Stick Season

is the time between the leaves’ dropping and the first snow that sticks— a time that brings its own stark beauty and rituals.

he third of November brings us the first morning this season that’s truly cold, and with it, the understanding that the truth of what’s coming can no longer be denied. It’s 23 degrees and the wind is gusting as I head into the thin, uncertain light of chore time. I’m dressed in long underwear, gloves, and the butt-ugly hat I got at the secondhand store for a quarter. Penny tells me it’s not flattering, and she’s right, but I wear it anyway, if only because it serves as an emblem of my thrift.

The ice on the cows’ water trough is a half-inch thick, and I break it with a booted foot. I pull two bales of first-cut hay from the barn, wriggling my hands under the strands of twine that contain them and serve as built-in handles. I heave the bound bales over the fence, then duck between the top and bottom fence wires, shoo the cows away from the bales, and cut the twine to release the hay. I can hear Penny in the barn—first her footsteps, then the metal-on-wood sound of her milking bucket against the frame of the stanchion, where she leaves it while she collects Pip. The sun is rising over our neighbor Melvin’s field, but not having cleared the horizon, it looks as though it’s emerging from the ground itself, a crop that was sown and is now blossoming.

Walking back toward the house while Penny milks, I watch the sunlight slowly unfold across our woodlot. With the exception of a handful of stubborn holdouts, the deciduous trees are leafless, and the roads are clear of even the late-season discounted-tour-bus leaf peepers. Two weeks ago, you could still see the buses pulled over at the scenic overlooks, discharging their camera-wielding passengers, and you couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for those folks, because peak was at least 10 days prior, and it was really something to behold. Best foliage season in years, actually.

Around here, people call this “stick season,” that post-foliage, pre-winter period that lasts from mid-October to the first sticking snow. I used to think of it as a bleak, bereft time of year, but I’ve learned to recognize a particular beauty in the leaf-bare landscape. I see the bone-colored birches and the wrinkled-bark sugar maples and the poplars with their greenish tint. The forest floor is covered in rusty leaves; the sky is ever-shifting among the infinite shades spanning white and black. The sun is rare this time of year, but that only makes us appreciate its infrequent appearances all the more.

Not long after the first truly cold morning of the season comes the first snow, and with it, the opening of Vermont’s rifle hunting season, which begins with a weekend reserved for hunters under the age of 16. Fin and Rye have been awaiting youth hunting weekend with something close to feverish anticipation: Guns have been cleaned, sighted in, and cleaned again. Ammo has been sorted, and debates have erupted over precisely how much ammo one should carry on a hunt. “I think five shells is enough, don’t you, Papa?” Rye asks, and I agree that five shells is probably enough. “I think I’ll take six,” Fin says, and that seems fine to me, too.

Truth is, at 12 and 10, my boys are already far more experienced hunters than I am. In fact, neither Penny nor I was raised with a working knowledge of firearms. Oh sure, early in my life, when my parents lived on a 165-acre homestead in Enosburg, Vermont, there was a .22 rifle, but my sole recollection of it is limited to an episode involving a raccoon, chickens, and, as family lore has it, my buck-naked father, sprinting in late-night darkness toward the coop, where a triple chickicide was under way. I’m pretty sure the raccoon escaped injury.

Of course, having been raised in rural Vermont, I didn’t find the concept of hunting exactly foreign. My parents had settled on a remote, rarely trafficked gravel road; every November, the population of gun-rack-bearing pickup trucks passing our house would soar. We’d pass them along the roadside, often leaning precipitously over an embankment, or straddling a ditch halffull of fallen leaves and almost-frozen rainwater. As non-hunters, we felt an unspoken anxiety inherent in the sight of all those trucks, because with the trucks came the knowledge that dozens of hunters—some of them our neighbors, but many of them strangers— were stalking the forest surrounding our home, loaded rifles slung over their backs. Did my parents post their land? I can’t remember, but even if they had, it wouldn’t have alleviated our anxiety, because few of our neighbors did, and although we didn’t know much about guns, we knew that bullets travel too fast to make sense of “No Hunting” signs.

Having been reared primarily in suburban New Jersey, Penny’s upbringing was even further removed from hunting and firearms. Her parents didn’t own a gun, nor, to her knowledge, did the parents of any of her friends. Of course, given that her childhood coincided with a household gun-ownership rate of approximately 50 percent (it has since dropped to about 32 percent), there’s a high likelihood that some of them were gun owners; she just wasn’t aware of it. But whether or not there was proximity to firearms, there was no exposure to guns and therefore no familiarity.

