Always Take Your Rifle

Introduction to the New Edition

Most of the stories in this book were previously published under the title A Life Spent Afield. That book didn’t sell very well, and I wanted to know why. My two other books, Eight Days in Africa and Deer Hunter’s Devotional, sold quite well in both the eBook market and in their paperback incarnations, so why didn’t A Life Spent Afield do equally well?

I asked my readers that question in a blog post on my website. Several visitors to my site replied, and I was not really all that surprised at their answers. There were, they told me, two problems with the book. Interestingly, the content of the book itself was great, they told me. The problems were actually at what would seem to be a more superficial level.

First, the title itself made the book sound like an autobiography. Ok, that’s a fair point. While the stories in the book were indeed autobiographical in the sense that they told stories from my life in the outdoors, the book is far removed from an autobiography. So I made a bad choice on the name. After all, who wants to read an autobiography written by someone that they most likely have never even heard of?

Second, the photograph on the cover was not one that conveyed the true content of the book. I made the mistake of choosing a photo that showed a close-up of some sepia-tinted stalks of wheat. This didn’t seem to speak to the sportsmen who came across the book; it just failed to convey that this was a book about hunting. While aesthetically pleasing, it never appealed to my target audience in the slightest.

In fact, I actually experimented with the cover a little bit on the eBook version. Instead of the close-up of the wheat, I used a picture of a hunter holding a shotgun, pointing it at some unseen bird flying through the sky. Sales went up after that, but only slightly. I was disappointed that the sales didn’t go up more than they did, and I decided to let it be, but in the back of my mind that nagging disappointment never really went away.

Why? Because the stories in this book are for the most part pretty good, and I always hated the fact that not many people were reading them. And so, what you have in your hands is the repackaged version of A Life Spent Afield. I’ve updated several of these stories to bring them up to date and have done a bit minor editing on others.

The other big change to the book is the addition of a handful of my favorite wild game recipes. Over the years, one of the most popular sections of my website has been the recipes, so I’ve chosen to include several of the best ones in this book. I encourage you to give them a try; I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

If you already own A Life Spent Afield, I hope that you’ll still want to read this newer version and that you find the changes worthwhile. I’ve tried to add a little something new to many of the stories in the book with you in mind.

Sean Jeffries

February 2011

Foreword

The essays and articles in this book span a period of almost twenty years in my life as an outdoorsman. I first dreamed of writing the book back in the early 1990’s, and have slowly collected these stories over the long years between then and now. Some of them have aged quite nicely, but others needed a good bit of work to clean up the embarrassingly poor writing skill with which they were crafted. At least two of them needed major surgery.

The book has also undergone several title changes since that day in 1990 when I first created a folder on my computer called Hunter’s Moon: Essays on Hunting. I tried out a variety of names, but none of them quite seemed to fit what I was looking for. I finally settled on the current title in 2010, just before publication.

Several years ago I wrote what I thought was a really good introduction, but time changes a great many things, and those original few opening paragraphs no longer apply. In that first intro, I told of how you would not find any kudu in the book, or trophy bucks, or elk, or caribou. Although I still haven’t killed a caribou, and the only elk I’ve ever seen was in a zoo, I have a kudu on my wall now, and a good many beautiful deer.

With the stories in this book I had hoped to capture, more than anything else, the feeling of the November wind under a grey sky on the Outer Banks, or the brilliance of golden wheat in an autumn field, or the thunder of the wings of a covey of quail as they burst out from underfoot. I wanted you to see and experience the beauty of the outdoors that God has given us. I wanted you to see the world from the eyes of a Sportsman, and to understand what it means to celebrate the Sportsman’s way of life. I hope I’ve accomplished that.

Cabin Ritual

This story was written in the early 90’s, and was updated in January of 2001, again in January of 2002, and was completed in July of 2010. A final revision was done in February of 2011. This is one of the earliest essays on hunting that I have written, and I thought it would be a fitting way to begin this book.

I was always thankful to have my grandfather’s cabin in the Uwharries to use as a base of operations for my hunting, and I spent many a night there in that wonderful cabin on the shores of Badin Lake. My grandfather is gone, the cabin has been sold, and I have not seen the old place in years. The passages below describe the best memories that I have of the times that I spent in that little house.

In the early 1970’s, my grandfather, who was known as Pop-Pop to his many grandchildren, bought a small piece of land on Badin Lake, a man made reservoir in the Piedmont of North Carolina. My grandfather was a man of many talents, carpentry not being the least of these, and he spent many summers building a little two-story cabin on that lot. Although he spent many years building it, he never actually completed the cabin. Looking back, I don’t think he really wanted to finish it; it was an ongoing project for him, a place where there was always one more thing that needed to be done.

