Honored to have my old dog’s story featured in Garden & Gun Magazine. To read it on G&G’s website, click the link below, “A Marine’s Homage to a Swampy, Popcorn-Loving Lab,” and you can read about what a great dog Ole’ Dude was. Sure do miss him.

A Marine’s Homage to a Swampy, Popcorn-Loving Lab

In late February, the Northwoods are cloaked in snowy silence. A patchwork of white lies over the forests, cedar boughs and pine needles protruding like shoddy stitch-work from the heavy quilt of winter. Daggers of ice hang from the occasional red oak or maple, threatening the soil against Spring’s usurpation. Tree limbs, deprived of sap and covered in rime, crackle under the many shifting feet of a host of crows, murder on the wing. 

Dwindling now are the fat stores and cached nutriment hoarded away in better times. The weak lie down in eternal sleep, and the weakening are grateful for their going, hungrily consuming the browse left behind. It is a holding-on time of famine and desperation.

But living things do thrive in the quietude. Snowshoe hares scamper under the lowest boughs, nibbling bark where the prying eyes of owls and falcons cannot reach. Bobcats, and the occasional lynx wandering south, pad over snowdrifts and penetrate the thick ground cover and briar vine where the killing is close and the thrashing of prey is dampened by the bloody cushion of snow. Partridge hold tight in their wintry cocoons, resisting the urge to break to the surface in the presence of such a death.

In March, the reign of cold and starvation briefly strengthens before suddenly beginning to wane. Little by little the icy dagger’s asperity is dulled by the quickening staccato of dripping waters, while the puddles of Winter begin to feed the shoots of Spring. The full-throated call of geese on the move challenges what hibernal holdfast remains, but their honks fade into the North; they intend for another land.

Flights of woodcock, the night traveler, flit through the twilight hours. From Texas and Louisiana, their up-down-up again patterns twist over the canopy, bouncing up the coastline. They spend their days feasting on worms wriggling from warming soil, peenting in the wet places between the trees, and waiting for the coming darkness and their chance to dance in the night sky. But they are not the herald.

The herald comes after the woodcock, and the geese, and the starvation, and the cold. He shatters the stillness and what ice remains hanging from the budding limbs of the oaks no longer covered in hoarfrost. He sends the crows to flight and answers their cawing with a thunder of his own. He signals the hares to shed their whites and to put on the garments of Spring, and ushers in replacements for those fallen and vanquished by fang and famine. On downed logs clear of snow, ruffed grouse drum again. 

He bellows, he whoops, and he yawps against the cold until the sap runs thick from the maple taps and the stream beds flood their banks with the overflows of season’s change. With curved spurs and dragging beard he terrorizes the ground, conjuring what grows in the dirt to rise and fill the bellies of those who survived the frozen times. Dragging wingtips and fanned tail feathers welcome the sunrise. Usurp, he cries. 

Spring is here.

Wind howled through the canyon like a locomotive, snapping fire-blackened aspens and leaving a graveyard of widow-makers and deadfall in its wake. When we set camp, I had been excited to use my new tipi tent – the kind with the three-hands-required-for-assembly wood stove.

Now I was going to die in this tent.

I looked over at Ronan – a friend I was deployed with twice overseas – for solidarity in our final moments before being pulverized by whatever angry mountain god was responsible for this cacophony of exploding tree trunks and flying splinters.
He was asleep. That son of a bitch.

Alone with the demons, I crawled deeper into my bag and waited.

---

Hermosa Creek Wilderness Area sits within the San Juan National Forest, just north of Durango, Colorado. I picked that spot because it had all the right words – wilderness, Colorado and Durango. I always wanted to be in a Western. It’s more than 37 thousand acres of hog-backed ridges and incredible drop-offs, which was where I was headed if I couldn’t figure out a way to clear my head.

2020 had been a bad year. Not because of the pandemic, though that was part of it.

In some far-off place on the ragged edge of the empire, my new year rang in with fireworks and a light show. Only, the fireworks were rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. The light show was enemy tracers snapping past with a distinctive “crack” – the kind every U.S. Marine recognizes from working pits at the rifle range.

