First Season
by ErikL · 18 June 2026 · Biography & Memoir
Erik remembers the first hunting season with his father — long silence, no game, and one sentence on the way home that explains everything. His father died twelve years ago. The silence remains.
My father took me for the first time when I was fourteen. We drove out before dawn, not speaking, which was normal with him — he was not a man who filled silences, and I had learned not to either, which I now understand was itself a kind of teaching.
We waited a long time. I remember the cold coming up through the ground into my boots, and the light changing very slowly in the trees, and my father beside me so still I occasionally looked sideways to confirm he was there. He was always there. He was watching with the complete attention he brought to this that I never saw him bring to anything else — not work, not conversation.
We didn't see anything that day. Driving home he said: that's most of it. I didn't understand what he meant until I'd done it enough times to know he was right. The waiting is most of it. The shot, if it comes, is just the end of the waiting.
He died twelve years ago. I still go out before dawn. I still don't fill the silences.
Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.