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Chasing Farts in a Hurricane

By David Petersen

Found in: | Outside | Hunting | Wildlife |

Late summer, late day, midlife.

With archery elk season - the apogee of my year - still two weeks away, I'm biding my time, dodging work and other "real life" responsibilities in favor of honing my stalking skills and hardening my legs and lungs with a few days of chasing pronghorns in Colorado's San Luis Valley, a hundred miles east of my Durango-area home.

For the past half-hour, a dozen of the wily prairie goats have been grazing carelessly in a grassy bowl a quarter-mile below me, courageously close by that stand-offish species' standards. Just moments ago, a score or so more appeared on the southern horizon, half a mile out, feeding fast as caribou toward the base of the long, narrow knoll where I'm sitting in plain view, binoculars in hand.

Watching this swelling swarm of prongies, including several mature bucks, it's tempting to try one last stalk for the day. But the sun has sunk too low, as have the odds against me. And I'm just too damn tired.

I was already pooped an hour ago when I sagged into camp after a long, invigorating sneak-and-peek that took me to within thirty-five yards of a beautiful buck. Following a fruitless morning spent sitting in ambush over a natural pool in a nearby creek, just after a rowdy midday thunderstorm, I spotted the animal from so far away that even through eight-power binoculars I could see no horns. Moreover, from that great distance the prongy looked small and pale, so I dismissed it as a doe. Then the sun winked out briefly and a jagged line extending from horn tip down through bulging eye and cheek patch flashed black as ebony - a legal buck.

After assessing the trend of the buck's stop-and-go grazing, and contemplating the corrugated terrain ahead of him, I contoured half a mile in that direction then leaned into the climb, hugging to the bottom of a shallow arroyo. Every hundred yards or so I'd creep to the lip of the swale and search until I relocated my quarry, adjusting the next leg of my route accordingly.

The closer I got, the shallower the arroyo and the fewer the trees, until at last I was on a level with my prey, with just two little pi�on pines between us. The tree I was hunkered behind stood fifty yards from the buck. If I could only sneak from there to the final bushy pine and lean out around it without being busted, I'd have a twenty-yard shot, corresponding not coincidentally with my maximum stickbow range. Peeking through parted limbs, I noted with reassurance that the buck had bedded, broadside and facing away.

From habit, I flicked my Bic to check the wind direction. Some experienced hunters claim that pronghorns pay little attention to scent; as one biologist hunting buddy so eloquently states it, "Your basic prongy is a whole 'nuther critter from your basic deer or elk." Just so, as the two are related by neither taxonomy nor disposition. Antilocapra americana, the American "antelope-goat" (in fact it is neither), has no close relative anywhere in the known universe. Yet, I know from hard personal experience that prongies do listen to their noses, scent-spooking at times from hundreds of yards away. Besides, after a lifetime of hunting, it's become compulsive habit - reading and heeding the wind.

This time, the wind was with me and so was hope, so unto the breach I went - out and around the sheltering pi�on, my heart booming like a timpani . . . slow, slow, keeping always that last critical bushy tree aligned exactly between my prey and me, taking one baby step at a time, careful of the crunchy volcanic pebbles always underfoot. Fifteen exhilarating, exhausting minutes passed as I closed the gap to within ten paces of my goal - a tree so dense I could not see through it. And just beyond lay my napping prize, wholly unawares.

Even as I was allowing myself to think, Good grief, man, you actually might pull it off this time (stalking a pronghorn to within stickbow range is arguably hunting's most difficult challenge), and with my fingers already tightening on the bowstring and my mouth watering in anticipation of hickory-smoked antelope backstraps - the inevitable bad news arrived, special delivery.

Wheeeee! The dread alarm-sneeze sounded. The buck was up, rigid and staring arrows at me. I became a statue, but too late. Wheeeee! With rump hairs flaring electric white he was going, going . . . I watched in awe as this most graceful of American mammals sailed birdlike over the rise and disappeared into the realm of memory.

Oh, to be a pronghorn - to fly flat-out and never stop!

Well, I really expected no better. As my biologist friend would say, "Trying to stalk a prongy to within bow range is like chasing farts in a hurricane."

Granted. Yet, like youth and lust and other fleeting pleasures, it sure is fun while it lasts.

But ultimately, as with most pursuits of wild game and girls in my life . . . nothing, in the end, ever happens.

Be all of that as it may, here I sit here on this spectacularly lonely evening, content just to watch as a growing convention of pronghorns mills below, aware that I am here but sensing no threat. As usual at such times, I soon lapse into meandering meditation.

Being only middle-aged, I find it disconcerting to admit that I'm already slowing down. Five years ago I'd have made a go for those 'lopers down there - no hesitation and to hell with approaching darkness and fatigue (of which I'd have felt far less). But time changes us all, not just in body but in outlook as well. While a young man fears that to go too slow is to risk missing something, an older man knows that to go too fast is to risk missing everything. If not disturbed, prongies don't travel much at night. Chances are good that come dawn they'll still be down there, waiting for old man Godot.

For now, armed with a deliciously filthy cigar and a cup of good Irish single-malt (whose label rightly proclaims "Every man should have his Dew!") I'm content just to be here now in this vast empty place on this balmy August eve, alone but no way lonely, doing nothing but feeling everything, watching a good day die.

