As my son and I were ascending the steep and rutted trail leading up to Chestnut Ridge one particularly raw December morning, I felt my heart muscle quivering in my chest, and I became sick at my stomach. I thought I was about to pass out. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but what I was experiencing was actually an episode of a-fib ( atrial fibrillation), something that I wouldn't be diagnosed with until two years later, lying flat on my back in a hospital bed, scared out of my mind.
Chase and I were headed to a spot that I had found while roaming around up there the week before. I thought it would be the perfect place to take him deer hunting, and I'd be able to keep my eyes on him at all times.
When I stopped in my tracks and placed my hand on my chest, he asked me what was wrong. I didn't dare tell him. I figured that the last thing I needed was for my twelve year- old son to start freaking out on me up there in the mountains.
I was joking with my wife the night before our big trip that if something happened to me up there, he'd have to quarter me up and pack me out, one piece at a time. Standing up there on that mountain with my heart beating erratically, it didn't seem quite as funny. I didn't have cell phone service, and we were two miles from the truck.
We went on around the bend and I found a place for us to sit, looking down into a small gorge. We leaned our backs against two oak trees, using the thick laurel as cover. After about ten minutes, my heart began to beat normal again. We stayed there for about two hours after that and didn't see any deer moving, which I could've cared less anyway. I talked him in to calling it a day, and we eased back down the mountain and headed home.
Occasionally, the Earth will give up some of her secrets. If one should be so lucky as to stumble across one of those secrets, it can have a lasting impact on how that individual sees himself, and the world around him. History is not just the past, but our past. On my way to a hunting stand one morning, my headlamp caught a glint of white, protruding from the red clay on the bank that I was crossing. I laid my recurve bow on the ground and took great care digging the point out of the mud, then wiped it off on my shirt tail. The serrated edge was as sharp as the day it was made, long before Europeans set foot in North America. Over the years, I have found several points, each unique, bearing the mark of the one who made it. The smaller ones being bird-points, or true arrowheads, the larger were no doubt spear points, used with an atlatl, a device used to hurl the spear at game, or enemy in time of war. They turn up in field edges after heavy rains, or on old logging roads. Sometimes
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