We buried my grandmother, Dorothy Grace (Anderson) Hill, on Thursday. You aren’t allowed to dig the graves of your loved ones anymore, so after the memorial service I went over and helped the workmen tamp down the soil on her newly filled grave with my soles. I have contended that digging graves for my beloved pets has been therapeutic in the grieving process, and I have argued that we too should be allowed to assist in digging the graves for the humans that we have loved. Somehow the process of digging the grave (or in this case symbolically sealing her mortal frame) makes their deaths real, draws an end to the chapter of life that we have shared, and is a final act of honor.

Her death marks a significant loss for at the age of ninety-six, she took the past with her. Yes, there are the pictures of her upon graduating from high school, of her with my grandfather after being married in the summer of 1941, of her with him in his Army Air Corps uniform after he volunteered in the first year of the war, of her on vacation with her husband, three sons, and her mother during the 1950s, and of her walking the streets of Greece where she lived for a while in the 1960s. There are the pictures and film of her cavorting at the deer lease near Bastrop, Texas in the 1960s, of the Christmases when the generations of family would gather at her home in the 1970s and early-1980s, and of her attending the graduations and weddings of her grandchildren during the 1990s. She seemed to enjoy being behind and in front of the camera—but both were ‘silent’ windows to the past.

Although the images remain, the stories have faded. My grandfather, E. P. Hill (Eli Porter Hill, Jr.), died after Alzheimer’s robbed him and my grandmother of the future they had planned, as well as the last fifteen or so years of the time that they had together in body but during which his mind was stolen by disease. As a child, I lived near my grandparents for only a couple of years and by that time the disease was already rampant, and his conversation was sparse. While I remember his face, I cannot remember him telling me a single story.

For most of my childhood, my immediate family lived far from the rest of my maternal and paternal families. For the Christmas of 1982, my grandparents traveled to visit with us in the Dallas area. My grandmother gave me a slim-line GE tape recorder. It was the greatest gift. I recorded that Christmas. I recorded my brother and I playing with our new Lone Ranger and Tonto action figures and of us squabbling, of course. Most importantly, I recorded the conversation between my grandparents and their old friends from Greece who came to our home to visit. It is the only recording that I have of my grandfather’s voice as he responded to queries from old friends with only a handful of words. It was a pleasant voice.

I come from a long line of hunters. My ancestors lived in Louisiana when it belonged to the French, they fought in the War of 1812 against the British, and they came to Texas in 1825 when it was Mexico. They settled along the Gulf Coast near Anahuac and became fixtures in the area. My grandfather of some generations past, Solomon Barrow, was a Ranger, a killer, and a neighbor of Sam Houston who apparently used to come over and get drunk until he found religion and respectability. My ancient grandfather raised cattle and horses on his land grant and infamously was probably poisoned to death by his slave and mistress, Margaret. He and his brother apparently were hunters, and he also kept animal pets, including a raccoon who shared his meals. Unfortunately, the pet raccoon died first after consuming the poisoned dinner thereby foreshadowing my ancestor’s imminent demise from the fateful meal. He was, to quote a Texas historical marker, “[r]epresentative of the hardy pioneers who first settled this section of the state.” The description seems euphemistic.

Recently, my cousin presented me with the shotguns of my grandfather and my great-grandfather. The guns are no longer functional. They are worn shiny and smooth from being used for decades, and they have a dusting of rust from having been inactive among the last generations. My grandfather grew up around Cove, Texas and apparently spent much of his youth hunting waterfowl just like his father, Eli Hill, who was a captain of a ship (first named the “Arena” for his wife and then the “Beth” for his daughter) that ran Trinity and Galveston Bays and the rivers that fed them. My grandfather’s sister remembered that her three brothers “all loved the water, boats, hunting & fishing.” After the war, my grandfather continued to hunt waterfowl but turned to hunting whitetails in Texas and traveling in the late 1960s and early 1970s to pursue mule deer on public land in Colorado. I have seen the pictures. I even went on two of those mule deer hunts as an infant and child. I have seen the pictures, but I don’t remember. Polished steel and worn wood, like walls, actually can’t tell the stories.

Several years ago, I did an oral history project recording the stories of generations of Texas families that hunted. The recorded interviews were the foundation of my chapter, “A Dying Legacy?: A Century of Hunting in the Stories of Texas Families,” in God, Nimrod, and the World. Ironically, I did not interview my own family. My only serious effort was when I surreptitiously set up a camera and began asking my grandmother about the past. We looked at slides of my grandparents’ hunting trips to Colorado and their Texas deer lease. The stories and details were much the same as those that I had heard during our weekly phone calls. It was like history was boiled down to a handful of memories that somehow held a concentrated form of identity.

My father was a busy man, committed to the priorities of faith and religion and we rarely lived around family. I did not get to go hunting until I was in high school. To be honest, I learned more about the outdoors from the hundreds of magazines that I consumed than I did from him, but he did tell me stories of his early years and the few times his father took him hunting—but most of the stories were about him hunting with his high school friends. If he did not pass on knowledge, he did pass on the desire. It was not until I was a senior in high school that I killed my first game animal—a thin-antlered whitetail deer in Missouri. But, I was hooked and I pursued hunting mostly on my own for the next decade and a half.

In the cemetery, my father eulogized my grandmother and recalled the story of the one time she went hunting with my grandfather. It was a story that she had told me numerous times. Sitting with him she had tons of questions and comments which she kept voicing and he kept telling her “Shhh.” She used to tell me that he made more noise “Shhhing” her than she did asking the questions. She would then tell me that she never went hunting in the field again, but she loved the hunting trips and hunting camp. She loved being with my grandfather and with their friends. Although she wasn’t a hunter, she took joy in the being a participant if not a practitioner.

Over the years she was happy to tell me I was a “Hill” and that my love for hunting was just like my grandfather’s and that he too would butcher and process his deer rather than take the easier path of having them commercially processed. She told me that she was happy that I had taken up duck hunting and deer hunting with my family once I had returned to Texas. She made it clear that hunting was “in my blood” and it was my legacy.

Stories sparked the fire of that legacy in me. Experience came later. The stories of generations past are now gone forever. Sadly, memories and recollections of stories told by previous generations are mere sketches in the minds of my parents’ generation. Story—the glue that holds it all together, that gives life to the images—is gone. Legacy and lore have been lost to disease, dementia, death, and distance.

I am a hunter. I have no children. The world is changing, and the tendril of tradition hangs ever so thinly—threatening to break.

Do you know your hunting legacy? If not, ask. If you don’t have a hunting legacy, begin one and start gathering and telling those stories.

Without stories, we won’t know where we came from or the direction we should go.