I opened the lever action and showed my grandson Aidan, age 8, that my deer rifle wasn’t loaded. As his mother and grandmother watched us, I asked Aidan if he wanted to hold the rifle. He looked for his mother’s permission, which was granted in a nod, and held out his little hands. As he received the rifle, his eyes went wide – from apprehension to wonder. “It’s so heavy,” he said.
As the only person in our extended family who hunts, it’s my self-assigned task to teach our four grandchildren to hunt. Aidan is the oldest and a very responsible kid. He pitches in without a gripe and has always done what I’ve asked of him, so I thought it might be time to take him with me. He wouldn’t carry a rifle, of course. I just wanted him to get a taste for the experience and to know what a serious business it was. His awe of the rifle was immediate and, I suspect, lasting.
He and I posed for pictures as we prepared to head out into the woods, the two of us awash in the orange vestments that would keep us visible and safe. His mother had taken me aside earlier and reported that he’d confided to her that he didn’t know if he could handle it if I shot a deer. I’d been pondering what I would do if by some odd chance we did see a buck, but now I knew that even if it were the biggest buck I’d ever encountered, I couldn’t shoot it. The rifle stayed unloaded.
As we entered the woods, I told Aidan how important it was that we keep quiet. “We don’t want to let them know we’re coming, do we?” I showed him how to step quietly, and he saw for himself that walking on the pine needles was much quieter than on the dry leaves. I found a log where we could sit and watch, and I told him we needed to sit there without talking and just listen to see if we could hear anything moving. After 10 seconds, and not a second more, he asked, “Grandpa Steve, when are we going to be done?”
“Pretty soon,” I told him. I looked at my watch and said, “I’m going to time it. Let’s see if you can be quiet for a whole minute.”
Our silence was filled by blue jays calling and woodpeckers excavating, and then by a crow’s wings as it sped by overhead.
“What’s that sound?” he asked, the second hand having almost made it all the way around.
“That’s Mr. Crow,” I whispered. He proceeded to tell me in great detail about a book he’d been reading that had a character named Mr. Crow. I’m not sure at what age children develop the capacity to whisper, but Aidan hadn’t yet reached it.
I had planned one particular treat for Aidan. My tree stand was only a short walk away, and I told him he could climb up the ladder to it. Up he went, one slow step at a time, his hands riveted to the cold metal of the ladder. He was two-thirds of the way up when he turned his head toward me: “I’m scared” he said.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to keep going.”
Relieved, he inched his way back down. “You go up,” he said.
So I leaned my rifle against the tree and climbed up the ladder. “You want to come up now?” I asked.
“No thanks.”
We filled out the rest of our hunt with activities that weren’t exactly hunting: bouncing on a springy young white ash that had been uprooted and examining insect etchings on a pine whose bark had sloughed off. Aidan showed me some squiggles he said looked just like a hawk.
Back home, he told everyone how cool it had been to go hunting. “Grandpa Steve stepped on a branch and made a lot of noise,” he said.
A half-year later, in the heat of early summer, Aidan and I were taking Woody, our little black birddog, for a walk.
“Do you recognize anything?” I asked.
Aidan looked all around and then spotted the tree stand.
“I’m going to go climb it. I’m not chicken any more,” he said.
And he gathered all his courage into his skinny little body and began to climb. Up and up he went without hesitation until he got to the top, where he would have to turn around in order to sit on the seat. He made the turn without hesitation and waved at me, way down below.
With that much heart, he’s sure to be a good hunter. It’s just going to take a little while.