A year later, I couldn’t get the boom out of my head.

To make matters worse, I lost my team to the confusion of redeployment home amid the chaos of the pandemic’s early days. By the time we figured out that covid was bad, but not zombie apocalypse bad, we had been working remote for six weeks. Then, I was transferred to another unit. It felt like getting ripped out of bed in the middle of the night and forced under the covers with someone else’s wife.

I felt as though I was imploding. I needed space to get away from the pressure and return to my true form. I needed space to think.

Wilderness. Colorado. Durango. All the right words.

---

We hunted elk as though they were hunting us. It was both strange and familiar.

As the military saying goes, “Two is one, and one is none.” I needed a wingman. Immediately, I thought of my friend Ronan. He was not a hunter. He neither caught fish nor fired guns outside of the military, but he was a man after my own heart.
The first time we ever did anything together, a miscommunication put us on opposite sides of the same mountain. Each thought the other ditched at the last minute, so we attacked separate routes – only to run into one another at the summit. I knew he would meet me at the top of whatever mountain we needed to climb.

I was raised in the woods. I grew up a houndsman, deer hunter and waterfowler. Training for war in the swamps of the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, felt like another racoon hunt – just more serious. As if the raccoons had guns and deadly intent. But the world of Western hunting was new and my depth of research consisted of a couple episodes of MeatEater. Naively, I figured, “If that guy could do it. …”

The day before getting to Durango, the day before sliding from one type of abyss into another, I picked up Ronan from a small airport in northern New Mexico. He had just completed military free-fall parachute training, which made him “sky trash.” I could still smell the wind and terminal velocity on his clothes when he got in the truck. Everywhere he went you could hear Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” in the background. He was the high to my low. Balance.

After a dark journey through the country, which I am certain was beautiful in the daylight, we pulled up the long dirt road to our predetermined parking area about 0400. Along the way we passed a small parking lot with a wall tent and three pickups. I, however, was headed for the end of the road.

We were greeted by a full-blown outfitter camp. Horses, wall-tents, rifles and coffee were everywhere. Guides were packing mules for the ride in, and hunters were lazily finishing up their bacon and eggs. It looked like heaven. We must have looked like a couple of sinners strolling through the pearly gates. That’s the reception we got, anyhow.

A man similar to Saint Peter, mounted atop his high horse and waving his hand in a 360-degree circle, looked down at us and said, “You boys need to get out of here. We lease the hunting rights from the Forest Service for this whole area. All you had to do was call and ask.”

“We’re just trying to get to public land,” I told him, incredulous that anyone could lease exclusive hunting access to a federally designated wilderness area.

I began to lay out Forest Service maps on the tailgate, listening to “All you had to do was call and ask,” being repeated over and over while trying to figure a solution to our problem. That’s when the weather solved it for us.

A tall man with a long, gray beard walked over to “Saint Pete” and said, “Forecast looks bad, Steve. We need to get out of here before it gets worse.” Despite his small stature and cantankerous nature, I could tell that Steve was in charge and had a tough decision to make. I understood the predicament.

After a few hand gestures and another, “All you had to do was call and ask,” we headed back to the lot with the pickups and wall tent. We should have kept driving – all the way back to town.

That’s what “Saint Steve” and his horse wranglers did a few minutes later.

By 0500, they packed up heaven and left us in hell. We just didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know hell was cold, either. It was about to freeze over.

Watching “Steve the Apostle” and his entourage snake their way down the mountain, Ronan and I rucked up and walked back to where the outfitter camp had been. Smoldering ashes dumped from a wood stove and a few steaming piles of horse shit were all that was left. It was a ghost camp. That’s when it began to snow.

With the swirl around us, Ronan and I started walking. I’d never hunted elk, and he’d never hunted at all, so we defaulted to our common baseline experience – patrolling. We walked like we were in the film, “The Hills Have Eyes.” Elk eyes.

We crested each ridge with the same ceremony granted to Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” Each man moves to the flanks, head up, rifle at the ready. Unless contact is imminent, the rifles are swapped for glass as the observers scan, by quadrant, the opposing hillsides as they come into view. Nothing. Map check and continue to move. We hunted elk as though they were hunting us. It was both strange and familiar.

