Hunting memories - On being scared in the woods

Some years ago, early one morning before sun up, I was deep in a thicket of 20 foot pines. It was quiet as a tomb in there and kind of oppressive with the trail being real tight and everything. I couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in any direction and the only noise was what I was making as I tried to creep through.

Suddenly there was the most hideous blood-chilling scream that seemed to come from right over my head. It was loud and close and of a tone that made me want to loose my bowels. I figure it was an owl that I had disturbed. It shook me up a bit but I didn’t run screaming into the night. But I’ve never forgotten it either.

Another morning in the same general area I was walking along a under a power line. The fog was incredibly thick and my flashlight was more of a hindrance than a help. It seemed that I could not see more than six or eight feet into the swirling mist. I tell you, it was positively creepy. Well…I guess the extreme wetness caused by the fog made the ground cover pretty quiet, and I managed to walk into a herd of deer that had bedded down on either side of the path I was walking along under that power line. All of a sudden, that thick mist was ALIVE all around me with blowing, snorting, hoofbeats going in all directions. It flat got my attention in a major way!

Now those two instances, though they gave me a good start at the moment, were clearly caused by animals and I was over it as quickly as it takes to tell about it. But this incident is a little different:

I was hunting on the edge a large swamp way back off the blacktop. It was the middle of the week and I’d seen no other hunters or people all that day. For whatever reason I climbed down out of my treestand a short time before dark; probably cause the hunting in that area was lousy and I was just plain bored. When I got to my truck right about dusk dark I noticed a trail heading off into the brush that I didn’t remember seeing when I came into the area earlier in the day. I thought “What the heck….may as well try a little stalking.” So I eased down the trail with maybe five minutes worth of light left.

In no more than 30 paces the trail opened up into a sort of clearing under a couple of towering old oaks. My first thought was that it might be a good spot for deer to feed. As I eased along under the oaks my attention was focused out in front of me rather than what was at my feet. But after standing there in the gathering darkness for a few minutes and realizing it was probably past legal shooting hours I shifted my attention to my immediate surroundings. Only then did I realize I was standing in a cemetery plot; a really lonely old cemetery plot five miles back in the woods…all alone.

But that wasn’t what made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I got out my little flashlite and examined the graves. There were about seven or eight stones arranged such that they faced towards the east, and they were all the same family name. Then I noticed that they all had the same death date, sometime around 1901 as I recall. All I could figure was maybe a housefire had killed an entire family. I wondered why they would be buried so far back in the woods in such a lonely place, and then I came to the conclusion that the site was probably their homestead and they had been buried where they died. That they were buried there didn’t bother me nearly as much as the thought that they had DIED there. Never did the woods seem as dark and lonely as they did at that exact moment. I didn’t run outta there, but I didn’t linger either. That place had an atmosphere of loneliness and sorrow that got under my skin in a big way.

I never hunted that area again.