What's the special feeling that you have about a piece of water--a brook, a spring, a river, a pond or lake? Why is it that the real outdoorsman instinctively checks his step and approaches such a place as he would approach a church? I think in part it's because we hesitate to break the quiet that usually surrounds a pond.
That's some of it at least--but more than merely awe of quiet is the feeling that we really don't belong. A shoreline is a foreign place to man. A shoreline, even of a tiny spring, belongs to the heron poised above a napping frog, a working muskrat, a feeding fish or, best of all, a deer staring at its own upside-down, sky-framed reflection.
The edge of water is a place of surprise to man--a place of sanctuary to the wild. A waterhole is usually a place of truce where the preying and preyed-upon can live side by side in peace.
I never really understood my own small pond in just quite that way until a day last fall when, sneaking past the willow tree, I heard the soft, contented feeding chatter of a pair of ducks that had slipped in as silently as sifting leaves. As I watched these hefty, merry canvasbacks I became aware of a shifting of emotions deep within myself.
Had I had a gun, and had I seen this pair come weaving through the trees in flight, I have no doubt that I'd have shot and considered myself lucky at the chance. But that's not what I felt at all, now that they were sitting feeding at a table in my house. No longer were they wild ducks--abstract fragments in the sky-- now they were suddenly particular ducks, my ducks. A hen and drake, hungry, and obviously very pleased to be exactly what they were. They had sanctuary.
So is it with the deer that feed on fallen apples from the greenings and the northern spies that line my lane. They are not abstract but particular deer. My deer.
I've come home from woodcock covers empty-handed more than once to find a flight down in the birches by the brook, but by being there, in my "backyard," they become particular and not abstract. My woodcock, my "house covey."
What greater satisfaction can there be to you than knowing you are man enough to know when not to shoot and why; having the understanding of sanctuary, the ability to separate the abstract from the particular?
Who should better know the importance of sanctuary than we who must turn out-of-doors to find it? Yours may be the mountains and mine the valleys with a spring-run brook, but the purpose is the same. To find a spot where we can be at peace, not only with ourselves, but just as important, away from others. A place where we can find our identify . . . become particular men, not abstract beings. As the deer feed on apples and the ducks forage through the pond, we are no less seeking food--just sustenance in a different form. A tasting of the wind. A feeding of the mind on quiet. A place to place ourselves, to simply rest our minds; to bank the fires of ambition.
To understand the meaning of sanctuary is to understand one of the earliest concepts of man.
The concept of sanctuary extends beyond place into circumstance as well. For example, I have a friend who is as fine a wingshot as I have ever seen, and his bird dogs are as good as their role in the field as he is at his. After seeing him return again and again with only one bird or, on rare occasions, two, I just had to ask him why a man with his ability with a shotgun and teamed up with dogs the like of his came back with so little to show for it. "I've discovered my own way of 'throwing them back,'" he said.
"Instead of using barbless hooks I use a kind of shell-less gun. The dogs get the same amount of work--I even find it easier to handle them when they need it now that I don't shoot. But shooting doesn't prove anything to me any more. I let the dogs do their work. I flush the bird, swing through it with my gun and watch it fly away. I only shoot what I want to eat." He handed me a couple of blank field-trial shells and winked at me.
I know we all understand sanctuary in our private way and have come, through experience and conscience, to know that we must first give it to others in order to have the comfort of it for ourselves.
This story originally appeared in Mostly Tailfeathers by Gene Hill. Copyright (c) 1971-74 Gene Hill. All rights reserved.