Ancient Fall Ritual by George T Edison Jr.

(I enjoyed this one and thought I would share.  Got this one from friend and family member, Whit, who is  down in south-central Florida)

ANCIENT FALL RITUAL

By George T. Edison, Jr.

As November approaches a small, dwindling group of Floridians senses a difference in the air, imperceptible to the "snow birds," it signals the advent of hunting season. The woods are drenched this fall from a hundred summer downpours. Curiously, cottonmouth moccasins are found in the flat woods, their stumpy bodies draped over palmettos far from the lake and creek bottoms which they prefer in drier times.

Wives and daughters shake their heads in disbelief that husbands and fathers could leave clean white sheets to spend a few days in places where snakes eat rats at night, and one arises at 5:00 a.m. to sit on a stool in a dark hammock where vicious Florida mosquitoes feast on ear lobes. One dares not slap one lest he spooks a nervous turkey roosting high and dry in cypress trees.

The fall hunting season is ushered in with much joy for those still fortunate enough to have a place to hunt.

Hunting has many detractors these days. Some people see no harm in slitting little sheep's throats to provide their palettes with rack of lamb, but they are reduced to spastic comas at the thought of shooting a running buck at 200 yards. It's okay to wring a rooster's neck for Sunday's chicken and dumplings, but a pox upon the devil that bags a quail on the wing as it bursts from the palmettos in front of a pointer.

It was not always thus. I recall that as a boy growing up in Orange County, the taking of game was considered a natural and valuable part of life's progression from boyhood to manhood. Some hard lessons about self-reliance, friendship, and the impending passage into adulthood were learned around glowing litered-knot camp fires in the oak hammocks and cypress heads of the upper St. Johns and Kissimmee River valleys.

Hunting camps, hunting dogs, and hunting guns were a cracker boy's heritage and he learned the nuances, respect, and use of each at his father's or grandfather's side.

Hunting camps, like season tickets to Florida Gator games, are passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps the mother of all such camps was Tosohatchee on the West bank of the St. Johns River in Orange County. These 18,000 acres of happy hunting grounds were sold to the state a few years ago for a wild life reserve. The land had become too valuable to be kept for a private place to hunt turkey and deer. The membership roll of Tosohatchee read like a roster of pioneer Orlando and Sanford families: Beardalls, McEwans, Spears, Campbells and so on. A nostalgic tear glistens in the eye of any surviving alumnus of Tosohatchee at the mere mention of that name. As one looks toward the St. Johns River with a melancholy gaze, memory becomes reality.  For the moment one is in the woods on the eve of opening morning at Tosohatchee.

Sometimes in the midst of a traffic jam on the Expressway or Turnpike, inhaling the pungent odor of a hundred diesel semis, my ears pound with the sounds of pulsating engines and boom boxes, my mind wanders back fifty years to my hunting camp in the Florida wilderness on K-6 Ranch west of Lakes Poinsett and Winder on the upper St. Johns River Basin just south of famed Tosohatchee. Dolph Keene's K-6 Ranch had recently been purchased by the Mormon Church, a new client of my mentor and boss, Billy Dial. Henry Moyle, the great Mormon elder and lawyer from Salt Lake City, who represented the Church in the acquisition, had given me a permit to hunt and fish on that fabled tract of almost 50,000 acres.

"Fabled" is not an exaggeration because to hunters the K-6 was as "fabled" and famous as the Serengeti Plains. When Mr. Keene owned the ranch, he employed Jim Black, an ex-sheriff of Orange County, to keep poachers away. Jim was 6 feet 5 inches tall with no fat on his lanky frame, and was known far and wide for his lack of mercy toward trespassers and knowledge of the terrain. A cracker friend once remarked that you had to be a hungry son-of-a-bitch to steal venison from K-6. With such protection, the game flourished and the population of deer, turkey and quail was legendary.

Someday a book or movie will be made about Jim Black. His life story is stranger than fiction. He came to Jacksonville at the turn of the century from rural Kentucky to play semi-professional baseball. He slew a fellow worker in a fight over a dispute at the dairy where he worked part time. The seventeen year old Jim Black was so distraught that he ran to the depot and asked for a ticket on the first train out of town and told them that he did not care where it was going.

The young ballplayer, on the lam, landed in the tiny town of Orlando at the onset of the 20th century where he lived until his death not long ago, well into his nineties.

Jim often visited me at my hunting camp on Ten Mile Road in Osceola County just east of Highway 441 and The Red Alligator Saloon. He was always with Ralph Hansel, his buddy and a fourth generation Orange Countian who still lives on the banks of Lake Gatlin where the Hansels homesteaded in the 19th century.