We barely spoke all day – our communication done with gestures and hand-signals. Once, seeing a cow elk at the edge of the burn we entered, we practiced our setup and shot sequence, crawling up to the ridgeline, placing rucks out front as rifle rests and getting the spotter positioned to observe the shot. But with only a bull tag, we painstakingly reversed the process and left her to graze, undisturbed.

We moved that way for the rest of the day, cutting cross-country and deeper into the burn. For mile after jagged mile, the charred and blackened remains of what once was a forest rose like specters around us. We were alone, walking among them, living in the presence of the dead.

Our first day ended in that canyon bottom, a place I thought would shelter us from the wind. A creek ran alongside, and the remains of another outfitter camp stood nearby with rings of river rocks marking the graves of campfires past. I took them for sign that this was as good a spot as any to set a spike camp. With water replenished and a warm meal in our bellies, we took shelter for the night, a thin layer of polyester and nylon encapsulating us from the accumulation building outside. That’s when the wind truly began to blow.

In the summer of 2018, two years before we found ourselves encamped in the desolation of that canyon, a pair of wildfires converged on the Hermosa Creek Wilderness. What’s known as the 416 Fire came from the east, ignited by embers from a coal-fueled passenger train, becoming the sixth largest wildfire in Colorado history. The Burro Fire came from the west, source undetermined.

Most fires build resiliency in forest ecosystems. With the underbrush gone and pathways for sunlight open to the forest floor, new growth and sources of sustenance are created. But if a fire gets too hot and if too much time passes without nurturing the flame, fuel sources build, heat burns through bark and cambium, soil becomes unstable and the forest dies.

From opposing sides of the same mountain, the 416 and Burro fires attacked their separate routes – running into one another in the abyss of that canyon. At their confluence, the combined heat built to the level of inferno, and they killed the forest.
We knew none of that at the time.

How does one field dress, with words, the complexities of war, guilt and responsibility?
How can you give a voice to that which drives men to seek shelter in the wilderness?
What spell must be spoken to dislodge what lurks in the unswept corners of the mind?

The wind grew to hurricane force. Like a wraith enraged by the sentience of our presence, it howled over the broken bones of a dead landscape. The groan of falling trees built to a Shepherd’s tone and each gust sounded the swing of snath and scythe. Skeletons of trees began to fall, halved at their shins. The rattling of bones drew nearer, joints exploding under the weight of an unseen menace. With each swing of the reaper’s blade, each shatter of wood and sanity, the squall intensified. The walls closed in around us and drifts of snow pressed against our bodies through the tent walls.

And then it passed.

The dawn brought a scene almost surreal. Under the rising sun, the corpses of wind-felled trees were arranged like a dry-ground replica of old museum photos from the logging boom – the ones in which a thousand timbers float down an impossible rapid, young men with axes precariously perched on the pinnacle of their accomplishment. And right in the middle of that river was our tent. Fire and wind had distorted the reality of the mountain.

The deeper truth? Maybe it was that “shit happens” – and sometimes you survive.

The deeper truth? Maybe it was that “shit happens” – and sometimes you survive.

Whatever the lesson, we needed to get out of that canyon. Altitude sickness set in. I was losing weight from both ends. Ronan, having just spent six weeks at 13 thousand feet – at least until the light turned green and he jumped – remained unaffected. He out-hiked me to the point of embarrassment.

When he offered to share the load, I was slumped into a snow drift, my pants around my ankles and head between my knees.

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine,” I told him. I held my rifle like the last vestige of dignity that it was. I’d as soon die as hand it over. I let him carry the tripod, but we don’t talk about the tripod.

We wanted out, but the mountain opposed us, positioning the twin impediments of deadfall and snowdrift like an abatis. And so, as the hours dragged on, I accepted the gift of time and pondered, “Wasn’t this why I’d come to this place? The place with all the right words?”

