Photographs and essay by Tailyr Irvine
It begins the same every fall. My alarm rings at 3:45 a.m. I roll out of bed, layer up, fill a Thermos with coffee and leave to begin the sixty-mile drive north. I arrive just before 5 a.m. When we hunt with our dad, I fight with my brother over the front seat. When it’s me and my brother, we work as a team, and squeeze my nephew between us in his red, single cab truck.
Since I was a child, when I was the one squeezed between my dad and my grandfather, these trips have followed a strict ritual. After we load the truck, we go to the gas station for powdered donuts, coffee, and sandwiches, and then we head to the river or the mountains or the woods behind town. The only light in the cab is the glow from the radio buttons and the digital clock. The drive is quiet. When we get to where we’re going and the sky begins to tint the land blue, we grab our rifles and begin our walk.
Sometimes we take separate paths and walk around hills through miles of brush along a river until we meet in the middle. Other times we walk together. When I am with my father, he shares the memories certain trees, mountains, and saddles hold from decades earlier, when he walked the same path with his father. We talk about relatives we lost. We talk about nature. We don’t talk at all for long stretches.
When I am with my brother, he confidently guides us through the brush, his stocky build a replica of our grandfather. My nephew and I have heavy, less-confident feet. Twigs snap and my brother often pauses to deliver us a look he learned from our father. No words, just eye contact. In those moments, I look at my nephew, the same way I used to look at my brother when we got that look from our dad.
It’s a nostalgic feeling returning to the same woods with a new generation, making new memories so similar to the old memories we hold with family that is no longer here. I bring my camera often to try to document these moments—partly because I want my memories to be physical so I can revisit them with more clarity.
I want to capture the feelings, smells, and stories. The quiet, the breathing, the way the hunting truck smells like gasoline, coffee, and wood. But these images could never bottle the memories the way I would like them to.
Instead, like our ancestors, we embed our memories into the land. When my nephew is old enough to take his children to these places, he can share with them these photos, as well as the history my camera can’t capture. The stories our ancestors told my grandfather, my father, my brother, and myself. The stories that he will pass on to his children as they hunt the same land our ancestors hunted.