Watching, that is, as pulsing, shifting curtains of orange and lavender clouds - like a slow-motion aurora borealis - shroud the setting sun. And listening, as distant coyotes serenade a ripe rising moon and my prongies sneeze in nervous reply. For all of this and a whole lot more, I am grateful. The key to contentment, I'm learning as I age, lies in an attitude of gratitude.

Not long ago, writer, artist and desert rat Ann Zwinger - a thoughtful friend who knows and respects my boundless passion for wild nature and difficult hunting challenges - told me of touring a European museum where she paused to admire a hand-blown glass jar dating from third century Cologne. It was, she noted, beautifully etched with a hunting scene and the epigraph Vita Bona Fruamur Felices:

"Let us fortunate ones enjoy the good life."

Amen Ann, and pass the Dew!

Life is good, or can be, should be, if far more fragile than most of us come to realize in time to make it work. I'm lucky that way. This past spring, during wild turkey season, strange things started happening. The first doctor I visited told me it was probably nothing to worry about but that I "could" have bone cancer. That "could" became "do" in my paranoid mind, and let me tell you, compadres - it put me through some changes.

Most memorably, my life priorities - those blessings to be recalled on my deathbed with a happy tear - flashed through my head as big and bright as Las Vegas marquees: waking in the night close and warm beside my loving wife . . . laughter-filled evenings in the happy company of a few true friends . . . and doing exactly what I'm doing now, being here now in the western outdoors, whether anything is "happening" or not.

(Interlude: A hummingbird moth big as a B-52 just splash-landed in my booze. I shoo her away but she comes looping back for more. This time I let her be and she doesn't drink all that much before staggering happily off into the shimmering twilight. Which reminds me: My bowhunting buddy Milt Beens recently recounted having mentioned my name to some joker who responded, "Oh, I know him; he's that elkoholic who likes to smoke cigars and drink whiskey." Well, yes, I suppose I do, like to smoke and drink that is, especially at night beside the ancient flaring flames of a backcountry campfire - drawn, you could say, like a moth. But always and only in moderation - that elusive key to a life of happy vice.)

Anyhow, so there I was, depressed and defeatist, convinced I was soon to die, entertaining myself by composing my own eulogy. Eventually, after four more doctors and as many months spent wallowing in a purgatory of anguished self-pity, things sorted themselves out to the extent that I can say, like Mark Twain, that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Too old to die young, too young to die old.

As a result of that eye-opening experience, I now make it a point not just to tell, but to show my wife how much I love her, every single day. The same with my little tribe of true-blue friends, though quite cautiously with a few, so as not to embarrass the macho bastards.

And I've by-god doubled my time outdoors. More hunting and fishing. More hiking and camping. More carefree careening around the backyard of beyond. More "doing nothing," much as I'm doing now. More honest living while the living's good.

And no time like the now.

As the sun sets and tomorrow's hoped-for prey fade to ghostly shadows, I retreat from the edge of the knoll to my modest drive-in camp among the perfumed pines, where I struggle to start a recalcitrant fire with wood still damp from a brief afternoon downpour. Refilling my cup (one part filtered Old Woman Creek water, one part Tullamore Dew), I scoot up close to the smoky flaring flames and resume my mental perambulations.

What a strange and wonderful place is this. Not your typical horizonless sagebrush antelope flat, but scenic basin-and-range country: rugged and rolling, cliff-framed, darkly vulcanized, tree-studded, sheltering numerous verdant side-pockets grown hip-deep in yellow-flowering rabbit brush. Federal land, this: sublime by nature but too long molested by a blight of domestic sheep (those whoreson woolly maggots of the West). What else? A few stunted prickly pears. The occasional brazen array of yucca spears. Pi�on pines most everywhere, though curiously not a one of their symbiotic sisters, genus Juniperus.

Withal - overlooking as best you can the glaring "wise use" abuse - this is one of the most hauntingly beautiful places on Earth. A virtual window into our Pleistocene past, as if the antediluvian mists had only this morning lifted. And only for a while.

Ah . . . the ultimate inscrutability of time and nature . . . the pure atavistic joy of the unknown and unknowable.

Lazy minutes pass. The fire is burning low and so am I when the moon blinks on like a spotlight, leaping suddenly from behind a wall of clouds blacker than flaked obsidian. Lunatic that I am, I fumble for my binoculars and point the optics moonward, but can't bear the sight for long; the brilliance and mystery are all too daunting.

What was it you sang, brother Marley?

There's a natural mystic flowing through the air.

But enough, already! Back to reality, such as it is. I drain the dregs of my drink, stand, stumble across the rocky ground and through the inky dark to my bedroll and collapse atop it, sprawled out on my back . . . back to where it all began.

Two more days of pronghorn hunting, then time to head for home. Home for a few frenetic days of playing catch-up. A few long nights of banking sleep. A few nervously distracted days and nights to gnaw unintentionally on Caroline's nerves so that she won't mind seeing me go again . . . when beloved elk season comes.

But tomorrow and tomorrow, I will live for today. Chasing farts in a hurricane.

David Petersen is the author of Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World and Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America.