When those two Crackers got together around the camp fire along with legendary bow hunter, Fred Bear, their stories kept boys of every vintage wide-eyed and awake well past bedtime. Fred and Jim have gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds now, and I wish that I had taped one of those sessions. The National Archives would have been richer had I done so.

Jim Black used to hunt turkeys where the sprawling Florida Hospital now stands. He said the tall pines on the northern rise overlooking Lake Estelle were a favorite habitat for big gobblers, as was Ferncreek's cypress trees where Mayor Carl Langford Park now stands.

Fred Bear's stories were not set that close to home. He brought movies to the camp trailer of himself shooting a man-eating Bengal tiger in India with a 75-pound bow at 100 yards with a Maharaja just after World War II; or maybe some action shots of Fred shooting pheasants on the wing with a lighter Bear bow in Michigan.

To us who were lucky enough to have been in my camp when those two were alive, Fred Bear and Jim Black will always be a part of wilderness Florida, and the hunting tradition we cherish.

*

But I digress. I will never forget arriving that first morning at the gate on the sandy Taylor-Creek road that marked the northern entrance to the ranch. My Florida law school roommate, Ben Smathers, was with me as my guest. It wasn't that Ben was such scintillating company but he owned the bird dog and one could not borrow the dog without taking Ben along too.

As we pulled up into Ranch headquarters early on the opening morning of the season, we looked out across the 6,000 acre "pasture" which lay to the west of the foreman's house. The tract was called a "pasture" although it was unimproved and covered with the native flat woods of palmetto and pine, interspersed with cypress "heads" (as ponds completely filled with cypress trees were called). The northern boundary of this pasture is Taylor Creek; the southern boundary, Wolf Creek.

In front of the cypress head nearest the road was a scene straight out of East Africa. A hundred or more white-tailed deer stood three and four deep, ears up and bodies tense looking in our direction. As we approached the herd for a closer look the deer suddenly bolted, leaping over palmettos with white tails flagging as they headed for the Taylor Creek bottom. Should an ornery deer hunter ever make it to heaven, it will surely look something like that K-6 pasture did half a century ago on opening morning.

Ben and I enjoyed one of those perfect days. Anyway it was as near perfect as it gets for "bird" hunters. (It is a tribute to the bobwhite that they are the only species so called by quail hunters. Doves are doves and ducks are ducks, but only quail are "birds.")  Back then we had no off-road, 4‑wheel drive vehicle to hunt from, so we walked through the woods with the dog. To use another cliché, of quail aficionados, we were "in birds" all day. As a matter of fact, the hunting was so superb that Ben found it necessary to claim only half as many of my kills that day as he usually did. Bird shooting doesn't get any better than that.

I hunted K-6 for over a decade and then the pasture was "improved," as they say, and the charm was gone and so were the coveys of fat quail. That was progress? The pine trees were cut down and the stumps removed to make room for a carpet of pasture grass to cover the ground and feed the cattle. Dull-witted bovines now chewed their cuds where swift, classy white-tails once dominated. The deer still ventured out in herds to feed at night, but the quail were gone from the pasture for good, except around the fringes next to heavier cover, and at night when they roosted in circles on the ground with butts toward the axle of their roosting wheel in the open pasture, so that predators could be seen or heard approaching from any direction. It became a common sight to see a covey suddenly rise from the low palmettos and dive in unison into the pasture in late evening to roost, or fly to the cover of the flat woods in the early morning when the birds were ready to feed.

The "African plains" were replaced by a "dairy pasture" look.  The coup de gráce, however, was the flooding of the Taylor Creek and Wolf Creek basins under the direction of and at the instigation of those mothers of all useless and arrogant bureaucracies, the St. Johns Water Management District and the Corps of Army Engineers. (At one time 98% of the St. John's budget was allocated for administrative expenses and 2% for constructing works of the District.) In the '50's, the St. Johns Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers conned the Mormon Ranch into granting thousands of acres for a drainage easement along the western side of the upper St. Johns River. The sales pitch was irresistible. They promised to build a series of dams or spillways across the creeks flowing easterly into the St. Johns, thereby creating huge lakes or reservoirs. These reservoirs were to be connected by ditches and earth berms. When complete, the project would hold back flood waters in time of deluge, furnish water for irrigation in time of drought and in between, create a water wonderland for the local peasantry.

After spending nearly $100,000,000 (yes, One Hundred Million Dollars), the project was scrapped by President Nixon as unfeasible and the entire barrel of pork was abandoned. It was determined that the huge flooding, damming and digging boon-doggle would harm the environment. Why so much of our tax dollars were spent to uncover this dark secret has never been explained.

