Gene Samanka, with arms raised, regales his friends with a late-night story at the Stone Camp in Clearfield County. From left are Dave "Hoofty" Reiter, Doug Righi, Samanka, his wife Dori and Tony "Bone" Zaffuto. When hunting season begins, Dori, and other women, will not be allowed into the camp. Story by Bob Batz Jr. ~ Photos by Steve Mellon

Here at the Stone Camp, a landmark hunting camp that sits all by its lonesome on an unpaved road in the forested mountains of Clearfield County, tonight is the night.

Tonight, as have their grandpaps and fathers and uncles and cousins, men hunker inside this rustic two-story stone cabin, which is little changed since the founding fathers of the Sykesville Hunting Club finished building it in 1921.

Members gather at the Stone Camp in the mountains of Clearfield County. The camp is occupied by the Sykesville Hunting Club, whose membership is strictly limited to 20. Click photo for larger image.

The men are warmed by a log and coal fire that roars in the massive stone fireplace. Some are warmed, too, by the beer and whiskey and wine that flow as freely as the icy spring out front that remains the source of all water in the camp.

The drinking and the card playing and the b.s.ing will have started early in the morning and continued through their traditional feed -- a Polish buffet of pierogies and halushki and pigs-in-the-blanket. In a rare and not unanimous nod to modernity, some will watch the Steelers game. They pick it up on their tiny TV only by duct-taping an antenna to a long stick outside that they also use to bang off the soot that clogs the chimney cap.

When it gets dark, it'll be so pitch-black they don't dare step outside without a flashlight, unless it's just to take a step or two off the porch toward the burbling of the spring and gaze up at a sky spilling over with stars.

Some of the men will turn in early, creaking up the steep staircase -- hands further smoothing the tree-branch railing -- to crawl into one of the six basic

wood bunks in the unheated room. Cigar smoke and pungent talk will waft through the crude floor vents, but what keeps these men awake is something else: the big bucks that keep walking and running and jumping through their heads.

Doug Righi fires up a cigar. Click photo for larger image.

That's because tomorrow at daybreak is the opening of Pennsylvania's two-week rifle deer season. It's a day so sacred that many schools and businesses still close in observance. They might as well, because some 900,000 licensed hunters take to the state's woods and fields. Many will go to "camps" that dot the green swaths of topographic maps, especially in the remote central and northern regions.

Clearfield County -- about a 2 1/2-hour drive northeast of Pittsburgh and straddling Interstate 80, where it hits its eastern high point of 2,250 feet -- is thick with camps. They have colorful names such as Bee Hollow and Wild Goose and range from comfy compounds to shaky shacks.

The Stone Camp, as folks around here know this fine example, is officially "Camp #9.C. 7.8.," as is carved into one stone lintel over the square side windows. That's how the camp is designated by the state, which leases out the ground it's on in the Moshannon State Forest.

The 4,020 such camps on the 2.1 million acres of state forest land are "quaint reminders of days of yesteryear," says spokesman Terry Brady, because the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources no longer allows new ones. Leases -- just $200 a year -- are renewable and transferable, but holders tend to hold tight. Countless more camps sit on private land.

The Stone Camp's original framed 1920 lease leans atop the mantel, darkened by decades of smoke. Also displayed there is a "Season of 1921" collage of sepia photos of the men who started the camp, each posing in their woolens holding guns and immortalized by fountain-penned captions such as "Billy & his coon."

	Next to the ever-present fire, Doug Righi, left, and Dave "Hoofty" Reiter chat at the Stone Camp in the mountains of Clearfield County. Click photo for larger image.

Most of them hailed from the Jefferson County town of Sykesville, today only about a half-hour car ride away. But back then, the men traveled up the mountain on foot and on a mule-drawn wagon. They'd stay for a week or more of serious hunting and then return to town with a wagon full of deer and bear and other meat, to be shared equally among them.

Or so goes a history that, other than a few mementos, is oral. It gets passed down over the years by members of the club, which incorporated in January 1946.

"The purpose of this organization is to make clean and better sportsmanship in hunting, fishing and vacation trips," reads the constitution and bylaws. Membership is strictly limited to 20. As Doug Righi puts it, "Someone has to die before someone gets in."

Even then, it's not easy. In the 1970s, even though his late father had been longtime president and he'd grown up here, the 20-something Righi was rejected for being too long-haired, too wild.