What are those words, “the right ones?” How does one field dress, with words, the complexities of war, guilt and responsibility? How can you give a voice to that which drives men to seek shelter in the wilderness? What spell must be spoken to dislodge what lurks in the unswept corners of the mind?

At some point, we navigated the last obstacle and broke into open country. The wind-swept and ash-strewn landscape gave way to an expansive wilderness studded with life. We stopped to rest and refit.

Whether from altitude sickness or a deeper struggle I do not know – my insides desperately wanted to become my outsides. I did the one thing known to conjure opportunity at the worst moment – I stepped behind a bush and dropped my drawers.
“Elk!” yelled Ronan. Push, wipe, bury.

Yellow forms crested the ridge a mile to the east and one by one dropped into a south-facing meadow. Two bulls, one much larger than the other, trailed a herd of 30 cows.

We ran to beat the sunset. Wind at their backs and sun in their eyes, the elk didn’t notice the two forms moving to intercept them. We dropped rucks and checked the range – 500 yards on the nose, which is qualifying distance on the rifle range.

The rifle barked, and the larger of the two bulls flinched as he looked for the source of discomfort. The distance, wind and terrain made locating us impossible, and the herd stood like statues in the meadow. Three more shots and the bull dropped in place – exactly where he stood when I began firing seconds before. When we reached him, four entry wounds pockmarked a softball-sized space behind his shoulder, exiting from what appeared to be the same hole on his opposite side.

The next day’s pack-out took 10 hours, and we reveled in the brutality of it. That night, at a roadside café on U.S. Route 160, I cut a piece of cake and gave it to Ronan in celebration. The date was Nov. 10, 2020 – the 245th birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

We lived a feral existence, surrounded by wilderness, in a place that no longer exists, and a time that will never be again. I saw my first bear track there, and slept fitfully beneath the branches of a long-leafed pine where turkeys roosted, depending on their lofty awareness to alert my brother and me to the bruin’s approach. The night train’s distant whistle marked the witching hour, and a kerosene lantern lit the way to railroad tracks we would follow home. And always, there were the hounds.

I was eleven, my brother was eight, and I don’t know what my parents were thinking. We roamed freely, the creek bottoms and pine forests as wild as our young imaginations. Our family owned little land, but it mattered not. There was no concept of private property, and posted signs just meant you couldn’t bring down the raccoons and squirrels your dogs treed on the other side of the fence. The audacity with which we approached farmhouses miles from home would terrify today’s generation of helicopter parent. But we feared nothing, and were rewarded for our gregariousness with glasses of cool sweet tea and invitations to “stop on by anytime.”

My mama kept a large dinner bell atop a fence post in our front yard. If you were close enough to hear it, you might get a warm meal if you ran fast enough. If you were beyond its resonance, well, wild muscadines and blackberries were good enough for the coon, and therefore good enough for the coon hunter. It was a time of plenty, and we immersed ourselves in its bounty.

Like all boys of wayfaring age, our wanderlust was stoked by an old man with nothing better to do than spin yarns and plant the seeds of adventure in our fertile minds. My grandfather’s rocking chair was his spindle, and Southern Appalachia was his distaff. In that chair, and of those mountains, he weaved epic tales of Ole’ Blue, a three-legged hound, battling a raccoon on the thin ice of a frozen river, and of a friend who dared tempt fate in the icy waters to pull him from certain death. When the yarns spun too wildly, my grandmother would send us, man and boys alike, to the barn with admonishments of, “don’t go puttin’ ideas in those boys’ heads, you old fool.”  

But my grandfather played the role of elder, and he gave me his stories. If blood is thicker than water, stories are thicker than blood. You see, he and I were the family bastards, brought in as collateral from other marriages and relationships gone wrong. We found kinship in one another, the old man and the boy.

I remember distinctly the tipping point when those stories became too much to be lived by someone else. Mrs. Beatenbough, my sixth-grade English teacher, gave me a book. Wilson Rawls, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and Oklahoma native, wrote the first draft of Where the Red Fern Grows on the backs of used paper grocery bags during the Great Depression. That he was once imprisoned for stealing a chicken in New Mexico only lent him credibility. The story of Billy Coleman, joined with the wild yarns of my grandfather’s youth, lit a fire in me.

