INDIAN STREAM TOWNSHIP -- The tiny living quarters of the hunting camp are cramped, and marked by the obvious signs of grown men being left to their own devices for several days. Coveralls and blaze-orange vests are draped over kitchen chairs and doorknobs in the hallway. The breakfast table is still littered with the beer cans that were never cleared away from the night before. Feet are on the coffee table, and corn bread is cooked in a most peculiar manner -- in a roasting pan sized for a turkey.

But the men are smiling.

They are smiling because they are playing cards and video games. They are smiling because they are here with the brothers they don't see enough of during the rest of the year, smiling because they strategize and re-strategize each and every day's hunt. And they are smiling, too, because as the night grows darker, colder and later, the same question is asked over and over and over.

"So, what time are we getting up?"

And every time it's asked, there is a new answer.

"Not as late as we did today, I know that," the oldest brother says.

"I'm really thinking about sleeping in tomorrow," his cousin says.

"I don't have to wait around for the rest of you meat sticks," says another in the group of seven -- a father, four of his sons and two of their cousins. "I'll just go when I'm ready."

Hunting camp is a time-honored tradition in the Maine woods, maybe the time-honored tradition.

For generations, otherwise sane men have plucked vacation time from the calendar for the month of November, loaded trucks to the brim with wool clothing, enough food for an army, rifles and ammunition and headed to camps ranging from rustic to ostentacious buried deep in the woods. Thanksgiving week is a popular time and, as was the case with the Blanche family, sometimes wives and sisters will show up a few days later to prepare Thanksgiving dinner at camp.

To make it to hunting camp this week, Carl Blanche's two oldest sons -- Nathan, 30, and Bradley, 28, a former all-state football player at Winthrop High School -- made nearly 12-hour drives from their homes in the Richmond, Va., area. Also along were Jacob, 19, and the family's youngest, 17-year-old Eric. Carl's nephews, Joe Blanche, 28, and Brandon Linder, 17, came, too.

It's not a group for the thin-skinned. Like wolves working together, they prey on weakness.

Nathan, the oldest brother and most serious hunter, is disappointed at the difficulty of the hunting in northern Maine, and his family takes great delight in his suffering. Bradley, the biggest and strongest of the group, is reminded not-so-gently of the time he cried over the taking of a deer's life. Jacob, Eric and Brandon are still teenagers, a point hammered home through name-calling, public ridicule and endless insult. The ribbing never ceases.

And, like in every pack of hunters, animals or humans, everything has a place here. Everything -- and, most importantly, everyone -- fits into a story suited for the hunting camp.

SENIORITY

Via backcountry logging roads iced with a slick coating of fresh wet snow, it takes nearly an hour to get to the general store located in the center of the West Forks. Wedged into the middle of a bench seat in a well worn-in Chevrolet pick-up truck on this banzai coffee and donuts run for a houseful of famished hunters, Joe Blanche has some time to think.

A wide grin crosses his face.

"I used to hate the whole 'seniority' thing when I was younger," Joe says with a chuckle before turning to his cousin, Bradley, piloting the swerving vehicle. "But I love it now."

Seniority is one of the unspoken rules of a hunting camp, unspoken, that is, until one of the young bucks tries to take a cup of coffee too soon or attempts to fill his plate with sausage and biscuits before the camp's elders have gotten their fill. Then it becomes seriously spoken, with consequences as dire as a game of "Dead Leg" -- in which combatants sneak up on an unsuspecting brother nodding off in an easy chair to punch their thigh as hard as they can -- or, much worse, being verbally undressed ad nauseum for the remainder of the day or (gulp!) entire week.

But hunting camp's not only about the seniority. It's also about the mind games brothers play with one another, the time a father can spend uninterrupted with sons who may otherwise live hours away from home and the simple joy of a week of stalking the peaceful Maine woods.

And it's all about the retelling of the stories, one of the last remaining tributes to oral history we have in our culture today.

Under red-faced cheeks, warming next to a fireplace in the evening after hunting in sub-freezing temperatures for hours on end, it's the stories that get a little more sensational with every telling. It's the stories like the one about "the community deer," which everyone in the room shares a piece of. It's about teenage sons rolling their eyes when they hear dear ol' dad holding court in the center of the living room to --for the hundredth time -- talk about the tame moose walking the local woods a few years ago.

When Carl Blanche first floated the idea of a hunting camp, he knew fairly quickly that the hunting itself was secondary. Because hunting success or not, there would be plenty of stories to pass the time.

"Oh, we could write quite a book," Carl said.

UPTA CAMP

Carl Blanche took months to plan this trip, and by his own admission, he found it difficult to stop smiling over the thought of it. His wife, Kathy, even let slip in the wrong company that tears clouded her husband's vision once he found out that his sons were on board for the week.

"It's something that as a father-to-son, or an uncle-to-nephew, relationship -- it's just very important," Carl said, wrestling to put it all into words that likely don't even exist as he drove out for a hunt in the darkness of Tuesday morning. "We're probably unique and typical at the same time.

"We're probably unique in that there are so many of us here, but we're probably typical to most hunting families in that it's all about the bonding time."

Carl abruptly brings the truck to a halt, swooping it around in the middle of a frosty, one-lane road. Backtracking, he looks for the fresh set of deer tracks that caught his attention, the ones that trailed off into the woods and up a large and obscured hillside. Initially, he cannot find them.

He turns to Joe.

"Where were those tracks, anyway?" he asks.

Joe doesn't remember. "We were too busy telling stories," he tells his uncle.

I apologize for distracting the hunters as they headed out under dark skies, clouds hanging low to protect sunlight that has not yet risen.

"No, no, no," Carl says to me. "Don't apologize. The stories are what's important."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com