The Rites of Winter
Foreword
Gathered around the campfire on a cool October evening are four drowsy grouse hunters. Slouched on lawn chairs, chins on chests, they’re yielding to the day’s hunt, evening cocktails and plattersful of Grouse Breast Villa Louis. Soon they’ll trudge off to tents and sleeping bags. For now, however, they quietly savor the final moments of a perfect day afield.
Beyond the shadows, busying himself with after-dinner kitchen chores, is the camp cook and self appointed poet laureate.
He stacks the last dish and, honoring a personal tradition, commences reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee” with a booming eloquence. It is the first of a series of grouse camp poems he customarily recounts.
After several verses, however, he pauses to consider his inattentive audience. The oldest among them is his junior by ten years. Yet to a man they’ve caved in before the shank of the evening.
He pours himself another dollop of The Macallan and quietly approaches the ring of reposing comrades. Reaching into the pocket of his brush pants, he withdraws a handful of 20 gauge number eights and casually tosses them into the campfire. He sips his scotch and waits.
At the pop of the first primer, four heads snap erect. The following explosions send sparks and hunters flying in a confusion of shrieks and curses. “Perhaps,” says the poet, “you’d prefer Kipling’s Road to Mandalay?”
The moment was classic Winter. I’ve known the man for over a decade and can attest that his good humor is not confined to the printed page. He’s demonstrated his mastery of the practical joke by making a fool of me from Hudson Bay goose camps to classic trout waters and points in between. Despite his stinging wit, or perhaps because of it, there’s not a finer or funnier companion.
There’s also a professional side to our long friendship. Many of the stories to follow first appeared in WISCONSIN SPORTSMAN - a magazine I owned and edited from 1972 until its sale in 1986. From its debut, Galen’s BACKLASH column was a solid hit among readers. It was immediately obvious that here was a singular talent, not a McMannus or Zern wannabe.
His outrageous tales were usually centered within or near his beloved cabin along the South Branch of the Oconto River. It’s here that Galen still regularly chases trout, grouse or deer. Often he will simply tinker with or relax in his impressive homemade sauna. In fact, I’ve long suspected that his bizarre story ideas are induced by prolonged exposure to steam heat (as I certainly know he is not a drug user).
For those who are reading Galen Winter for the first time, a word of warning: The author tends to dabble in social criticism.
This may be uncharted territory for most outdoor humorists, but Galen roams it freely, taking pot shots at politicians, militant feminists, anti-hunters and other pretentious prey too self-exalted for a little satire. All of this while spinning a package of first class hunting and fishing yarns at no extra charge.
So, settle in, head for the first story and expect the unexpected.
And don’t take any of what’s ahead too seriously. Galen certainly didn’t.
Tom Petrie, Boulder Junction
Chapter One
The Sportsman
The Little & Jones Webster Dictionary defines “Sportsman” as: A person possessing the qualities attributable to a sportsman; a chivalrous, fair minded person; one willing to incur and prepared to suffer defeat in fair competition without complaining.
I don’t know who came up with that definition. You can bet your Thesaurus it wasn’t anyone who hunts or fishes. There are some magnificent liars in our fraternity, but none so steeped in perjury that he could write such a preposterous statement.
Maybe some sportsmen, like pool sharks, crap shooters or basketball game bookies, could fit such a description, but if you are considering hunters and fishermen, it misses the mark and by a wide, wide margin.
Anyone who has suffered the defeat of spending a full day crashing through tag alders, blackberry bushes and swamps without sighting a woodcock or Ruffed Grouse can be expected to devote 75% of his evening campfire conversation denouncing the hunting, damning the local terrain and complaining bitterly about anything even vaguely associated with the hunt.
You can begin to commence to start to consider the possibility of a pheasant hunter being chivalrous and fair minded when he fires twice, misses and then says: “Good move there, bird. I hope we meet again next season.” In real life, the ministers, ladies, children and, perhaps, career sailors home on leave would learn some new language if the actual comments make by the pheasant hunter were broadcast immediately after such a display of shooting.
If we limit the word to its application to hunters and fishermen, trying to define “sportsman” is a genuine test of vocabulary and imagination. It is a Herculean task similar to that of cleansing the Augean Stables. If you spend time associating with and listening to hunters and fishermen you will quickly develop the ability to recognize the material cleaned out of stables.
The outdoorsman is not like other people. Oh, I don’t mean there’s anything genetically distinctive about him. The differences seem to come, not from within, but from forces outside of him. As a class, hunters and fishers find themselves in situations where strange things happen.
It’s as if some whimsical cosmic power enjoys frustrating and poking playful fun at the ones who love to hunt and fish. The Fates are constantly testing him, setting road blocks in his path and assailing him with ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. The fact that he, nevertheless, persevere in his avocation may be one of his major distinguishing characteristics.
Certainly, the outdoors type is not a heroic figure. Most of his endeavors are, at the very least, minor disasters. For every day he returns with an acceptable catch of legal sized trout, he will return on eight other days with nothing more than very wet trousers. For each day producing a limit of woodcock, four days will be spent looking for a lost dog. And the hunter who claims more deer kills than times he’s been hopelessly lost in the woods is an Olympic class liar, a poor credit risk and probably a liberal.
The
