Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
S A a family reunion than anything else, and wives, children, parents and grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and assorted other relatives were likely to be there for the festivities. In the South, for those who follow the gun, there is no celebration like opening day! The evening before we would gather to put things in order around the camp. Alex would set about preparing a "low country boil" of shrimp and sausage and little new potatoes and corn still on the cob, all boiled together with his own brew of seasonings. It would simmer in the pot until we couldn't stand it any more and then we would stuff ourselves beyond reason and settle around the fire to tell stories, true and otherwise, and laugh late into the night. And then with the sunrise we would scatter into the far reaches of the place to hunt and to live our lives as full as full comes to mere mortals. Occasionally in the late season, when the women and children were home safe from the weather, the hardiest of us would hunker 'round the fire after the hunting was done, and tell tales, tall and taller, dreamt in firelight and liberally greased by dusky "tongue oil" poured from tall Mason jars. In a while, the toe of Dave's boot found the cut-granite step that marked the remains of one of the plywood-and-tarpaper shacks, and a rotting doorsill led us to another. After a half-hour of searching we found the remains of our skinning pole and the old fireplace, its stackedstone perimeter covered with pine straw and hidden among the roots of a downed sweetgum tree. There was precious little left, but there was enough. Enough to make it new again. Enough to remember. Dear God, the times we had there! We hunted the property for more than 30 years, beginning in the early '70s and once knew it inch by inch. Through all manner of natural and unnatural disasters, the hunting club had been a constant for us. Through births, deaths, marriages and divorces. We were raising families at the time, and children had been born, educated and nurtured within its protective confines, then grown up and moved away to begin their own families. Alex went there to be alone when his daddy died. And I went there when I lost my boy. No matter what else passed, it remained. And we always knew that we would meet there again and times would be better. Every fall we congregated there to hunt deer, and later to gun the winter migration of ducks and geese that flooded into the swamp from Broad River to the north. In the spring we skulked and called to amorous gobblers. In summer we wiled away the time working on our rough-and-tumble shacks and rebuilding deer stands and duck blinds and swimming in the river until finally, after months of stifling Georgia heat, the air would cool again and the cycle would repeat. In those days the opening day of deer season was more akin to P O R T I N G C 55 L A S S I lex was the truest storyteller of all, his pliable memory patiently whetting the fine edge of each story over the years as they became better, sharper, cleaner, funnier and more believably unbelievable with each new campfire. He had never been one to let drab, monochromatic truth interfere with a good story. We had been friends forever. Ever since the hot summer day when I met the gangly, barefoot boy kicking clods along as he walked the dirt street that passed in front of my grandma's house in the tiny South Georgia town where I lived. As it turned out, we were within a month of the same age, and soon discovered that we were in the same second-grade class. Of course, our little country school only had one. In those days, children in rural Georgia were introduced to the gun quite early, and since neither of us quite fit in socially, it wasn't long before we found our own place, and our own society, following dogs and guns together into the wild. Pretty soon, his momma, "Miss Sarah," took me under her wing and I became a de facto member of his family and he of mine. Since Dave was C S