On December 10 Kentucky will inaugurate a new Governor, and though such matters no longer affect me because every day is somewhat of a holiday to me, I suppose that state employees will be off work on Inauguration Day.

Current serfs of officialdom may or may not know that this beneficence began with Inauguration Day of 1983, when the incoming Governor—Kentucky’s first and only female head of state—Martha Layne Collins, asked that state workers have the day off so that they could attend and enjoy her big day. I was already happy with the idea of a lady Governor, and getting a day off during hunting season just put cream inside the cupcake. I had voted for her even though I had forsaken the Donkey Party in Presidential races by voting for Reagan beginning 1980, having learned that on the national level, Democrats were dangerous to my Second Amendment rights. Here at home, however, they had not then shape-shifted into the aberrations we are seeing on TV every day. My bride, at not quite two years wed and still relatively new, disagreed with my vote and accurately predicted that I would regret my choice, a matter she still brings up whenever the occasion warrants, including when I first proffered the theme of this essay. As I recall, one of Madame Governor’s egregious acts was to raid Fish and Wildlife funds for general use, a practice some successors have repeated.

Inauguration Day arrived mild and clement. 1983 was the third successive season of an upsurge in rabbit populations, and my beagle Bad Henry, at seven months age, was showing early promise. On his maiden hunt opening day he had trailed a rabbit long enough to circle it back to my gun. He did not progress much beyond that first season in the four more he had with me, but he was a good companion gun dog and was always more help than hindrance. He even became a reliable finder of downed grouse and quail.

In 1983 I had youth, energy, good health, and hope. I had plenty of places to hunt. The only asset I lacked was free time to spend in the coverts. Now I have an abundance of free time, but for it I have paid out most all my store of the others.

I did not go to Frankfort to celebrate Governor Collins’ installation. Instead, Bad Henry and I went to an iconic crossroads in Eastern Mason County’s Orangeburg Precinct near the Fleming border, a meeting of roads with colorful Kentucky names: Pole Cat Pike and Bear Wallow.

A lady whose husband hailed from the vicinity related a sketchy account of the origin of the name Bear Wallow, that it came from an only-one-of-its-kind tree that once grew there, its planting somehow attributed to a bear. The road takes its name from the holler that meets the North Fork where the Dixon Pike Bridge crosses it. Pole Cat Pike skirts the ridge above Bear Wallow’s head.

My Inauguration Day hunt of 1983 was on the south side of the dead-end road marked South Bear Wallow, the ridge meadows and their little drains that slope down to Pole Cat as it heads toward Mt. Carmel Road, a watershed not on Bear Wallow creek at all. It was then a marvelous small game haven of old weed fields, blackberry patches, and scattered small cedar and hardwood trees—one of the best rabbit patches in the vicinity and home to one of the first coveys of quail to emerge after the crashes of the winter of 1976-77. I was toting my Remington 1100-Lt 20 with its modified barrel that morning. I can’t recall intimate details, but we—Bad Henry and I to be clear lest the harpy who accused President Trump of having royal delusions when he said “Do us a favor”, impute to me the same flaw—jumped rabbit after rabbit and I shot the limit of four. One was a kill as Henry drove it circling back to the flush site, but the others I nailed on the jump, a form of shooting at which I was passably good.

Rabbits were not the only action we had. Adjoining the back section of the prime rabbit field, an open pasture stretched to a fencerow of large red oaks. I found three fox squirrels “treed” in one of the oaks, much like dogs often find multiple squirrels in large oaks during breeding season. The trio of bushytails joined the limit of rabbits in my weighted coat. We did not find the quail covey that day.

I have made two journeys of reminiscence to the Bear Wallow vicinity this year during my fishing travels: one when summer had its heavy green hand on the earth and the other in November, the time of rabbits, quail, and the orange globes of bittersweet strung on fences, of which I dutifully used to fetch a handful for my mother to use as a fall decoration. My hunting there phased out in the beginning years of this millennium, and the changes wrought are stark: There is a home on one part of the ground of that hunt and they have blocked off additional lots and posted realtor’s signs. Part of a locust thicket where in ‘82 I shot the first quail I had killed in six years still stands, but cattle have grazed and tramped the remainder of the great rabbit field down to a nub. On the November trip I turned at the farmhouse on the Bear Wallow side that was my headquarters for that hunt and all the others, and where I would still be welcome to walk down one of the little hollers to the creek. Everything else there has succumbed to the acts of change: selling out, moving away, cleaning up, and dying off, which all of us have experienced to the detriment of our outdoor careers.

I know I went hunting on other Inauguration Day holidays before I retired 17 years ago, but Martha Layne’s day was the best and is the only one I remember. It’s also the the one my wife won’t let me forget.

Sam Bevard
https://maysville-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/web1_Sam-Bevard_2.jpgSam Bevard

Sam Bevard