Stories of a Life Afield: "Brothers in Arms" and "Thanks to Gert"

By A. Hunter Smith

Two short stories about the life lessons a hunter learned in pursuit of wild turkeys and deer.

In "Thanks to Gert," the first of this two-story ebook, A. Hunter Smith recalls one of the funniest and most productive April turkey-hunting seasons he has experienced in the thirty-five years he has spent in pursuit of one of God's most maddening, frustrating, and divinely conceived creations. "Brothers in Arms" is a story about hunters and fishermen who discover that their best teachers are the wild creatures they hunt. Elders and mentors may impart advice, but Smith has learned the inescapable rules of hunting by observing the actions of the wild things around him. These rules, Smith says, equalize us all in the struggle of life and death in the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611175189

A. Hunter Smith

A. Hunter Smith is a native South Carolinian who has hunted and fished across the Southeast and the nation for the last forty-three years. For thirty years he worked as a hunting and fishing guide and now writes outdoor stories that stem from his experiences afield. He has been published regularly in outdoor magazines and journals, both regionally and nationally including South Carolina Wildlife magazine and Gray’s Sporting Journal.

Book preview

Brothers in Arms

For many, southern river swamps are imposing places. There’s something wild and unrestrained about them, something brooding and full of secrets. Their haunting skylines and sightless black waters stir imaginations to create myths and legends, an eerie and howling wood where ghouls and specters come to haunt the murk and shadow and ghosts are often conjured beside the flickering campfires. But in truth what arises from those spectral mists are the last remnants of Eden, the last beating hearts of wilderness unremitting, unconscious still of ill intent. There is nothing deviant there, nothing maligned or spiteful. There is only life, only purpose and survival. Like any wilderness there is danger there, but it is outmatched by raw beauty.

Those sportsmen who understand this do not fear such wilds but respect them. They do not attach morality to basic instinct or intent to primal action. They know that their lives out there are governed by the elements; they accept that consequence follows decision and that safety comes from awareness. What awaits such woodsmen there is not some lurking peril but memory without regret, joy without remorse, and a place of quietude beyond a world that demands to be heard.

I was lucky to be born to people who cherished such places, who had known them for centuries. Their very existence was hacked from the bottomlands, and their lives passed along generations in the shadows of the cypress and the tupelo. It was a part of them and it sustained them, and they would have had it no other way. Such love and knowledge was passed to me as proudly as a coat of arms, and I have carried that banner gladly ever since. But even after all I was taught and all that I have learned and have witnessed, after four decades of hunting the floodplains of the South, I am constantly amazed by things that I have never seen. The evolution of life in that darkened wood is shy and reclusive and only reveals itself completely to determined patience.

It takes time and energy to learn to hunt big river swamps, to understand them truly. In those shadowed reaches, the ways and manners of game are not always apparent, the patterns not so easily recognized in a world where the signs of life are evident at every glance, while the life itself remains guarded. Yet if you are persistent, there are other worlds there to be discovered, worlds few others have ever seen.

Twelve years ago I began to hunt a portion of the Santee River Swamp in the low country of South Carolina that was unfamiliar to me at the time. It is a vast tract of bottomland that borders the river for fifteen miles, a tremendous expanse of floodplain near to twenty thousand acres that has been left the better part of half a century to its own devices. By the time I started exploring it, the old roads that remained had long been overgrown and were nearly unrecognizable as anything man had made, and those few that were still apparent had long been rendered impassible by floodwaters, the bridges washed away and pipes blown. It was and still is, for all intents and purposes, as God had meant to leave it, except for old wounds hacked into it by saw and ax that had begun to heal on their own. As river swamps go, it is a magnificent place, full of ancient cypress and tupelo and massive oaks along twisting inland oxbows and flat lakes, thousands upon thousands of acres of hardwood and canebrake. No more perfect a river-bottom deer habitat could ever be envisioned.

The deer that live in it are as they should be, wild and uncorrupted and unaccustomed to the scent of man. You would think that would make them easy targets, but it’s exactly the opposite. One thing I have learned in my time as a guide, having worked on hunting plantations and as an independent nearly all my life, is that whitetails that are used to people are far easier animals to hunt than those who have only heard the rumors. This I know is contrary to popular opinion, but those who have been in the business long enough would undoubtedly agree with me. A deer seems to be born with an innate distrust of anything on two legs, but they can be conditioned to put up with people given constant interaction. A whitetail in his true environment is not subject to intrusions from humans on a regular basis, however, and his reactions are not as you would expect.

A buck that lives in a big river swamp is exactly the same deer that lives on the hill genetically, but he is in many ways an entirely different animal. He has adapted to an environment of extremes. He’s not like a deer who is born and raised on a farm and lives his entire life where nothing much changes but the seasons and whatever they decide to plant in his favorite field that year. A river swamp buck is a vagabond, a wanderer. He is in fact—for lack of better terms—a migratory whitetail. His placement in life is dictated by flood and drought, by feast and famine. His sense of territory is not bounded by acres but by miles. He claims every nook and cranny, every twist and bend along his section of river swamp, and he keeps more than one house. He may well summer on the far west end but is just as likely to winter in the extreme east, even though ten straight miles or more may lay between. As a whitetail he is always partial to one residence, but as a swamp deer, he is never bound to it. If he was he could never survive there. Like any migratory animal, his routes are old, familiar, and well-reasoned. He knows exactly where he is going and why. To hunt him you have to learn to think as he does, because you can’t just walk up and question him, and if you could you can pretty much bet that he would lie.

Knowing these things, the first years I spent hunting that swamp were simply armed scouting missions. I worked on dry months and wet, through drought and flood, walking the ridges and the flats and paddling the oxbows and sloughs. I came from the east and worked west, started from the south and went north, and crossed all other compass points in-between. I covered miles in weeks and thousands of acres in months, until the day came that I knew the lay of the land well enough to leave my compass behind. Of course I saw and shot deer, saw and shot wild pigs. I learned regional patterns of movement. Yet all the while I was looking for the bigger picture, that group of elements that dictated where the majority of animals would be on any given condition and when, but also, more important, how