Periodic Editorial on the State of Hunting and the Hunting Industry Today
Waxed Cotton
It was 25 degrees here in San Antonio this morning. That’s a little chilly no matter where you are (and, yes, those of you who live in Saskatchewan can spare me the jokes about that being a “warm” spring day), but here in the south of Texas, that’s damn cold. It rarely hits a true freezing 32 degrees, let alone lower; last year I think I had the heat on in my house for a whole three weeks total the entire “winter” here.
Anyway, it was pretty nippy this morning, so before I left for work at 7:30 a.m., I reached into my seldom-used coat closet and looked at the selection available. I have more than a few cover-ups to choose from, having lived in a four-season state most of my life, but after scanning the contents of that particular closet, I reached in for one of my favorites.
It was an oversized wax cotton coat. The color base is a tobacco brown, but it’s plaided with deep maroon and gold striping. A deeper brown collar of corduroy tops it, and the lining is of some warm, flannelish material, also plaided, but in light tan, orange, and green—it is not as hideous a combination as it sounds. I don’t know why I chose that coat, except that I thought it might be the one least likely to be stolen as it hung in my door-less office for the day (my current workplace is a very public-oriented one). No one will want such an unusual coat here in San Antonio, I thought, as I swept the garment’s weight from the sturdy hanger it awaited on.
It’s been a long while since I’ve worn that coat. Before I moved to Texas, it used to be the one I pulled on nearly every day, once fall set in. I’d gotten it as a gift from my second sporting clays coach. In addition to nurturing move-mount-and-shoot skills, Glenn Baker was a purveyor of fine British shotguns, shooting literature, and various finer shooting accessories, most of British origins (see his website, www.woodcockhill.com). His wife had ordered this particular coat, and it had been a little big, so she hadn’t wanted it when it arrived. The wax cotton coat I’d been using at the time, a coat of solid deep navy that I still have, was a lighter version by the same maker and was wearing thin—holes perforated the elbows, the cuffs, under the arms, and in various intervals around the hem, I’d worn it so much. Those myriad holes leaked, of course, defeating the purpose of wearing wax cotton in the first place, and though I couldn’t bear to part with it (still it hangs in my closet, and I haven’t worn it in ten years), it really wasn’t serviceable as a hunting coat any longer. So when Glen offered the heavier brown plaid coat to me, I accepted.
The minute it got cold enough, I slipped on that brown plaid, wax cotton coat. I went everywhere in it; to work, to the grocery store, out with friends and on dates, and, of course, I wore it hunting. It was, after all, what the garment was meant for. The wax cotton was tough stuff, taking on multiflora rose and tangles of wild grape vines in my quests for grouse and woodcock, head-high tall and razor-edged grasses in pheasant territory, and harsh Kansas winds as I hiked public hunting food plots looking for quail. The coat’s game pouch, zippered in heavy brass on either end, was well used.
I don’t remember wearing this coat last year at all, or much the year before—it never really got cold enough—but with the stellar and highly unusual drop in temperatures here, I pulled it on this morning. Sitting in my Trailblazer, I started the engine, and then looked at the windshield I was going to need to scrape with a credit card (I have no idea where my ice scraper is, not having needed it for the last three years). Waiting for the defroster to kick in a bit, I snugged the coat a little tighter around me, warding off the cold in the car. Something was missing (besides the ice scraper). I thought about it a minute, and then I realized what it was.
It was the smell, that smell of old and often aired canvas tents that well-proofed wax cotton coats have. I love that smell. A little harsh, a little funky and musty—all my Filson clothes and luggage have that fragrance—but it’s one that fits in, seems right, in the mix of Hoppe’s and Federal paper hulls.
But there was something else, too, something more subtle that was missing. I sat back and thought about that coat, let all the places it had been, all the miles of countryside it had seen, flash through my head like a movie on fast forward. And that’s when I knew what was really missing in that favorite coat of mine, one absent from the fields these last three years.
It has been so long since this coat had been worn for its purpose, its very essence—the essence of hunting itself—was missing. No longer was there the mix of wet dogs, over-heated pickup cabs, steaming coffee and cold sandwiches, hoarfrost, swamp water, and sleet mingled with human sweat, hot bird blood, warm feathers, and Labrador spit. It was missing the smell of a corner of the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, where grouse regularly evaded my shot pattern, but where my setter, Fergus, ran with unabashed joy and did his job in fine form, even when I didn’t do mine. The coat was absent the whiff of whatever gourmet meal our group cooked over backpacking stoves on the top of Storm Mountain in West Virginia, during our annual woodcock pursuit every Veteran’s Day weekend. The scent of pine trees on a Georgia quail plantation was gone, and so, too, was that of the prairie winds the coat kept from cutting through to me, while I pushed milo fields to force pheasants to rise.
I buried my nose in the cold wax cotton, looked at the dull and bruised material in need of a reproofing, and wished I was anywhere but sitting in that Trailblazer headed to work at a place that was as far from hunting as this planet is from the sun.
Unzipping my backpack, I slid a credit card out of my wallet and got out of the car to scrape the frost off the windshield. With enough of the residue removed to see safely and drive, I turned to open the vehicle’s driver’s door. But then something made me stop.
I don’t know what made me do what I did next. It was nothing I needed to do. No dogs waited in the back of the vehicle in Vari-Kennels, no guns were loaded in the rear seat, and no ammunition cascaded out of carelessly tossed-in boxes to roll recklessly under the car seats. But I reached behind me anyway and pulled down the ring of the heavy brass zipper on one end of my coat’s game pouch. And slipping my hand inside, I fished around until I found what I didn’t know I was looking for.
I took the lone grouse feather out, looked at it in my leather-gloved hand. A tear slipped down my cheek, the missing of and longing for a hunt in a place that pretty feather must have come from rising through my throat, intense and instantaneous. I brushed the salty bit away, cleared my eyes to better focus on the feather a moment more, and then, careful not to let the morning’s chill wind sweep it from between my fingers, slipped it back in the wax cotton coat’s game pouch and pulled the zipper shut.
After 12 long hours at work, I came home, poured a highball of Wild Turkey doused with ginger ale, and picked up the laptop. The waxed cotton coat is draped over the end of the couch I sit on. From where I am curled up, I can see the brass ring of the zipper that keeps the grouse feather I know is behind it safe and sound. I thought of the tear I shed this morning (so unexpected!), and despite the laying down of my guns that has happened since I got to Texas, I know that I am at least still connected to the hunt.
One grouse feather. How such a tiny piece of fluff can serve as a talisman of where I’ve been and where I want to be again I find amazing, but I’ll take it for what it apparently is, for one thing is now clear: I have been gone from the hunting fields too long.
I guess I needed to unzip that zipper after all.
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