woods knows
that it isn’t a good idea to get in his way. But this bear had
been shot and wounded all the way across the farm, a good half-mile,
in Dad’s estimation. Surely, he thought, he wasn’t in
any danger, sitting on a hilltop a half-mile away.
This
time, he was wrong. He listened as the wounded bear tore up the
farmer’s chicken coop. He heard two more shotgun blasts, and
the slight echoes in the predawn morning of a man yelling and
shouting curses. And he heard more roars from the wounded bear. And
they seemed to be coming closer.
When
he told this story, Dad said it finally dawned on him that the bear
was being chased by the farmer across the field, straight at him and
his hilltop hiding place. And when it became evident from the
roaring and squalling, growing louder and louder, that the bear had
passed the tree line at the base of the hill on his side of the farm,
Dad got up and started trying to climb the tree he was sitting under.
But it was a huge old hardwood, probably oak, although he couldn’t
tell in the dark and didn’t feel much like wasting time trying
to find out. The branches were much too high for him to grasp, and
the trunk was much too thick for him to shimmy up. He was stuck. He
only had two options: move to another site, or hunker down and hope
the bear didn’t discover that he was there.
Dad’s
options got a lot slimmer about then, because his friend Jack,
sitting on the hilltop across the ravine, finally heard the commotion
and yelled across the ravine. “Hey!” he called. “You
hear that?” Then he switched on his flashlight and shone its
beam across the ravine in Dad’s general direction.
That
caught the bear’s attention. Dad swore that he could hear the
change in the bear’s growling and roaring right after the
flashlight’s beam cut through the darkness. All of a sudden,
instead of harboring a hope that the bear might cut across the side
of the hill and head away from him, Dad knew that Jack had just lit
him up in the bear’s sights like a Christmas tree in a little
kid’s sights on Christmas morning. And he knew that he was the
object of that bear’s affection, and that the bear intended to
tear into him just like his own kids tore into their presents under
the tree.
And
it only got worse from there. Because just as he realized the danger
he was in, the bear burst through the brush not twenty yards from the
hilltop, headed uphill straight for Dad, who was still standing there
at the base of the tree.
Now,
my dad was not an athlete. A strong man, sure, who had grown up
hard, working with his back and his hands his whole life. But one of
his legs was three-quarters of an inch shorter than the other, with a
slight clubfoot deformity, as a result of the polio he’d
contracted as a kid. That hadn’t kept him from getting drafted
into the Army during the Korean conflict, though. But because of the
superior marksmanship skills he exhibited during boot camp, gained
through a lifetime of hunting, he was tabbed to stay stateside as a
drill instructor and member of Fort Benning’s marksmanship
team. Still, running was never Dad’s strong suit.
Until
that day, November 16, 1964. That day, to hear Jack tell it later,
my dad set a world record in the Ravine Run and Jump.
Dad
said that when the bear burst out of the brush, headed for him, he
was at least twelve feet tall and weighed at least a thousand pounds.
Of course, he had forgotten his glasses, so I guess that might be a
slight exaggeration. At any rate, both Dad and Jack agree on the
basic details of Dad’s fantastic flight.
Leaving
his gun, his extra ammo, and his backpack holding his sandwiches and
thermos behind, panicked, Dad ran for his life. With the bear in hot
pursuit, coming within just a few feet of my terrified father, Dad
tore down the hill into the ravine. He leapt over bushes and dodged
around trees, running and sliding like a stuntman in a jungle movie.
When he got to the bottom of the ravine, he jumped the small stream
and began to scramble up the other side, pulling himself up with his
hands as his legs churned up the earth, throwing clods into the air
behind him. Jack tracked him with his flashlight, trying to get a
clear shot at the wounded bear chasing him down into the ravine and
back up the other side, toward where Jack was now standing on his own
hilltop. The eastern sky had lightened up, but it was still dark. Jack
couldn’t aim clear enough by flashlight with Dad running
right at him and the bear behind, so he couldn’t shoot. And
when Dad was halfway up the hill and the bear was still coming on
strong, bellowing and roaring in rage and pain, Jack realized that
now he was in danger, too.
Dad
was screaming at Jack to shoot the bear as he flew up the side of the
hill. Jack was screaming back that he couldn’t get a clear
shot. So now there were two of them running for their lives.
When
Jack finally gave it up and turned away to run down the other side of
the hill, Dad stopped screaming and started praying, out loud. And
the Lord apparently heard his prayers, because he caught up with Jack
and passed him as the two of them burned out the soles of their boots
running from a wounded, enraged North Carolina black bear.
Many
years later, I heard that old joke. You know, the one that says you
don’t have to outrun the bear who’s chasing you; you only
have to outrun the guy running beside you. I don’t know if
whoever first said that knew my dad and his friend Jack, but I know
that Dad always said that was what was running through his mind just
then.
Well,
the story had a happy ending. For Dad and Jack, anyway. Probably
not so much for the bear. Or for the farmer, for that matter, who
apparently lost a perfectly good chicken coop and a number of
chickens. The bear gave up the chase and headed deeper into the
woods. The sun came up and revealed two hunters who hadn’t
killed anything during the hunt, and who had only been in the woods
for a short time that day, but who had lost their appetite for
venison.
And
my dad never went deer hunting again. Eventually, his lame leg gave
him so much trouble that he had to give up hunting altogether,
because he couldn’t hike through the countryside anymore
without so much pain that he couldn’t enjoy it. So he turned
all his outdoor attention to fishing, which gave him hours and hours
of pleasure until he couldn’t do that anymore, either. He died
in 2009. But to his dying day, he swore the whole story of the
twelve-foot-tall, thousand-pound bear was absolutely true.
Not
long after the hunt, the Old Hickory Council presented Dad with that
framed poem. It hung on the wall in his own study until he died,
when I brought it home to hang on the wall in mine.
This
is the story of two deer hunters who entered the woods in the night.
They
crept to their stands and sat on the ground to wait for the morning
light.
Not
a sound could be heard for miles around. Everything was quiet and
still.
Then,
from out of nowhere came the roar of a bear, he stood just over the
hill.
The
brave hunters sat breathless and still as the bear moved closer until
A
voice from the darkness pierced the night: “Jack, please turn
on the flashlight.”
As
the light was turned on, he plowed up a furrow and in no time flat he
was there.
He
laid down his gun and broke him a switch and said, “Now let me
at that bear.”
Now
to all you deer hunters who enter the woods when the night is black
as pitch,
Remember
your motto, “Be Prepared,” and instead of a gun, take a
switch.
-
Words Inspired by Bob Daniel
Eddy
Daniel is a retired professional educator living once again in his
native Person County, NC, his ancestral family home, where his father
Bob Daniel grew up. Since retiring, he has devoted his time to his
wife and daughter and two precious grandchildren, to teaching Sunday
School and small-group Bible studies at his church, and to writing
the stories that have been kicking around in his head for most of his
life. These include four full-length Christian action novels and
four Christian science fiction novels, all self-posted for e-book
readers only, and none of which has ever earned more than a few
dollars. Nor has the total combined sales for all eight earned
anywhere near the limit for an author to be designated as
"published" for purposes of this contest. But that
hasn't stopped him; like a very well-known and highly successful
fantasy writer who shall remain unnamed here, he writes for himself
because it gives him great joy to do so. This story is the first
non-fiction one he's ever submitted anywhere.