As a matter of fact, the abandonment of the project was such a well-kept secret that by the time the full folly of the situation became evident, the news was so stale, no one gave a damn. Meantime, the Taylor-Creek Reservoir is the only grand lake in existence as a result of the initial plans. The multi-million dollar dam across Penny Wash Creek to the South, stands looming in the flatwoods while the meager waters of the stream flow around it, avoiding the embankment like the plague. Millenniums from now our ancestors will happen upon this monument to bureaucratic ineptness, scratch their heads, and ponder what gods were worshiped by the builders of such monstrous concrete ruins.

The southern terminus of the system ends ignominiously at Ten Mile road in Osceola County, a dirt thoroughfare affording access to the interior of the southern extremity of The Mormon Ranch. This southern-most terminal is merely a great ditch with a high berm on each side cutting straight through hammocks and heads alike until abruptly ending at the unpretentious Ten Mile Road. Hunters and cowboys, down there, quickly christened the big ditch, the "Panama Canal", by which it is known to this day.

Curiously, the St. Johns Water Management District held on to the wasteful and useless "Panama Canal" for years after the project for which it was dug was scrapped. The ditch was enclosed mile after mile with the finest barbed wire fence in the surrounding cattle country, and a crew was kept by the District's staff in Palatka to mow the grass on the berm and keep the fences mended so that no cows could chew on the precious turf. (Fret not!  I understand railroads still hire fireman for diesel locomotive engines.) I cannot leave that mama of all red tape, the St. Johns Water Management District, without one more observation. Among the cities in its jurisdiction are Orlando, Jacksonville and Daytona Beach, all served by air lines, railroads and turnpikes or thruways. Yet the District's sprawling headquarters lie in the pinelands west of Palatka, unserved by an air line or a major no-access highway. When these headquarters were placed and built, the Chairman of the District was from Palatka and the architect of the Headquarter's 2.5 million dollar building was from Brevard County. They both served in that great deliberative body, the Florida Senate, at the same time: That is the upper Chamber that put the headquarters in the thriving, non-accessible metropolis of Palatka in the first place. We should all be proud.

*

Before the flooding of Taylor Creek and the arrival of portable saw mills destroyed the pasture, the golden age of hunting on the Mormon Ranch flourished. I used a weather-beaten, board, cracker house with a tin roof for a number of years as my hunting camp. My house was located behind the ranch headquarters on a two-rut trail that led through Wildcat Hammock down to the St. Johns River. It was hardly Isleworth, but it was suitable and handy to live close to the ranch foreman and the other cowboys and their families who also had houses and trailers under the oak trees nearby.

The Wolf Creek delta was my favorite place to hunt turkeys and squirrels. The creek, where it enters Lake Winder, spreads out like the Nile River and is fringed by a beautiful oak hammock whose ancient trees spread their huge branches in a seamless canopy of moss, leaves and airplants. There are many Sable Palms, Bays, Florida Maples and Hickory trees disbursed throughout the delta along with the oaks. In some places the ground is always soaked with creek water.  Aged cypress trees soar skyward and gnarled cypress "knees" rise above the surface around their trunks at water level. Tall yellow pines separate the delta region from the sandy flat-woods beyond.

Wild turkeys thrive on acorns, dollar-weed, and palm berries under the trees.  Cypress trees furnish a perfect roost for young turkeys, that fly up just at dark and spend the night over water so they might hear coons or bobcats wading out for a turkey dinner. When sunlight becomes bright enough to see the ground, turkeys fly down and spend the day on the forest floor foraging for food. The tough old gobblers prefer the tall pines at the hammock's edge for roosting except in the spring when their chests swell up and they gobble at every sound, including hoot owls and banging jeep doors. Then they sleep close to their harem deep inside the delta.

White-tailed deer also love the delta. Strangely, they forage like the wild turkey and eat the same food.

Feral hogs also roam the delta, gorging on pinkroot when acorns become scarce. Turkeys follow rooting pigs and gobble up the grubs, worms, and edible roots overturned by ravished porkies.

I guess it is impossible to deny that the swarming hordes of humans now milling around in every city and hamlet in Central Florida have been good for business. That infernal mouse has made Wall Street Journal subscribers out of many a dirt-poor cracker who was lucky enough to own a sandy lot near the Magic Kingdom.

But I miss the real magic kingdom we had before the mouse infestation: the magic kingdom of litered-knot camp fires, early morning turkey hunts under gorgeous live oaks, and afternoon duck shoots at the south end of Mosquito Lagoon before the "federals" invaded our pristine land.  Most of all I miss the steady, easygoing people who lived and worked here and took enough time to value and nurture friendships and our priceless Florida wilderness.