Sycamore Trees

Sycamore Trees

            Our old pickup rattled and clanked its way down the log road the headlights bouncing ahead in the late fall air.  The leaves were pretty much off the trees and the coons would have on their winter coats.  The hounds had been kenneled all summer and they were whining in the home made box in the back; ready to rock and roll.

            We saw the eyes first reflecting our lights and then a large buck coon rippled his way across the road in front of us.  We bailed out of the truck with the rusted fenders still flapping from the sudden stop and cut the dogs loose.  They hadn’t forgotten the drill since last season and were in full frenzy casting for scent.  As usual Bell struck first and her clear voice filled the woods like a pipe organ in church.  Then the rest clambered on and they were off and running.

            We waited there in the road, three bare foot boys with our pants rolled up half way to our knees, shivering as we smoked forbidden cigarettes. It couldn’t have been ten minutes later Dan started barking treed and we were off at a dead run; full of our selves, full of the clear fall night, full of the joy of life.

            Dan was still chopping strong when we got to him his front paws against a massive sycamore tree his head thrown back and his voice strong on the cold night air.

             Not that anyone cares but my favorite tree is the Sycamore.  The largest of the American hard woods it can reach fifteen feet in diameter and one hundred feet tall but gets little credit.  It’s sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of trees.  The mountain people call it a sacamore, boxwood, button ball or a snake wood.  It feeds and houses a variety wild life and adds an odd beauty to the forests along the streams. 

            When I was about ten or eleven years old two of my friends and I spent the night sleeping in the hollow base of a huge Sycamore tree beside the Lenard’s creek.  I can’t say we slept much and I don’t recall doing it more than once.  It was pretty close quarters, the earthen floor smelled of rotten wood and porcupine scat, and even though none of us would admit it we were a little worried about what nocturnal creature might be lurking high above us in the cavity of the tree to descend on us as we slept.  About a year later on a stormy night like a great nation the tree succumbed to internal rot and crashed to the earth.  The good news was it fell across the creek and for several years we used it as a bridge.

             Little by little storms would bring high water and the high water would tumble rocks and gravel from upstream and lodge them behind this giant log until they formed a dam and water fall.  I later caught an eighteen inch brown trout out of what we called the sycamore tree hole.  A very nice fish for this small stream.

             The other three hounds were going crazy around the tree.  The bark of the sycamore reflects the lite as we searched the huge branches, probing for the reflection of eyes, and then we saw him hugging the trunk and staring down at us.  Harvey and Carl George took control of the dogs as best they could and I shot the coon with my Dads old single shot twenty-two loaded with long rifle hollow points.  I slipped the coon in a burlap bag and threw him over my shoulder and we headed back to the truck.

            I don’t know how long it will be before the cancer gets me, I’m doing great now and only the good die young, but knowing time is short raises some questions.  One of those questions is what to do with my ashes.  It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me because I won’t be there.  My old friend Ned Hawley and I will be walking the dark damp earth beneath the poplars behind a pair of well-mannered setters.  But Pat will want to know.  Some days I think I’ll have her mail them to a friend and have him sail them on the wind in the Rocky Mountains.  Then again I think I’ll have a friend dump them over the side of his drift boat on the West Branch of the Delaware. But I would not be at all offended if someone were to spread them in the shade of an old Sycamore tree beside a mountain stream were eager hounds could trample them in the damp earth as they wait for another generation of youngsters to get to a treed coon.