On my snowshoe walk yesterday in the beautiful, fresh eight inches, give or take, I detoured the land behind the house that’s posted, walked the edge, but didn’t step a foot over, by gosh. If those folks don’t want me on their property, they won’t have me. But I did spot this woodland irony. Between the “Posted, Private Property, No Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, Trespassing” signs, a deer hunting stand hung from an oak tree ON the posted property. But facing the unposted property. I call that irony. In other words, “Ain’t that a strange juxtaposition.”
If the deer can read, they’ll be all set.
Been thinking about deer since reading Tara Marvel’s book from the Maine Folklife Center, Muskrat Stew and Other Tales of a Penobscot Life: The Life Story of Fred Rancor. She interviewed Fred before he died in 2008 and in the book she lets him tell about his life in his own colorful words. Fred grew up on a reservation near Old Town, Maine. He was eight years old when his father first took him deer hunting, but he didn’t shoot his first deer until he was 14 or 15. That was when his father told him the secret: Deer read minds.
"You have to keep that killing out of your mind ... And you can’t even think of shooting at a deer. If you keep that on your mind while you are hunting you aren’t going to see anything, because they already are alerted on your intentions to do it. That’s why you don’t see any deer.
"You have to wash that out of you mind and think clearly. Don’t think about anything at all.
What you should do is look surprised, when you see a deer, so that you are not showing him any fear. ...
"My mind is usually blank anyways. I don’t think about nothing. It was no problem for me."
Check out the Maine Folklife Center website for info on Muskrat Stew, which was also Fred’s favorite food, and other oral histories and books on cultures being lost to us. My column on Muskrat Stew will hit the papers on Sunday, and be posted on the web sites for the Portsmouth Herald, Concord Monitor, Nashua Telegraph (maybe not all three, but a couple at least) shortly thereafter, as well as at nhbooksellers.com.
I wonder what Fred would have thought of all those No Trespassing signs.
In England, I heard, you can walk anyplace you want so long as it’s not within a certain number of feet of somebody’s house. That sounds nice.
Oh no, you can't. Has to be a right of way.
Posted by: Sally (England) | January 21, 2009 at 11:09 AM
Oh, well. It sounded good. Thanks, Sally, from England. How do you find those right of ways? (And hi to Vic. :))
Becky
Posted by: rebecca Rule | January 21, 2009 at 05:41 PM