Loaded for bear

When Alice Jones was young, hunting was man’s occupation, and women could join the Excelsior Hunting Club in Highland only with their husbands. Back then, she was accepted by her male counterparts “as an oddball,” probably due to her hunting skills, although Alice modestly doesn’t brag about them. Last October she turned 91, and she says with regret, “I cannot stalk anymore, because it’s hard for me to move around a lot now. But I can still hunt by going to where the deer come and sitting there quietly waiting.”

“My mom is the best hunter I’ve ever known,” says Dave Jones, 58, with genuine admiration, “the way she used to stalk the deer.” He adds, “I’m talking as a hunter, not her son.”

In order to catch your prey, you have to be out in the woods and ready by the first rays of dawn, which means getting up in the dark in the middle of the night. Alice is determined to get her first bear this season, chuckling, “I’m jealous because both my mother Leila and my son Dave took bears. It’s jumped over one generation.” She points to the bear skin covering the armchair. The rest of the walls are covered with deer heads in the cozy room where the wood fire blazes.

This seven-year survivor of an aggressive stage-three cancer and “one and a half” heart attacks, as well as a severe onset of adult asthma, says jokingly, “I won’t leave until they push me in… with the big stone on top.”

It’s to this ability to make light of things and to make others laugh that she attributes her own long life and continuing agility, both mentally and physically. Alice also has an inborn curiosity about life and humility of spirit, liking to look at the starry sky and think, “We’re so small and insignificant, yet so many think we’re so important.” Dave interrupts, “She wants to come back again, because she says she still has so much to learn, things like astronomy.” Alice still reads magazines such as National Geographic each night. She says she has always followed a regular American diet and ate her “healthy bread.” Her family enjoyed chicken and fish, as well as the deer and other game they hunted, along with plenty of vegetables. She also enjoys an occasional glass of wine and never smoked.

Both of Alice’s parents hunted. Alice says that her mother was more “social,” and it was she who took the bear. Her father Adolph was closest to her, influencing her decisions. Starting her hunting career at the tender age of nine with a rabbit, she’s gone on to taking a deer each season. Descended from French Hugenots who settled in New Paltz in 1580s, Alice embodies the American pioneering spirit akin to her ancestors who learned to survive in the new continent. Her survival skills served her well when her husband, also named Dave, was called to the Korean War, leaving her in a house that had no running water with two small children, Dave, named after her husband, and Leila, named after her mother. She hunted and fished and grew some vegetables such as tomatoes, but not many. Alice says, “This is no farm land.”

Despite not being able to have an environmental career and instead working as a nurse, Alice started the recycling program and the program to keep roadsides clean in Sullivan County. For many years she was also an active contributor to the government-run Breeding Bird Watchers Program, recording the sightings and birdsongs with her friends on their walks.

Today, singles, including women, can join the Excelsior, and the hunting club has seven woman members. Although the size of the deer has got smaller due to disappearing farm land that supports many more deer than the corresponding size of forest, and there also are fewer deer, the hunt goes on. Alice will be there, hoping for her first bear.