Family Hunting Camp Poem by David Welch

Great Grandpa Moses first built the old shack
in the summer of nineteen twenty-three,
thrown up with big logs, hard maple and oak,
it only measured twelve feet by fifteen.

There have been two expansions since those days,
a real bathroom and a whole upper floor,
with the bunkrooms it will sleep eight people,
but gets crowded if you add any more.

It sits way back in the Northwoods forests,
in an empty corner way up in Maine,
amidst logging roads sits four hundred acres
that have for so long boasted of our name.

In the Fall months in has been the site
where we've taken close to one hundred deer,
one at a time, you got to follow laws,
we've just been doing it for many years.

And though the hunt carries its own appeal,
it's comradery that has made this place,
all that goes on when nightfall has settled
and we sit 'round the fieldstone fireplace.

The amount of beer consumed on these grounds
may strike a rock star as very obscene,
not to mention the cards tossed fast about,
and the stories told that nobody believes.

Outside stretches a ground-level deck,
an outdoor room in the long, warmer months,
a hand-made table sits there upon it,
a good space where we often clean our guns.

The land is mostly an evergreen swath,
though forty acres cleared form a good plot,
to keep the herd big, it's around this place
where we get them more likely than not.

Though it was deep in a small old-growth patch
where my father bagged the family's only moose,
he'd been lucky, got a permit that year,
and shot the bull while it fed under spruce.

I'd like to say I got a deer every year,
but hunters can be well-known for their lies,
I usually get a buck every other,
those whitetails really know how to survive.

These days some of my older nephews
want to run power and wifi to the joint,
whenever they do well all roll our eyes,
they seem entirely to miss the point!

And now my boy Mose, though you be but one year,
I pray you will not become like those fools,
and grow to have may adventures here,
one day I know you will love this place too.