“C’mon, Beagle. Get your act together and come up with a damn game plan… Time’s a – wasting… Tommy would never have put up with this sitting-around-camp crap when there are deer out there to hunt.”
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George Wise’s good-natured cajoling instantly hits its mark, somewhere deep down in Marty Cormier’s gut. Although the scolding was lighthearted, the resulting angst is palpable.
As he pores over topo maps and aerial photos, Marty, aka Beagle, calculates the next move. The job of Hunt Master is tough duty any day of deer season, but it’s Herculean when you’re tasked with casting 15 to 20 hunters across hundreds of acres of generally featureless public land. It’s all the more confounding when it’s mid-December, the deer have been pushed for weeks, your crew is toting muzzleloaders, and you’re trying to live up to the reputation of the Super Beagle.
The Loss of a Leader
It was Wise who had dubbed Tommy Cormier, Marty’s younger brother, “Super Beagle” back in 2002 for his uncanny knack of getting deer up on their feet and headed in the direction of one of his buddies waiting in the woods for driven deer to sluice past him. It was the same year that Tommy shot a giant buck on a hill called Round Top not far out of town.
“Just think about beagles for a second,” Wise explains. “What do they do? They zigzag through the thickest damn cover in the woods and get stuff up and moving–and then they chase like hell. Well, that was Tommy. What else happens? People follow beagles through the woods. I bet that half the kids in town learned how to hunt because they followed Tommy through the woods. He just wanted to teach them how to hunt. Hunting wasn’t what he did–it’s who he was.”
“There was no keeping him out of the woods,” says Tommy’s father, Ray. “If deer or turkey season was open, you wouldn’t see him–he was gone. And whether it was Josh and Steven [Tommy’s sons], or his nephews and nieces, he’d take some kid fishing or wake them up in the dark, get them dressed in warm clothes, and take them out in the woods to scout for deer and turkeys. He got them involved almost as soon as they could walk.”
But then, it all went to hell. Tommy Cormier, just 36 years old, was gone. The father of two young boys died tragically in an ATV wreck that forever changed the lives of the survivors.
When they laid Tommy to rest, cars lined both sides of Route 57 for half a mile. Mourners young and old walked arm in arm up the long hill to the family plot. You couldn’t miss it–it’s next to the giant oak tree, the one that consistently drops acorns and draws in turkeys and deer. And you couldn’t mistake Tommy’s Boys. They were the ones dressed in camo.
The late Hank Zelek
