The Lost Woods

H. William Rice

Description

A collection that follows the lives of two families who own land and hunt in rural South Carolina

The Lost Woods is a collection of fifteen short stories, most of them set in and around the fictional small town of Sledge, South Carolina. The events narrated in the stories begin in the 1930s and continue to the present day. The stories aren't accounts of hunting methods or legends of trophy kills—they are serious stories about hunting that are similar in style to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. The collection traces the evolution of two families—the Whites and the Chapmans—as well as the changes in hunting and land use of the past eighty years.

Some of these stories are narrated in third person; others are told by a wide range of characters, from grown men and women to children, but only from one perspective—that of the hunter. As they walk the woods in search of turkeys, deer, or raccoons, these characters seek something more than food. They seek a lost connection to some part of themselves. The title "the lost woods" is adapted from Cherokee myths and stories wherein people must return again and again to the woods to find animals that were lost. Thereby, we find not only food, but who we are.

Through these stories Rice reminds us that hunting is inextricably entwined with identity. As one of the oldest rituals that we as a species know, it reflects both our nobility and our depravity. Through it we return again and again to find the lost woods inside ourselves.

Sujets

• Turkey hunting
• By Nature
• Waterfowl hunting
• Treeing
• Dirt road
• Frozen food
• Coonhound
• Boll weevil
• General officer
• Hiking
• Drought
• Theft
• Single-shot
• Short story
• Burial
• General
• Scrap
• Short Stories
• Family Life
• Hunting
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173307
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Lost Woods
The Lost Woods
STORIES
H. William Rice

