Night Hunting

 

By Joe Perham

“To sleep, per chance to dream, aye there’s the rub”

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

I dream a lot and every dream I have manages to wake me up. Which is good. It used to be that I could recall my dreams with a fair degree of detail. Now that I am older, I awake to whispers of sound and broken images. Always I stand at the center of my dream – doesn’t everybody? Most often I dream of doing unfamiliar things in familiar places; like searching for money and gems at the old house on the mine road – crawling through the culvert on High Street – hiding from various creatures in the building at the home farm where the machinery was kept – places that no longer exist.

Calamity visits me in my dreams; fire on the mountain – the crash of a BI-plane – paratroopers dropping down from the sky – things that never happened – enough of that……

In late October, usually around my birthday, as the hunting season nears, I experience a recurring dream. That dream is always the same. It’s like, you know, “Here we go again!” The reason I have this particular dream is that I anticipate the coming of the deer, the challenge of the hunt. That’s my guess. The hunting season is special to me. It’s like being released out of the routine into a more natural, outdoor world of marshes and hills and ponds and fields and dark running water….the land bare and brown. I can see more of what the land really looks like in November, before the snows come and fill up the hollows and smooth things out.

In my dream I’m asleep in my bed and I awake and reach for my rifle leaning at arms length away. I know that in the field outside my second-story window at the home farm, there is a buck swimming in a lake of fog, the moon full and bright. I know this because I’ve had this dream before. I raise the window with my right hand and place the barrel of the rifle on the sash with my left. The buck is there but I cannot pull the trigger. The safety! I throw the safety and try again. I manage to move the trigger slowly toward the guard but not before the deer has passed from sight. The gun fires…..I see the flash but I hear no sound. I sense other deer hiding behind stone walls and more lurking within the shadows of the trees that border the fields.

Does this dream suggest that I have some unresolved issues relating to hunting? Reluctant hunter? Do most hunters have dreams about hunting?

I know one thing for sure: I do not recognize that dream hunter as being an extension of myself. I do not have a loaded weapon in the house. All ammunition is stored in a separate place.

The bottom line with me is simple: Stay within the rules of constant awareness of others – never fire unless you are certain you have a 99% chance of harvesting the animal you’re firing at.