The Owl and the Offering.

I want to talk about being out in nature. Being surrounded by nothing but trees and one’s own thoughts; the forest during the day offers great colors and conversations of chirping birds and loud squirrels. Walking down a path that has been treaded by man and animal, over the months of use it’s easy to find your way. The forest at night is entirely a different story. The same path you were walking during the day takes on an eerie feeling at night. The birds are sleeping and the squirrels are snuggled tight in the crooks and elbows of great trees. The forest’s only sounds are that of sporadic rustles in the leaves and possible snapping of twigs under foot with the occasional hoot of an owl.         

The first time I went deer hunting I was with my great Grandpa, who was nearly a full blooded Indian. Not the one with the dot, but the one with the feathers. At four in the morning he and I walked into the woods with our rifles. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my pimpled face, I didn’t need to. Gramps knew those woods like the back of his hand. As we approached our trail to enter the wall of oak and walnut trees, he told me to hold on a sec. I took a knee and acted brave in the cold November morning air. He pulled from his pocket an old Crown Royal cloth bag, all purple and gold lining. The purple looked dam near black in the early hours of morning. He handed the bag to me and told me to pick a branch and to hang the bag from it. I asked him “why”? He talked about the spirit of the owl and how it’s job, in his belief, is to take the spirit of the deer if we kill one to the other side. In the cloth bag was tobacco, a payment/ offering to the owl. The tobacco was vanilla scented, still to this day when I smell someone smoking a vanilla cigarette, pipe, or dog rocket (cigar) I think about that morning. I picked a branch and tied the little tobacco bag tightly to it. I reached into my pocket for a stick of gum and stripped the gum of its silver wrapper paper and put in my mouth. The silvery paper fell to the ground as I tried to catch up with Gramps.  Gramps walked ahead of me in the night air, he was so quite in the woods. It was as if he was floating above the dead leaves, he was so damn quiet. I couldn’t afford to lose him in the dark wood.  

We came to the top of a ridge, the only way I knew it was a ridge in the dark, my foot steps on crunching leaves were echoing off the other side of the small valley. I was very happy he was there or I would have fallen off.  We came to a small bluff that sat at the top of the clearing. On the bluff was a green and white moss that felt like an old quilt. We lay down just as the sun began to rise out of the east. The bottom of the valley faced east and we lay on the north ridge on top. Gramps had a feeling the deer were using the valley for cover. He was right like most of the time on the topic of hunting. Three deer came running from the west in a hurry; they didn’t even stop to smell the air.

I started to lift my rifle and Gramps quietly touched my arm. I let the rifle settle back to the moss covered rock. It seemed liked hours past when a six point buck came galloping in to the valley. It stopped directly in front of us and began to sniff the ground. I looked to Gramps and he winked. I lifted my rifle and sited the cross hairs of my scope on the front shoulder just behind the shoulder bone and squeezed the trigger.

We climbed down the sloped bluffs ground and hiked to where the buck laid lifeless. Above us an owl screeched and landed on a branch of a dead sycamore. Gramps looked up towards the owl and nodded his brown leathery face and spoke words I didn’t understand.

We worked together dragging my trophy deer out of the woods, getting up the bluff was the hardest. After, it was easy going, it looked as though we were on the same path we took to get to the moss covered bluff, but I wasn’t sure. We came out of the clearing of trees and Gramps told me to wait at the base of a walnut tree, so he could go and get the truck we had parked on the other side of a hill, “there was no sense in us working harder than what we had to” he said..

As he disappeared over the top of the hill I began to walk the tree line looking for the purple Crown Royal bag filled with the tobacco offering.  I never found the bag, the one thing I did find was the silver wrapping paper of my gum.

Still to this day when I go hunting I bring a Crown Royal bag filled with vanilla smoking tobacco stuffed inside and tie it to a tree branch for the Owl.