Fall
is the polishing time. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. For some reason, the
spirit that guides us
made our experiences in fall the peak of the year’s efforts.
For animals,
both wild and domestic, it is
the rut, the breeding time. The bulls and bucks have never
looked better. Their
antlers and horns are hardened into weapons and sharpened
against trees. Their
bodies are lean and aggressive and they tend to lose all good
sense.
I don’t think
for a minute that it is just a
calendar coincidence that fall is when most festivals, fairs
and exhibitions
occur. Because by the time fall rolls around, we have jars of
jelly ready for
competition. The hunters have been practicing out at the range
for weeks now
and are ready to take the rifle or the bow into the woods to
see how their
skills measure up to those who they’d love to subdivide and
put in the freezer.
The kids are
all back in school now, where
they can try out all the new crazy stunts on their friends
that they learned
from their uncles last summer. It is a holy, blessed time for
that. Family
tradition, you know.
The uncles
have been polishing these stunts
for decades now and have them down to a science. And the older
folks may not be
building cabins or climbing mountains after elk as much these
days, but there
is a lot to be said for just passing along stories to the
youngsters. And it
works out fairly well when we realize that ‘most everyone who
could challenge
the truth of one of those stories has already graciously died
on us.
Fall is just a
wonderful time to be alive.
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Brought
to
you by the new paperback edition of ‘Ol’ Max Evans: the
First Thousand
Years.’ From UNMPress.com.