Get your things together, we’re going to the country.” This was my mother’s annual announcement. I had no doubt that my uncle (Unc) heard the same thing as a child. Unc, my brother Bo, and I were a part of our family’s second and third generations of The Great Migration who landed in DC. Many children and grandchildren of the southern migrants were often sent down south for the summers to maintain family connection.
During our summers in the South, we climbed trees, roamed forests, and caught creatures—eventually, we were introduced to hunting. It was during a property clean-up trip following the homegoing service of my great-grandmother, Cornelia (our family matriarch), the Miller Club was born. With a borrowed 16-gauge shotgun and a hazy memory of the landscape, the adventures began.
The things we understand so clearly now, were in the beginning, great heart-stopping challenges. We didn’t know that a shotgun barrel could blow up and peel back like a banana or that a rut-enraged buck could knock a man off a tree stump—and we were caught off guard when we found out that deer and quail would let you walk right up on them before they exploded out of their hiding places to scare the hell out of you. We also quickly discovered that our uninsulated boots and loud plastic clothing were not going to work if we wanted to be successful, so the hunt was on for good boots, quiet clothing, and steel.
From time to time, we had to deal with the good-natured humor from our local relatives: “You city boys know what you doing?” “This ain’t no park up in Washington!” We were good sports and we laughed at their digs. Despite the teasing, our family was reliable for some occasional shotgun shells and shared wisdom about the local deer population. Over the next few years, we killed some small game, and finally Unc got the real prize when he shot a spike buck in the old boy scout camp. Catching the first deer was a big deal. Learning to gut and skin a deer was intimidating, but thanks to the wisdom of an elder cousin and his comedic sarcasm, we survived the process. I recall so many funny moments during our fall hunting trips—like the time I climbed a sapling beside an old tree to retrieve a dead raccoon from the tree’s hollow and ended up swinging around upside down in the dark—Unc and I almost laughed ourselves to death.
Like many urban centers of the time, DC was plagued with violence and crime. That small hunting niche along the James River in Tidewater, Virginia became our sanctuary. By the early nineties, we were equipped with ten years of hunting experience, Vibram soled boots, Gore-Tex, another cousin, and a small arsenal which solidified our official arrival on the hunting scene—we were Deer Slayers! We had mastered the local swamp by learning its runways and pinch points, we learned how to rattle and call during the rut, and that hunting was a game of patience and respect.
Along the way there were many more memorable events, and at the heart of those many years of woodsmanship was the love and loyalty of family and a tremendous amount of laughter—even when we came home empty-handed.
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