Dont get 'hunting'? It's about so much more than hunting.

When we had a house fire one December, twice we awoke to find freshly field-dressed deer left anonymously by our back door. Not butchered-- they trusted us to know how. We did butcher one, and itwas plenty. The other we dropped off to another pastor on our road who was temporarily without a church, and with a houseful of hungry kids. Each deer had been dropped with one clean kill shot. Culling them strengthened the herd.

We learned quickly how to contribute to the local giving system. Excess Txgiving turkeys thst accumulated at church (more than needy families on 'the list' needed) were mysteriously left in neighbors' kitchen sinks. My full pantry was raided more than once, for teenagers feeding younger siblings in families in various crises. Delivering those boxes was... there are no words.... the least we could do... and EXACTLY as much help as they could accept. A precise place for each, in a sacred, primal system.

One elderly parishioner who'd hunted since boyhood gave his priest, annually, a package of homemade sausage. Another gave us fish, from that final time he was able to fish. I sang him to sleep in the ICU during his final illness, and his wife to her columbarium niche a few years later.

For years, our farmer landlord Bruce followed the County custom of planting the 2 roadside rows of field corn in their families' choice variety of sweet corn,. The custom is that this bounty is freely available to anyone who stops to pick an evening's boil. My son grew up to milk his cows and-- one bitterly cold winter evening-- overruled his worried ma who urgently wanted him to stay home. "NO! You're SICK!" I screamed. "MOM." he quietly replied. "Bruce is a lot sicker than I am, and I'm going to GO!" That teenager became a grown man that night. In our turn, Bruce's teens came to do odd jobs for us (and learn how to hold a job).

Once you're adopted into this system, only an asshole doesn't see the raw, human beauty of it. Only a privileged idiot doesn't realize it's all about the food chain and cycle of life-- of which humans are a very small, humble, and dependent part.

Dan, you know that life. God Bless you in that life!

~S~