Why we built it
The stories are the whole point.
Every hunter has a morning he'd give anything to have written down.
We grew up in Memphis. Every winter, the farm. Our dad still tells the stories.
Jump shooting the ditches with the truck still running. Timber to the chest, mallards pouring through the canopy. A blind held up by one two-by-four and a couple of screws. Limits out of it for six seasons.
He'll tell you how many they shot. The number goes up every year. Nobody argues. His hands still come up to his shoulder at the dinner table, forty years later, with no gun.
We weren't there. We don't know what the wind was doing. There isn't one picture of that blind.
One day he'll tell it for the last time and won't know it. Then it lives in us, in pieces, and we tell it wrong.
The tally is gone by February. The stories are what you take home. And they're kept in the least reliable place there is: people.
So we built a place to keep them.
Three mornings. One log.
One family, three ways of remembering.
Water to the chest. They came through the holes in the trees like somebody was pouring them. Ricky lost a boot. Dad says it was the best morning of his life and he's said that about four mornings.
The whole blind swayed every time Dad stood up. Rained sideways for three hours. Two birds between the three of us and the best day I ever had. Ben fell asleep on the dog. The two-by-four gave out the next season and nobody wrote that down either.
Ben's first greenheadBen's first greenhead. He didn't say a word for ten minutes, just kept turning it over in his hands. Dad said that's how I was. I don't remember that. I'll remember this.
Two from memory. One written down while it happened. That's the difference.
What gets kept
The date. The light. The weather, written at the moment you started. Who was in the blind. What came home. A picture. A note in your own words.
Log it in the blind or log it years later. At the end of every season, print the journal, so the record never leaves. Hand it down with the guns and the camp.
Write the morning down while your hands are still cold.