It had been a hard day of hunting, the fresh snow failing to muffle the crunching underfoot of an old frozen crust. The wind had shifted to northwest and blown hard. The deer were in the swamps and thickets, and were impossible to approach quietly; even I could have heard myself coming. For a couple of hours I’d followed the track of a big buck, who’d headed straight uphill. Surely he was headed for bed, I thought, and in this wind I might have a chance to surprise him. But, though I doubted he knew I was behind him, he was headed instead over a ridge and into the next valley. A little before noon I bade him godspeed and headed back down my own track.

Now in the gathering dusk – I kept checking my peep sight to see if I could still find the hole – I was leaning against a silver maple in the river bottom and imagining the warm cradle of my truck seat, the engine’s strong start, the slow creep in first gear back to camp, the blast of heat from the wood stove as I opened the camp door. And the familiar voices, gently chaffing.

I took one last look, rotating slowly in a full circle, seeking dark motion against the white snow of the woods, slung my rifle over my shoulder, and started to shuffle back to the foot bridge over the river. These were the last moments of my fiftieth year of hunting.

I was working in a saloon fifty years ago, tending bar for my supper and mopping up in the morning for my breakfast and lunch. I was just finishing up one early afternoon, wiping down the tables in the dining room and filling the liquid candles, when a mustached old-timer came in: wool Ballard-cloth pants, red-and-black checked jacket, brown fedora. He was looking for a man to help him skid a couple of deer, he said. I was the only one there. He went into the kitchen, and I heard him asking my boss whether I was discreet, and then, could he spare me for a couple of hours.

He had a couple of deer, all right: two does, frozen solid and illegal as hell, way up on the side of a mountain about two miles from the village. We dragged them down to the road, loaded them into my old Plymouth, and drove them to the tool shed of a summer residence, where he hung them for later butchering. Then he invited me to come to his camp with him and his sons for a whole weekend of hunting. That’s how it started. I’ve been going there for fifty years now.

I thought of him as, crossing the suspension bridge, I stopped to listen to the river. He and a few others in that mountain village were more than kind to me; they helped me get established. They’re all long gone now. I remember him and his brother best of all. One included me in his family hunting group, the other hired me and taught me carpentry. But much more important, each was the absolute patriarch of his respective domain. We hunted as Charlie dictated or, in his later years, advised; and we built just as his brother Bill directed. Each was superb at what he did. We followed willingly, eagerly, and when they died, were as lost for a while as orphaned bear cubs.

A successful, long-lasting camp situation, I’ve concluded, depends upon a patriarch who by example sets the tone of the experience and implicitly makes the rules. No one has to be told what to do, or how to do it; he knows. As often as not, the patriarch’s successor, as the saying goes, “can’t carry the matches to light the old man’s cigars,” and the quality of the experience begins to deteriorate. That process is rarely, if ever, reversed. I’ve experienced both – an heir who let the traditional values erode and another who has cloven to them religiously – so I can attest to it. In the first situation there is created a cautious, self-conscious desire not to offend; in the second there’s no need of that, because subscription to the spirit of the place is unanimous.

For some reason, a great number of people need a leader to tell them what their goals are and how they are to be achieved. I’m old enough now that I don’t need one, but when I was immature, unsure, and just starting out, Charlie and Bill were godsent. Not all leaders, however, produce benevolent results. Reading Tolstoy recently, I’ve noted his “great-man” theory of history: that famous leaders are not the free agents they fancy themselves, but rather pawns in great events, motivated by ego and personal ambition. His favorite example was Napoleon, who marched millions of people west to conquer millions of others, and succeeded only in killing hundreds of thousands and marching back home – for what? And why did those millions follow him?

Adolf Hitler is a more recent example: a leader who appealed, subtly at first and then blatantly, to the basest instincts of the German people. Again, millions died – for what? Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin, to consolidate their personal power, also set their own people against each other, with the same tragic results. The danger exists even in our own country. Millions of people, seeking and needing authority and leadership, honestly let themselves believe the most patently specious reasons for the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives – for what? For me, knowing that my phone may be tapped, my internet use monitored, and even my library records collected by my own government creates the same cautious, self-conscious desire not to offend as in that unhappy deer camp. Surely there must be a better way!