Some years back I ran into a testy fellow at a bookstore who
snapped at me when I made a comment about summer. The month was May and I’d said it looked like
summer had arrived. “Summer doesn’t
start until late June,” the testy fellow blurted out. I smiled but said nothing more. But for those of you not familiar with South
Texas it’s worthwhile knowing that this subtropical climate doesn’t follow the
seasonal rules common to temperate regions.
We have no fall to speak of, and our spring is a short-lived, humid, and
often windy affair that begins while most of you living to the north are still
experiencing winter. Spring is the time
of wildflowers and a few spotted rains.
Fall on the other hand is nothing more than a subtle feeling that
prompts old timers to say, “Summer’s over.”
A delicate change in the cast of the morning’s light with nights
five-degrees cooler than the week before; when fall arrives there are no
changing colors other than the reddish coats of whitetails and coyotes begin
shifting to dark gray. Mind you that
July, August and September will often see midnight temperatures in the high
80s. September brings an occasional
monsoon in the form of a tropical storm.
Winter heralds its beginning with one cool snap that usually blows
through in the pre-dawn hours. City
people may not fully understand the meaning of this first gentle occurrence but
for grizzled woods rats that’ve walked the trails for six or seven decades,
that first mild norther says the brushlands are reaching the end of another
cycle. The whitetail bucks will already
have their antlers. It’s sad how hunting
has changed over the years. In South
Texas, deer season means business and not much else. Gone are the times when people used to actually
hunt. Now all you’ll see are dudes
wearing camo uniforms, snake-proof boots, gimme
caps with some outdoor company’s logo, and driving four-wheel drive pickups
pulling ATVs. Long gone are the days
when a woodsman entered the brush dressed in worn khaki or denim pants, a
flannel shirt, a canvas fedora and cradling a Winchester .30/30 or perhaps a
Savage 99 in .250/3000 or maybe even an old 92 in 44/40. They’d find a crossing and sit patiently,
sometimes for hours without moving; and when the right moment came it was
performed honestly and honorably. The
few old timers still around can dress a deer and bone it out for the freezer
using nothing more than a knife and a saw.
But those are nothing more than memories. Today’s “hunter” looks like a page out of a Cabela’s
catalog. So he drives his truck to a
deer tower where he locks himself away peeping out a gun port. He sits there with a coffee thermos at his
feet and perhaps even a cooler filled with beer and goodies. Then down a long trail, called a sendero¸ a deer or hog crosses and our
hunter pokes his rifle’s barrel out the gun port and fires. The animal drops; the camo-clad dude comes
down the ladder and gets in his pickup truck then drives to where the beast
fell. Our dude manages to put the deer
into the bed of his truck then takes a photo or two with his Smart Phone. Then he drives back to town where he drops
the deer off at a butcher’s shop that cuts everything into steaks and
sausage. There’s really not much to it
these days.
One day, as if to say enough, winter heads back home. Perhaps it grows weary of pushing so far
south, or maybe it sees the whole endeavor as pointless. Gone are the hordes of slickers who finally
rumble off in their four-wheel drive pickups still wearing camo costumes and
snake-proof boots. Back in the day a
deer ate naturally, feeding off the shrubs growing wild in the woods. But today the business model dictates
quantity over quality so the deer are shot up with growth chemicals, sometimes
pen raised and nearly always fed a steady diet of corporate protein. The dandies don’t seem to care, but the old
timers turn away in disgust. You know,
decades ago the idea was to hunt and not engage in a contest.
A week ago a relative of mine and I sat on my front porch
looking at birds feasting at my feeders and gulping water from the
faucets. “I can sense that it’s going to
change any day now,” I said. The
mesquites were still wearing their skeletal and bone naked coats of bark and
slender limbs. The winds of March had
yet to kick up. Somewhere nearby a
couple of green-jays began a conversation and about thirty bobwhite quail sauntered
out of a granjeno mott then began scratching the ground looking for seeds. My relative still can’t believe how the quail
run to me when I walk out to the woods bordering my yard. Like chickens, they follow me around. I’ll call out, “Okay everybody. I’m here.
Come on everybody.”
“My dad said a mesquite never lies,” my cousin said. “Yep, never lies,” I repeated. You see, mesquites tell us when spring
officially starts in South Texas. Naked
one day and then loaded with Kelly-green leaves the next. Like waking up on Christmas morning and
running down to the Christmas tree to see what Santa left overnight. A colorful present; spring is here. Of course that means come May we’ll be in the
throes of summer. Come to think of it, I
wonder what ever happened to that testy man.
I wonder if he ever learned.