There wasn’t really much to the place. The upstairs consisted of a large living room and a tiny kitchen, separated from each other by a bar and a row of cabinets. There was also a little bathroom just beyond the dark stairway which itself led to the basement of the house. The house was built into the side of a hill, and a large deck encircled the upper level.

The downstairs contained a little corner storage area, another small unfinished bathroom, and three tiny bedrooms with cinder block walls. There wasn’t much lighting in the bottom section of the cabin, particularly in the storage area, so we always had to carry a flashlight when we went down there for any reason.

The back yard was a very steep hill that led down to the dock that my grandfather and I had built in the mid-1980s. The steps leading to the dock were quite slippery, and you always had to be really careful when you walked down to the lake. I mowed that yard a few times over the years, and I can tell you that it was quite a difficult piece of work! As I mentioned, there was also a high deck attached to the upper story of the house, and this was a great place to sit and look out over the lake.

The cabin was complete enough that when I began deer hunting on the nearby game lands in the Uwharrie National Forest my grandfather unhesitatingly offered the use of it to me during the season. That would have been around 1988, just as I was finishing up my last two years of college. I was welcome to turn on the power in the cabin, or to build a fire in the fireplace (there was no heat), but he preferred that I not turn the well pump on, and he insisted that the cabin be left as clean as it was when I arrived. Having no water meant that in order to flush the toilet you had to walk down to the lake with a thirteen gallon garbage can, fill it full of water, then lug it up the hill and pour it into the toilet tank.

My first overnight trips to the cabin were made by me alone. I had managed to work out my college schedule in such a way that Tuesdays were free of classes, so each Monday night I would pack up my truck and make the short trip from my apartment up Highway 49 to the lake. Those were quiet nights for me, usually spent with a good book in front of a roaring fire and a cold beer close at hand. Beyond a weekly glass of wine or so, I don’t drink much anymore, but the memory of an imported beer by that fireplace, the bottle dripping with ice, is one that I will never forget.

As time wore on, my friends would occasionally express interest in going hunting with me. I took a great many people to that cabin over the years, and most of them returned with me several times, but for now I want to focus on the times that I spent there with one particular friend in the years just after my college graduation.

In the last days of the summer of 1991, I took a job working in the mailroom of a large grocery store chain. I had only intended to keep the job for a few weeks, until I could find something more fitting of a college graduate. That changed though, when I became fast friends with my immediate supervisor, a fellow named Ted Leonhardt.

Ted had never hunted deer before, but had always had a great interest in doing so. His main problem was that he didn’t have anywhere to hunt, and no one to go with. He had recently purchased a brand new bow and was itching for the chance to try it out in the woods. I told Ted about the cabin on Badin Lake, and though we had only known each other for a few days, we made plans to hunt together in the coming weeks once the season opened.

I remember telling Ted that during the summer the cabin would be full of screaming, laughing children, scolding parents, and a variety of dogs trying to get out of the heat of the day. After Labor Day, I told him, the children would be gone, the running water turned off, and the small aluminum boat would have been turned upside down on the dock for the winter. The house would become mine until the end of January, when all of the hunting seasons finally closed.

Throughout that first deer season together, Ted and I developed a routine – really almost a ritual – that we would follow for over the next several years, until the death of my grandfather and the loss of the cabin. Those simple actions that we would perform on a weekly basis for the four months of the hunting season would cement our friendship, and those times would ultimately grow to legendary status in our minds.

Each Friday morning when we left our respective homes for work, we would pack our guns and gear into our truck, and then when the work day was over we’d go straight from work to the lake, stopping only once at the grocery store for provisions for the weekend. Our purchases were always the same: steak, a bag of red potatoes, sourdough rolls, and a six-pack of beer to ward off cabin fever.

We often tried to find a new imported beer - preferably German - as Ted had spent some time there in the Army and had acquired a taste for Bavarian beverages. We probably spent more money on the beer than we did on the steaks, but it’s the steaks that I can still taste all these long years later. And I never eat sourdough these days without remembering those rolls that we had every weekend at the cabin.

It seems like we always ended up buying a new squeeze bottle of margarine every time we went to the store. I’m not sure why we didn’t just keep the one from previous weeks, but I bet we bought two dozen bottles of the stuff over the years. The winters were colder in those days, and I’m positive that we could have just left the bottles there in the cabin and they would have been fine the next week.

Upon arriving at the house, we’d step carefully down the steep hill from the driveway to the front door of the cabin. There was a heron that lived in a tree at the edge of the yard, and I would often point at the tree that he perched unseen in, and just as I pointed he would rudely squawk at us, angered at having been awakened. Or maybe he was just saying hello; I was never sure which one it was.

Once we got inside the cabin, Ted would start the water for the potatoes boiling while I built a fire; the only heat that we would have in the house. A beer or two consumed in a comfortable silence would give the potatoes some time to cook, and then the steaks would hit the grill. We ate in silence as well, and then sat quietly beside the fire with our third and last beer of the