Obituary of a Three-Century Man, Chapter 2

Venison for the Family and an Epiphany

To back up just a bit, in the winter of 1907, not long after he turned seven, Jackson Calloway bagged his first deer. Jackson was not a recreational hunter. He didn’t hunt for the rush of the chase, the thrill of the kill, or to hang a trophy on the wall, but simply to put meat on his family’s table. As alluded to earlier, by the time he was old enough to do so, he was expected to do his part in helping out. And seven was old enough.

His hunting garb was coveralls, not camouflage. His mode of transportation was not a jeep or a 4-wheel drive truck—he stalked his prey on foot.

This was not an insignificant accomplishment; it provided hundreds of servings of protein-rich fare for the Calloway family. Tracking and shooting the hoofed ruminant was the easy part, though; he needed his mother’s help (and the horse’s) in bringing the deer back to the homestead, and his father’s in dressing it.

Had Jackson been one of the Wintu Indians who lived in the area, this event would have been viewed as a “coming-of-age” event, and a feast would have been thrown in his honor. For young Jackson, it was enough to see his family enjoy the meat and hear their words of appreciation for it.

A few years after this, in the spring of 1910, while Jackson’s father Will was sitting in his rocker one evening, reading a newspaper that he had acquired from somewhere, he remarked that Mark Twain had died. Jackson asked who Mark Twain was. His parents told him that he was the writer of boy’s adventure stories. This made Jackson curious. He could read, having been taught at the little one-room schoolhouse and at home how to do so, but had never spent much time at it. Or wanted to. But now he was curious about what sort of adventures Mr. Twain wrote for people like him. Eventually he found a “neighbor” (that word was applied in that region and time to anyone who lived within a few miles) who was willing to lend him a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and, when he had finished and returned that, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Jackson didn’t find the life described in those books quaint or far-fetched at all. Most of the scenes were not much different from his own experiences, except that he had only been to a town the size of “St. Petersburg” (Hannibal, Missouri) a few times. Ukiah was marvelous enough, with its houses situated next to each other, a post office, hotel, stores and such, but St. Petersburg, where Tom and Huck and the gang lived, was even more mesmerizing. What made it so, mainly, was the proximity of the Mississippi River, and the steamboats that plied its waters. Mendocino county had rivers, sure—the Russian, the Eel, the Mattole, and the Black Butte—but none that could float a steamboat.

This was Jackson’s first real yearning for life beyond the woods and mountains that he knew so well. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to escape his rugged and primitive existence—he didn’t even know yet that a time would come when he would view his upbringing that way—he just wanted to explore the world. He wanted to see things; experience things: Ride a steamboat, and make a journey on a raft with a friend—things of that nature. He had begun to dream.

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Chapter 1 can be read here.

Chapter 3 can be read here.