Pennsylvania Game News - August 2022 - 60

A Wild Discovery
I wished desperately I'd been the one to find it.
One summer long ago when I was still a child, my parents purchased an above-ground
pool, then, because paying someone to put it in meant stretching the budget too far, recruited
family to help. A cousin, later a consistent hunting partner, was leveling a spot in the yard
when he uncovered a stone arrowhead.
It had lain just below the surface for, what, centuries perhaps? Man, what a find that was!
It shouldn't have been totally unexpected. My parents' property abutted a working farm,
the Lazar place, plied regularly in those days by pheasant hunters. The sounds of Saturday
morning cartoons were often accompanied by the twin explosions of launching roosters
and booming shotguns.
Long before that, though, others hunted, and fought like hunters, on that same land.
On the far side of the farm was Bushy Run Battlefield, a National Historic Landmark.
Its backstory is a familiar one. The British signed a treaty with Native Americans, limiting
westward expansion, then promptly broke it. The natives just as predictably pushed back.
The war known as Pontiac's Rebellion - including the Battle of Bushy Run - resulted.
The natives, historians say, sparred using " communal hunting techniques, " ambushing
foes from cover and driving them to standers, among other approaches.
Was the arrowhead in our yard a relic from that encounter, loosed in an effort to sustain
a vanishing way of life? Or had it been fired at game, before the hostilities perhaps, in an
attempt to feed a family?
I wondered often on the path to becoming a hunter myself in that same place.
In the years before reaching license-buying age, I roamed the Lazar farm and battlefield
with Patches. She was the family pet, ours courtesy of an illicit beagle-spaniel pairing. She
pointed butterflies as a pup but howled when she heard the local fire whistle and later was
as apt to chase groundhogs as stalk the wild ringnecks already grown scarce.
Still, we'd go out the back door, cross a field full or corn or stubble, squeeze under the
barbed-wire fence encircling the resident dairy herd, and roam the woods beyond. We grew
to know where to expect every squirrel, where to look for owl pellets, where to find deer
beds the morning after a fresh snow.
I carried a Crosman BB gun rather than a bow. In my imagination, though, I was, like
those long-gone natives, exploring and fighting through an untamed life.
Not long after I started hunting for real - my first day was spent with a hand-me-down
shotgun in the Lazar woodlot - Patches was gone. The farm disappeared later, made part
of the historic site. The backyard arrowhead is once again lost, too, how or when unclear.
Misplaced in a move is as good a guess as any.
It was never mine; I held it for a short time only. But it's a collection of thousands of
tiny moments like those that shape us, is it not? That one, I think, helped propel me to a
life lived outdoors.
Bob Frye
60

Pennsylvania Game News - August 2022

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