My girlfriend’s family has a long standing ritual of hunting
early thanksgiving morning and celebrating with a large thanksgiving breakfast.
Make no mistake, this is sacred to them; to the point that the first year of
dating their daughter, I wasn’t invited. The initiation for this ritual was waking up
close to 330 in the morning to prepare to hunt and set up the blind. As part of
my initiation into their ritual I was not to hold any of the guns and obviously
wouldn’t then be allowed to shoot any of the deer if they would have walked by.
I still enjoyed my part in their ritual and kept an eye out for deer. The morning
was very slow with very little signs of deer. The only deer we saw all day was
one I had barely spotted when I saw a flash of white along the tree line. The deer
seemed to almost feel our presence as it walked the outside of the tree line
like a tight rope to stay out of range of us. Just as it seemed the morning was
going to be completely uneventful, a bald eagle flew above us. I felt very
connected the natural world around me as we simply observed it for upwards of
four hours. Also, the feeling of being accepted into another group’s ritual
made the morning very special.
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