It was against this backdrop that about five years ago Fin developed a keen interest in hunting. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised us: After all, the slaughter of livestock for meat has been part of our children’s experience almost since they were born. And our boys have always seemed most contented when immersed in wilderness.

Indeed, one of our intentions for raising them in rural northern Vermont was precisely to instill in them an appreciation of the natural world, and it’s one of our greatest satisfactions to witness their obvious love of—and connection to— the flora and fauna around our home. But somehow, either out of naïveté or simple willed ignorance, we never imagined them or ourselves as hunters.

Fin and Rye stalked our land with homemade bows for more than a year, bringing home the occasional squirrel or chipmunk before we purchased their first gun. We’d seen where all this was leading: the bows and arrows, the squirrels, the endless questions about all things hunting, the drawn-out games of fantasy they played together, involving deer rifles fashioned from sticks and convoluted, ever-changing rules about whose land they were hunting on, how many deer they could harvest, and so on. And so we’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea of our boys’ owning a gun.

We never imagined that we’d be gun owners. It never occurred to us that our sons’ relationship with nature would be mediated by deadly force.

Our boys began hunting with homemade bows and arrows; the first animal that Fin killed was a red squirrel, brought down with a bow he’d made. We didn’t need to explain to him that any animal he killed would be utilized for food; that dictum had already been instilled in him through books and mentors. Still, when it came to hunting for food, my imagination ran toward grilled venison steaks and small roasted game birds, perhaps with a side of mashed potatoes or a pile of buttered rice. What I most definitely didn’t imagine, and yet felt compelled to experience if only to support my young son, was a scrawny haunch of fried red squirrel. (For the record, it was tough and chewy and did not taste just like chicken.)

Used to it, maybe, but still not entirely comfortable with it. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this,” Penny remarked one night, in the midst of one of our many discussions regarding guns and hunting and how they fit into our preconceived notions of what sort of family we were. But the more we talked about it, and the more we observed the boys’ commitment, evidenced by hour upon hour of bow-and-arrow practice (along with their undiminished enthusiasm for the flesh of small rodents), the closer to comfortable we got.

And that, in short, is how I found myself rising at 4:35 a.m. (I’d promised Fin I’d set the alarm for 4:30, but five minutes seemed an acceptable cheat) on the opening day of Vermont’s youth hunting weekend, so Fin and I could be deep into the woods by legal shoot time. To thwart the potential complication of who would shoot first should a deer present itself, the boys had decided to split the weekend, even if it meant less time in the woods for each of them. I rose sluggishly, envious of Penny, free to slumber for another hour or more. And not just any hour, but that sweet, deep sleep of early morning, the one that grants you the luxury of arising fully refreshed. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me as I pulled myself out from under the cocoon of covers. “Good luck,” Penny mumbled, before rolling over to face the wall and descend back into the downy folds of her subconscious.

We didn’t have good luck, at least according to the common under standing of “luck” during deer sea son. Although Fin and I had the good fortune of seeing two deer, neither presented a reasonable shot. Rye and I saw nothing but tracks, perhaps because we couldn’t bring ourselves to remain motionless for more than 12 minutes at a time. “I think I’d rather walk around and have less chance of getting a deer,” Rye replied when I mentioned that we might be better served by still hunting.

I understood what he meant. It was an amazing time to be in the woods: The light was creeping into the sky, and everything seemed caught in the suspension between night and day. It was nice to sit for a few minutes, sure, but it was also nice to move on, to feel the blood quickening in our veins, to practice the inward-rolling footsteps that, once perfected, would let us move silently through the trees.

The boys and I hunted regularly through the remainder of rifle season, but we never saw another deer. But no one seemed to mind, and besides, our freezers were already nearly full with the beef, pork, and chickens we’d raised over the summer months. As with most of our fellow hunters in 21st-century Vermont, the meat wasn’t essential to our survival, and we knew that this fact itself was deserving of our gratitude.

But the early mornings in the woods? The whispered conversations with my sons as night succumbed to day? The return home to the breakfasts of fresh eggs and fried potatoes that Penny had made in our absence? The warmth of the house as we stood by the woodstove with our chilled fingers outstretched? I suppose it could be argued that even these things weren’t essential to our survival. But it sure didn’t feel that way.

Ben Hewitt’s fourth book, The Nourishing Homestead: One Back-to-the-Land Family’s Plan for Cultivating Soil, Skills, and Spirit, was published this year by Chelsea Green. benhewitt.net