Rudolph’s Girlfriend

The sun was low, the river lay in shadows as the day grew long and tired and still. We were slowly, silently, drifting along with the current, me with my sassafras paddle in my hands and Sondra sitting in the bow with her rifle. She had been thoroughly enthralled with the late afternoon ambience, filled with kingfishers and squirrels, and an occasional painted turtle sunning on a log.

Earlier about ten or twelve big old ground-raker gobblers had flown across the river, back-lighted by the late afternoon sun. Sondra was really enjoying it all, you could tell. And then, all of a sudden, there was the deer, on the right bank about 35 yards away, standing and staring at us, wondering what we were. I figure it was a two-year-old doe, with big ears tilted forward attentively and huge brown eyes following us as we drifted even closer. “O.K.” I whispered, “There’s your deer… shoot!”

This was a cinch… we were about to have venison on the table. The doe stood stock still, the peaceful valley about to echo with the roar of Sondra’s rifle.

Last year after 21 years as a small-town newspaper editor who seldom had any free time at all, Sondra Gray took a job I offered as the editor of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, an old fashioned magazine not much like anything else being published today. She had grown up a country girl and fished with her dad when she was small, but she had never hunted. In fact, the outdoors seemed unimportant while she was a mother raising a family and holding down a job.

But things are different now, she has some time to enjoy life, and the outdoors has suddenly become part of her life too. It’s important now, now that her kids are grown and she hears about all the adventures her husband and three older brothers have had in the outdoors. And it is important because as someone who edits and puts together an outdoor magazine, you need to know something about fish and game other than how to cook them.

This week will mark the one-year anniversary of her new job. Last spring she caught her first largemouth bass, a limit of big crappie, then a limit of hefty white bass. In the summer she caught more big fish, and camped overnight on an Ozark river for the first time in her life. Then she caught some nice walleye and a whole boatload of smallmouth bass in Canada, some of them well over four pounds. In most of her fishing endeavors, Sondra was lucky, and she took to it.She quickly became adept at using both spinning and casting reels and in little time could put a 1/8th ounce jig, or a 5/8th ounce spinner bait right where she wanted. It was no job at all to learn to work a top-water lure, or give the proper action to a crank-bait. And Sondra figured any lady who could master fishing could surely be a hunter in short order.

But she is only about two inches better than five feet tall, and she has very short arms, and shooting a shotgun or high-powered rifle proved to be a sizeable challenge. When she decided that an editor of an outdoor magazine had to know something about deer hunting, my daughter Christy loaned her a little .30-30 Winchester built along the order of a BB gun, and not much heavier. Unlike other deer rifles she could barely lift, she could shoot that little lever-action rifle, and even hit a target placed about 40 yards away.

So Sondra bought her very first deer tag and sat a whole afternoon in Christy’s deer stand and never saw a deer. She was disappointed. She figured since she caught a limit of crappie on her first fishing trip, she’d bag a deer her first hour or so in the woods.

And since she wanted one so badly, I told her I would paddle her down the river that last afternoon of the season and we’d see if we could get one that way.

So that’s how we got to the beginning of this story, with Sondra and the doe staring at each other, and me waiting for that rifle’s explosion. It never came.

I guess the doe finally got nervous because of all my shrill whispering along the order of “Shoot, dang it, shoot!” It hopped away, flashing that big white tail, and I looked at Sondra like Archie Bunker use to look at Edith, clutching that little rifle with big wet eyes and a quivering lower lip. “She was looking right at me!!! I couldn’t do it, she said quietly. “We bonded!”

I just paddled on down the river and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a big deal, and I have field dressed enough deer this year. The quiet was finally broken, when Sondra, still holding the rifle as if she was afraid it might go off and hurt something along the bank, said…

“She looked so much like Clarice…”

“Who the heck is Clarice?” I asked, still in my Archie Bunker frame of mind.

“That’s Rudolph’s girlfriend,” she said. “Didn’t you see the movie?”

Gloria Jean met us downstream at the take-out point as it became dark, and Sondra went on and on about how pretty the doe was, and Gloria was soooo understanding. It sounded like the two of them ought to be knitting a blanket and eating coffee-cake with some of the church ladies. I like a little syrup on my pancakes, but that was enough to make a grizzled old veteran outdoorsman like me about half nauseous!

Sondra thinks she still can shoot a deer, if it doesn’t look at her. She’d like a burly old buck, with little squinty eyes and not looking at her… walking along as if he just stomped on a chipmunk somewhere. She wants to go along during the muzzle-loader season, but I’m doubting that happens. I intend to be out there with the intention of bringing in a deer, whether it is looking at me or not, Clarice included.

There is a reason why early pioneer women stayed home and cooked and the men hunted. There’s a plan behind the idea of Indian braves hunting buffalo while the squaws made moccasins. You don’t become a hunter… you are born one. And if you can bake bread and make homemade jelly, you don’t need to be one.

Having said all that, I am kind of proud of her for not shooting. There is a little bit of a soft spot inside of me that grows bigger and softer as I grow older. I love to hunt, but bagging a deer doesn’t seem as important as it once did for some reason or another. Maybe I’ll take her deer hunting just one more time, and if that happens again… “Den dat’s it.” As Archie would say.

Well, if you live close to Salem, Mo., join Sondra and me on Tuesday, December 14 as we meet to help form a local chapter of “Common Sense Conservationists”. Sondra will be there to give away free copies of our Christmas issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, and sell my books for those who might want a signed copy, perhaps as a Christmas gift. The meeting begins at 7:00 p.m. at the Salem City Hall Auditorium. If you are concerned about what is happening with the Missouri Department of Conservation, you need to be there. We can change things, and we should.

My address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. The website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.