My grandmother saw the flame, and instead of stomping it out, she gave it oxygen. It was she who was the real culprit. Beneath her sun-bleached yellow bonnet and white curls, she was born of the mountain. She knew what we were, and wanted us to be it to the fullest. It was she who got us the hounds.

The two pups came from my grandmother’s employer, a kindly man who owned a fish house adjacent to my grandparents’ sweet potato farm. At the Red Minnow, smells of fried catfish wafted among the drawling conversations of farm families gathered together in what felt more like a church social than a place of business. Years later, it burned down under suspicious circumstances. We all missed the catfish, but were glad the old man never hurt for money in the years before his passing.

Our pups were the spawn of grand nite champions, but we didn’t know what that meant. From the first moment they bayed the fleeting locusts in our back field, we just knew they were going to be fine coonhounds, and we houndsmen. And so it was.

Crockett writhed with muscle beneath his white coat, one large black spot on his rump and a white blaze between his glowing yellow eyes and drooping black ears. He was a killer, no two ways about it. His wrath was fearsome to behold and his voice boomed like rolling thunder. Pepsi was his sister and littermate. Of similar color, but smaller build, she preferred my brother to me and did not hunt for blood, but for pleasure. Hers was a delighted pursuit and joy rang in her short and quick trail bark.

Our first winter we hunted with reckless abandon. Our missed morning classes were met more with teachers’ interest than disapproval, and we rolled into spring gaunt, with bloodshot eyes, and clothes torn of briar and bramble. We’d had a real education, learning lessons in those bottoms that would become the foundation for all of life’s future adventures. But most of all, we were happy.

There were other hounds in years to come, some better, many worse, but none like the two whose voices led us into those first years of freedom. But like all things, this too shall pass. 

I left home two decades ago, called by war and kept by circumstance. My brother, too, left the piney woods of our piedmont home and settled on the white sands of the Gulf. Neither of us have the time, nor the space, for hounds whose souls would surely die absent the immensity of freedom their desire to follow a trail requires. 

I have bird dogs now, and still find joy in watching good dog work. Yet there is something more gentlemanly about them, less raw, than the scarred and muddy hide of a hound in full throat, body half-submerged in an icy Georgia swamp and voice echoing into the night.

I see the difference most at fence crossings. My spaniel’s approach, the one I have instilled in him, reflects the profundity to which attitudes about property have changed. He sits patiently at the gated corner as I unlatch the chain and allow him through, permission granted, respecting the process.

One gap over, the ground is scraped bare by the repeated crossings of mesopredators, the raccoon and opossum, the skunk and fox, that have combined with the twin scourges of disease and habitat loss to decimate once mighty quail populations. Absent are the tufts of muddy hair and strips of faded blue cotton left behind by hound backs and boy knees raked across sharp barbs in hot pursuit, permission assumed, if even thought of.

But the difference is most acutely felt as loss; cultural, traditional, and generational. Unfettered freedom, the assumption of one’s permission to roam, tamped down and trimmed along the edges. It’s been replaced with, if not a lesser version, then a tamer one. Those hounds would pay no more mind to my spaniel’s whistle than I paid to my mother’s bell when it competed with the call of forest and stream. So much of that is gone now, the magic eroding faster than I can count the grains of falling sand. First the assumptions, then the hounds, and now the quail. Maybe I am next.

The rivers don’t freeze over anymore, and probably won’t for many lifetimes to come. Gone too are the friendly smiles and sweet-tea from cattlemen met wandering their fencerows, shotgun or rifle in hand and a bag full of squirrels. The crop lands and timber tracts that formed the wilderness of my childhood are subdivided now, and trespassing signs are backed with cold stares from faces bearing no resemblance to the farm families of my youth. This is growth. This is progress. That is what we tell ourselves.

The truth is that there are too many people now, and not enough space for us all. They come from the cities, looking for solitude, and in so coming tarnish the treasure they seek. But who can blame them for desiring the bounty we have so long held secret? Certainly not I, a son of Eden. Yet the compliment of emulation saddens me, for I know what it means.

