Quiet Noise

As I open my eyes this morning I look over to check the time and quickly remember that I am not in my trailer. I begin to move and within an instant I hear a repetitive thumping on the floor. A second later there are two pairs of black eyes looking down at me. No, it’s not a nightmare, but I am just as unlikely to move as if it really was. The thumping is Farley’s tail on the floor, his one and only movement in the morning when he knows I am up, and the eyes belong to Emma and Smokey, the two high energy bird dogs I have the privilege of sitting for the next five days.

I am sleeping on the floor and I know that at this point, any sudden or exaggerated movements will almost certainly ignite a firestorm of activity. I slowly check my watch, it’s 6:10 AM, there’s no hope, and they’re onto me. A flurry of tails and rapid breathing now fill every inch of space around me. This is way too much chaos for me on a Saturday morning. Time to get up.

After some laboring I’m able to get my shoes on and as soon as I open the door the dogs are out. I step outside to a cool, crisp morning with new snow blowing out of the east. The morning noise is exactly what I need to calm me down. It’s not the kind of noise that everyone can hear or appreciate. In fact, the compilations of sounds are actually very quiet. They’re neither loud nor soft, yet they’re as clear as anything you’ve ever heard. The noise or lack thereof is making me smile and it’s exactly what I believe all breeds of hunters seek out. Whether that person is sitting in a freezing cold duck blind or getting ready to chase birds through the sagebrush, it’s the quiet that only comes when you get away from modern world.

When you close your eyes you find yourself hearing noises that most others are too busy to stop and appreciate. The wind blows through and you hear the rustle of the brush around you. You hear songbirds start to stir and then, a crack in the woods ahead, everyone goes still. Waterfowl hunters hear quacking off in the distance and lower their heads. The turkey hunter catches a faint gobbling over the next ridge and crouches down. Theses noises don’t break the quiet, they simply serve to enhance it. Now you start taking in even more. Suddenly you hear leaves shaking together and you begin to look for movement. The quacking is now accompanied by the faint sound of whistling as ducks pass by high overhead. The gobbling of toms now comes from two different directions. These noises are the ones that drive us to go out, that make us want to be out before the sun rises. Before a single shot has even been fired we’ve taken away more from that experience than we could have had we taken the entire day and done something else.

The noise is not something everyone can hear though. In today’s day and age the thought that you can just stop and listen is often lost on many. We now live in a world where we are more in-tuned to hearing the distant ringtone from our cell phones in the other room than we are to the natural world around us. And for many of the people out there, were you to put them in a situation where they were forced to listen, as we choose to do every time we go out hunting, they would very likely not hear the world around them like we do.

That is the quiet I heard when I stepped outside this morning. Those are the noises that never fail to calm me when everything else around me is in chaos. In the early morning light those noises let us know that success is within our grasp; that today might end with your reward in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other. But then again, even if the reward eludes us on this day, the whisky will still be sweet and tomorrow morning you get to do it all over again. You get to go out and listen to the world. That, in and of itself, is the true reward.