The University of South Carolina Press
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rice, Herbert William, 1952-
[Short stories. Selections]
The lost woods : stories / William Rice.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61117-329-1 (Hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-330-7 (Ebook) I . Title.
PS3563.O8749A6 2014
813 .54-dc23
2013041125
For sons Will and Matt and my brother Dan
In memory of my father, the Reverend Herbert W. Rice,
who took me hunting and told me stories
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Deer Hunt
Stalking Glory
The General
Slick s Conversion
The Honor and Glory of Hunting I-Luke
The Honor and Glory of Hunting II-Clyde
End of a Season
The Longing
My Uncle s Dogs
Uncle Ivory
Poachers
The Lost Antlers
Call Me Bubba
Gobble, Gobble
His Mark
Appendix: Family Ties-White and Chapman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to publications where versions of these stories or portions thereof appeared. Earlier versions of Stalking Glory, The Longing, and Uncle Ivory appeared in Gray s Sporting Journal. An earlier version of The Honor and Glory of Hunting I-Luke appeared in Gray s Sporting Journal as Early Lessons. An earlier version of My Uncle s Dogs appeared in Gray s Sporting Journal as My Father s Dogs. An earlier version of The Honor and Glory of Hunting II-Clyde appeared in Sporting Classics as When the Walls Fell Down. Finally portions of the introduction appeared in Big Sky Journal in my essay Hunting among the Indians. I am grateful to James Babb and Russ Lumpkin of Gray s Sporting Journal and Chuck Wechsler of Sporting Classics for publishing my work. I also acknowledge the influence of various friends on my work and on my evolving understanding of the woods: my old friend and colleague Wilson Hall; my camping buddy and the fisherman I hope to be someday, Mark DeSommes; my oldest friend and first colleague, Rodney Allen. I also acknowledge my wife, Ansley, for her support.
Introduction
On a windy, frigid morning when I was around ten, my father took me squirrel hunting for the first time. We saw nothing. So to keep the morning from being a total waste, my father taught me to shoot his old scratched-up, single-shot .16 gauge shotgun.
There was an old chimney standing on the edge of the wooded area where we hunted, the lone remnant of an abandoned, dilapidated tenant farmhouse. My father took some of the crumbling mortar from the chinks in the bricks and drew concentric circles on the chimney, explaining to me about load and wad and spread. Then he handed me the gun and told me to put the bead on the innermost circle and pull the trigger.
All these years later I still remember the roar of the gun, the jolt of the stock as it slammed into my shoulder, and the cloud of dust that burst from the bricks. My father took his pocketknife and picked the shot out of the bricks, forever imprinting on my mind the pattern of the pellets.
Two years later, when I killed my first squirrel with that same gun, I felt as if I had completed the process that began on that cold morning. I had connected to something deep inside me that had no name, a connection that only blood could allow. The time in which human beings have lived among twelve-lane freeways and tall buildings, buying their meat packaged in Styrofoam and cellophane from the supermarket, is a blink of the eye compared to the eons in which man hunted to survive. Little wonder the first shedding of blood is so memorable: it allows for a connection to the collective memory embedded in our DNA. It reminds us that eating comes with a cost-the life of an animal, the stalking skills of a hunter, venturing forth into the woods on a cold morning when mist covers the valley.
Because I grew up in the small-town South, I was never far away from the woods. The backyards in my neighborhood ended in weeded lots that led to fields and trees and finally wooded lands. The farmers who owned this land didn t much care if boys wandered the woods. They often didn t care if we hunted there so long as we were careful to stay away from buildings or livestock. What I didn t know was where the woods ended.
I suspect I thought that they never did end, that the farther you wandered into the woods, the more mysterious they became. I read stories about hermits who lived in the woods, about mountain men who had their fill of civilization and just wandered away to live wild off the bounty of the land. When schoolwork became boring or I had arguments with my parents or my brothers, I would imagine striking out with nothing but my shotgun, a sleeping bag, and some matches to start a new life, living among the tall trees the way I imagined people had lived before anyone owned the land. I had never killed anything other than a squirrel, and though I had been taught to clean squirrels, I doubt that I could have figured out how to cook one over an open fire.
As I grew older, I learned more about the woods, and I left behind notions of hermits and mountain men. Still, with each new animal I stumbled upon in my wanderings, the woods became more mysterious. I distinctly remember the first deer I saw.
It was a gray, windless day in early November. The trees were beginning to lose their autumn color, and brown and yellow leaves were everywhere-on the ground, scattered along tree branches, floating in the water of the creek at the bottom of a huge hollow where I walked. I didn t have a gun-I was just walking the autumn woods, scouting out places to hunt. I topped the hill just up from the hollow and came upon the remnants of a road-two trails in the leaves, following the crest of the hill. And there before me was a buck. He stood sideways in the road, looking back my way. He was so still that he seemed for a moment to fade into the brown world around him, but the grayish tint of the winter fur along his flanks stood out.
I didn t know to count the points on his antlers. All I knew was that he was the biggest wild animal I had ever seen. When he snorted and lowered his head, I thought he might charge me. Instead he ran, slowly at first and then picking up speed so suddenly that he seemed to vanish, almost as if the woods had opened and taken him back into the patchwork of leaves and branches and underbrush around him.
I walked to where he d been, looked at the sharp marks his hooves had made in the dirt when he started to run. I would have never called him beautiful or majestic or any of those stale words that people use to describe the wild. I just knew that the woods were now deeper and more mysterious because he was there. There was life here that I could not fathom, could not know. Later, when I first saw mallards fly into a swamp lake or heard a covey of quail thunder into the air all around me, I felt much the same way.
At some point around the time I began hunting and exploring the woods on my own, I was also initiated into the stories that hunters told. They came from everywhere, gifts to all of us who hunted. Stories of uncles and grandfathers and friends and mere acquaintances and their encounters with the woods, with the cold, or with the dark, or with the wiliest rabbit anybody ever heard of or the largest buck that had ever breathed air and that incidentally had gotten away and was still out there haunting the woods-somewhere, somehow. These were stories told around campfires late at night after a day in the woods and a few stiff snorts of bourbon, or before sunrise and before the hunt over coffee and grits and bacon and eggs in local meat-and-three restaurants where all the waitresses wore puffed hair and tight jeans and were saints to put up with men who called them honey, or sweetie, or beautiful, and weren t terribly generous with their tips either.
For me at least, the stories became a part of what kept me coming back to the woods because they reminded me that I never truly knew what was out there. The woods were a world in which the mystery of creation was forever unfolding, merging somehow with my imagination of that world, so that even when the story was a leg puller, I never knew where the truth ended and the exaggeration and out-and-out lying started.
The town I knew. The woods I would never know in any complete way. There were parts of the woods that no one had seen, that no one could know or own. That mystery, that sense of something bigger and older than man, something that man could not explain or own in any real sense of that word, was part of the draw and part of the storytelling. It was also what finally led me to Cherokee hunting stories.
Long before white men came to these shores, Native Americans hunted these woods, living lives in which hunting was a way of life, as familiar and necessary as breathing. Perhaps they knew the animals much more intimately than later hunters would. Perhaps they understood the relationship of hunter and hunted as a spiritual matter, not an issue of how big or how many. I often think that the ghosts of these early hunters still haunt our woods.
Two Cherokee hunting stories came to capture for me the mystery of the woods as I saw and experienced them as I grew up. They come back to me now when I wander in the woods. The first, Ganadi, the Great Hunter and the Wild Boy, has been told by Freeman Owle and appears in Barbara Duncan s book Living Stories of the Cherokee (1998), a volume well worth the time of anyone wishing to