I look at my children, four sons budding with life, and I pine for the days before the twin “blessings” of economic prosperity and social mobility laid low the “poverty” of living small lives in even smaller places. I see the hypocrisy in my sentiment, but how desperately I want for them the loose rein and faraway boundaries that made me a lover of that place. 

The quiet conversations of whispering pines still exist there, awaiting interpretation. Still too, rushing waters flow between banks where treasures of crawfish await the groping hands of young children and raccoons alike. But the night sky now rings hollow in the absence of hound voices, and is too dark without the glow of kerosene lanterns shining back at the stars. Property lines now form tight boundaries around the wanderings of each, new norms extinguishing old pathways.

But blood is thicker than water, and stories are thicker than blood. Like my grandfather, within me lie yarns yet to be woven. I have my own spindle and distaff too, leaning there in the unswept corners of memory. In my tales there will be rocking chairs, and rivers, old men and women born of the mountain, and hounds. There will always be hounds.

Major Jake Lunsford, USMC is a native Georgian currently hunting and fishing in Rhode Island while serving as Commandant of the Marine Corps Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. 

View original article on tombekbe.com

I love fishing stories. I see them as allegories for hope. Casting your lot into the unknown, you hope the tide will take you to some future, some place, from which, up from the depths, a fish will rise. But how to tell a fishing story if you never catch any fish? It begins with having a place to fish in the first place.

We are perched, my sons and I, on the banks of the Palmer River, whose brackish waters run between Warren and Barrington, but we are not after perch. We hunt tautog, a fish with teeth straight from an orthodontist’s chair. There are none at the moment. Any moment. Ever. 

My grandfather told stories of running telephone wire into the backwater eddies of the Broad River, down in Georgia, sending a powerful current into the muddy waters. Electricity-stunned catfish would come, turning bellies up, to the surface. I inherited that same electric power. 

I cast my line into the current, and like my grandfather, an electricity flows through me, up rod and down line, into the dark waters. This is the moment when my power is greatest.

When my line hits the water, at that exact moment, an energy pulsates through the deep. It ties every living thing in the sea, angler and fish alike, to the same fate. Nobody catches anything. Not me, not you, not even sharks. I am the fishing equivalent of walking under a ladder while breaking a mirror over the head of a black cat.

I have exercised my powers in the muddy waters of the South, the trout streams of Appalachia, the golden coasts of the Pacific, and the slow rivers of the Heartland. Now, I’m coming for you, New England. Note the days when everything is perfect, yet the fish just won’t bite. This may be the worst striper run you’ve ever had.  

Which leads me back to the original question: How does one like me (a superhero) tell a fishing story? It begins with having a place to fish.

With 400 miles of coastline, Rhode Island has more opportunity for aspiring anglers than any place I’ve ever lived. It even has constitutionally protected shoreline access. Seriously. Article 1, Section 17 of the state constitution guarantees it.

Despite this, people are still arrested, and “Do Not Trespass” signs abound. Phrases in Section 17 include, “secure in their rights, preservation of their values, duty of the general assembly, and natural environment of the people.” Notwithstanding, Rhode Islanders’ constitutional right to the sea is anything but, and the cause is obvious. The values of the people, which enshrine access to the natural environment, are not being being dutifully protected by the General Assembly. Their rights are not secure. 

Enter House Bill 8055. I’ll let you read the details, but it’s a winner. With 47 House members as co-sponsors, it’s also veto-proof. When’s the last time you saw that? The bill’s key provision is language clarifying the boundary between where public access meets private ownership. 

Rep. K. Joseph Shekarchi, D-Warwick, holds the keys to the sandcastle. As speaker of the House, it is he who will decide if H8055 comes before the General Assembly. Will the rights of the people be protected? The answer depends on if you care enough about your values as a Rhode Islander to call him and demand your inheritance. 

As for that fishing story? It begins with having a place to fish. And sorry about your striper run…

Jake Lunsford, of Warren, is father to four aspiring anglers. 

View original article on projo.com