TWL Classics - The Last of the Elephant Hunters

Originally Published September 2008

When I was young, I dreamed of Africa - of swatting down elephants with the big bore double barrels in the company of other legendary ivory hunters like Karamoja Bell or John “Pondoro” Taylor.

The dust of the stampede. The mad dash to dodge the charge of the herd. Slamming the last two cigar-sized rounds into the breech and touching off the shots that save your rear end from being ground into the African soil.

After the hunt, we toast to success through the flames of a mopani campfire. We drink to past hunts, to old stories, to friends present, and to those we’ll never hunt with again. After a while, I’ll stagger on to bed with visions of tomorrow’s elephants.

It’s not like I’ve had anything against elephants, then or now, but for this boy, the adventure of wandering the land chasing wild creatures has always...well, I just don’t know any other way to be.

For me, a dozen years later, Africa is farther away than it ever has been. Even back when I was a kid, large scale ivory hunting was 50 years extinct, as it should be. Today, you can still hunt elephant, and from what I’ve heard and read they’re exciting, challenging hunts, but it’s a rich man’s game of slapping down big bucks and posing for a picture beside a tremendous animal laid low by a puny bullet. In reality, there is not much need for an elephant hunter anymore.

Many people find it odd the devotion of my life spent chasing animals. Some folks are interested, some are repulsed, and many others just don’t understand. While I’m certainly not embarrassed, being a curiosity is not one of my favorite things, so I avoid the topic as much as possible in a general crowd. And even attempting to explain this passion is near impossible, although I’ve certainly taken a stab at it.

Even so, a hunter is a label I identify with more than any other, which no doubt sounds silly to others. And I guess it is. Few people in this country need to subsistence hunt. I am clearly not starving. Still, every autumn, hunting is about the only thing on which I can honestly concentrate.

This season is right around the bend, and I don’t need the calendar to remind me; there are clues everywhere for those who have the senses. The green grass of the summer is starting to look old. Acorns are budding up and falling from the oaks, and the days are getting noticeably shorter as the sun tracks a slightly different path west, the light shining brighter off waxy leaves in the afternoon hours.

More than this though, I know the season is coming because when I lie down in bed at night and wait for sleep, if I listen closely, I can hear the coyotes howling down in Hog Valley. I can hear the crackle from the burning tip of a pre-dawn cigarette as I stand in knee-deep water waiting for the sunrise and the first flight of teal down on the Big Lake. Lingering amid the cattails listening to the flocks of coots chat amongst themselves, and the splashes of feeding bass and gators, I watch to the east as the sun rises into the clouds of a winter front, scattering purples and oranges across the sky and reflecting across Okeechobee. A shot echoes across the marsh to remind me of why I’m there. But at this point, it is not loud enough to wake me up.

Yes, the fever is running high now. Only February will cure me, and rather forcefully too, I may add.

If I were so inclined to explain myself and elaborate on why I am so compelled to load up my truck and drive to distant places for game, I guess the best answer would be the freedom of it all. Being able to roam. Making decisions of consequence and living with these choices. Even though there are game laws, your days and actions are guided by your own sense of morality and ethics and little else. After all, once you send that bullet or arrow on its way, there’s no calling it back.

When you spend as much time in the woods watching life work itself out as I do, you gain enough humility to see the world in a different perspective. For instance, these experiences a field have tamed my adolescent notions of having control over everything - no matter how far in advance you plan or how much money you save for a trip, there’s an inherent chance that the days will be ruined by weather or something else unforeseeable. A hunter can’t go into the woods and expect Nature to fall into his line. You have to stay adaptable and in a good mood - and thankful for even having the day to consider it.

Hunting can also cure those afflicted by some sense of being “right all the time”. More times than not, showing up and being patient is more successful than detailed scheming and plotting and speculating.

These conditions very much make me the person I am. Hell, even my flare-ups of social anxiety can be partially diagnosed from a pastime comprised of hiding oneself.

Also, I love seeing new places and meeting new people. I certainly benefit from jumping off the Interstate and the repeating cartoon background of Golden Arches, Motel Sixes and Cracker Barrels. I’d rather eat some greasy Back Road Diner fried chicken and catfish off a lunch buffet than ever step into a chain restaurant again. The towns – Otter Creek, Red Feather, Olar, Coleman, Newton’s Crossroads – may not sound too romantic, but they ring beautiful in my ears.

But as much as simple things pleasure me, and no matter how much solitude I may crave in the woods, taking a big deer is much smaller than the experience of sitting around the campfire shooting bull about it and other hunts past.

A decade ago we got together religiously every second weekend of November. We camped in tents and drank moonshine and cooked steaks on the oak fire. We all got hangover drunk telling the same stories everyone had heard before, added with a new nugget of falsehood or embarrassment at the cost to the victim of the tale. Of all the things wasted on my youth, I’m proud to say the lessons learned and the lifelong friendships made around these fires were not discarded.

And as hard as I tried to hold on to these days, they were inevitably taken away. Us younger guys graduated school and got jobs. Some of the older guys have retired or moved to other states. The land in Central Florida we hunted is no longer available, taken away by a company too worried about lawsuits.

So I moved on, too, with a new crowd in Georgia. Things, of course, are different. We don’t drink to the point of incoherence at night, and as much I enjoy these guys, we don’t have the history. I’ve found a seafood shop in a neighboring town, so a cooler full of raw oysters and a couple of Blue Gills are an acceptable alternative that will keep a crowd awake and stories flowing. We no longer huddle around a small portable TV to watch a Florida game, rather we flip the remote to the satellite-fed unit in the two story house we occupy during the fall. And it’s a right fine time.

Some things remain the same in all camps though. Every morning that Early Riser will bang around making noise before the alarms go off as you’re trying to squeeze out the last few winks of sleep you’ll have for the next sixteen hours. If you’re lucky, he’ll yell out, “it’s thirty degrees with a slight wind out of north, get ya some coffee." You cling to your comforter like a life raft in a frigid Pacific sea. Eventually, though, you get dressed and plunge into the darkness with the same “whoosh” of doing a cannonball in a cold pool. A new day is about to begin and it is important to be out to meet it on time. Plus, you have a mile to walk and a tree to climb.

By January I’ll have spent at least a solid month-and-a-half worth of days actually hunting. At the end of the season I’ll be ready to make peace with the deer and ducks and start shaking with anticipation of spring turkey in March.

This year it’s bow and muzzleloading with Dad in Manatee County. Hopefully, ducks, grilled pork chops, corn tortillas and Bud Heavy down on the Big O with Beavis and Lance the Romance. Deer, pigs, turkey and some steamed clams up by Cedar Key with who knows who’ll show up. And, of course, oysters and trophy deer in Georgia with the New Crew.

For fifteen seasons I’ve tried to keep this pace, but I’m not sure how much long I can maintain this routine. This schedule is not too conducive to the needs of a successful career, health, marriage or family, all things I want one day. I’ve always wished this hunting lifestyle meant more than it really does, but responsibility and reality are tough foes to battle.

For the moment, though, I have this season. And as a bonus, most of the Old Crew is assembling at a family farm in North Carolina for a week to help reduce a herd of deer that are destroying crops. Of course, that is our stated reason for going. But there are other purposes too.

At night we’ll toast to the success of the hunt through the flames of an oak campfire. We’ll drink to past hunts, to old stories, to friends present and to those we’ll never hunt with again. After a while, I’ll stagger on to bed with visions of tomorrow’s elephants.

It’s not like I’ve had anything against elephants, then or now, but for this boy, the adventure of wandering the land chasing wild creatures has always...well, I just don’t know any other way to be.