He stayed away, moving away to Phoenix, and 15 years passed before, for the hell of it, he went with a buddy to visit the camp.

"As I walked through that door -- boy, I'll tell you -- it was like taking a sniff of a pheromone or something," he recalls.

From picking buckets of wild blueberries to peeping at nudey magazines to shooting his first deer, all his boyhood memories came back to him. He wound up coming back to the club.

Now 53 and employed setting up medical equipment systems, he's here every few weeks, sometimes with his wife. As always, women are welcome here in summer, when families use the camp for vacations. But during deer season, they're banned.

Gene Samanka, left, is greeted by Larry Righi during a visit to the Stone Camp. Click photo for larger image.

"That's always been the men's week at camp," Righi says while showing a visitor the "bunkhouse," where, in seasons past, 20 or more guys would snore and emit other noises. Lit by bare bulbs and cluttered with cast-off furniture, the whitewashed room isn't much to look at. But the magnificent mustiness is what "camp" would smell like if you could bottle it. Even his wife says she loves that smell so much that when he comes home, she doesn't want to wash his clothes.

Leading the tour outside, Righi points out the stone on the front porch, on which members exuberantly marked "V.J. Day 8-14-45," when the Allies were victorious over Japan in World War II. Other graffiti covers the wall. "Every kid that's ever been up here put their names on it."

His father didn't bring him to hunt until the season he turned 15. In fact, he got his first deer on his birthday. He'll never forget his excitement for the preceding weeks, especially the night before, when a member from Pittsburgh presented him a horn-handled knife in a leather sheath.

He'll never forget the kick of the .35-caliber lever-action rifle, the acrid smell and his remorse when he stood over the doe twitching on the ground.

He can see now that his father was teaching him a lesson in responsibility in helping him field-dress it and drag it back to camp, where the prize hung from the porch. The knife he used he carries with him to this day.

	Tony "Bone" Zaffuto spreads cheese over his pasta at a large round table in the kitchen. Click photo for larger image.

Sitting and sipping pitchers of local Straub beer on a recent weekend, a few of the men naturally slip in to retelling more of the stories. About seasons when cases of beer were stacked this high on the porch -- or this high, depending on who's telling it. About seasons when it was too difficult to transport enough beer and so they piled up cases of whiskey.

Visiting hunters lined up out the door. The poker games would go 'round the clock. Guys might take a break to cross the dirt road to "Weber's Hideaway" -- the outhouse they had before they added on a bathroom.

And man, did they eat. They laid in so much food -- huge hams, roasts, sacks of potatoes, dozens of eggs -- that they had a "grub committee" and hired a full-time cook.

Men who toiled the rest of the year cherished this rare time away. Sons cherished rare time with their fathers. They still do.

Righi's boyhood friend, Tony "Bone" Zaffuto, who lives in Du Bois, laughs recounting how their dads and other World War II vets once trimmed the pines outside to resemble the palm trees they'd seen in the Pacific.

Prodded for stories about actual hunting, Zaffuto shrugs and says, "All hunting stories are very, very similar."

Dave "Hoofty" Reiter sacks out on the couch at the Stone Camp. Click photo for larger image.

"Like fish stories," offers Righi's uncle, Larry. "A 6-inch fish becomes 3 feet long."

Zaffuto's dad, Joe, was the club patriarch until he died this summer. But like other members, he lingers at camp. He's in the huge round plywood table he and his son made, putting a lazy Susan in the middle so a dozen men could share meals.

They still eat well, as the Righis demonstrate with a meal of a roast filet of beef, pasta with burnt butter and fresh green beans, which they share with a married couple who drop in.

Zaffuto, making bruschetta, asks, "Do we have any Parmigiano-Reggiano up here?"

"Yeah," answers Larry Righi. "It has to be grated, though."

No Spam and beans for these hunters, though there was that legendary night when Amerigo Torretti tried to make the men eat "pancake soup."

The late Torretti was an esteemed member: He ran a beer distributorship. Members always have been a mix of collars, blue and white. While what Righi calls the "bloodlines" have strayed, this looks to be the spring meeting where they'll vote in their first fourth-generation member: Jarrad Taylor, whose great-grandfather, Thomas Taylor, is pictured on the mantel. Says Jarrad's father, Jim, "It's passing the torch on."

With a rifle slung over his shoulder, Tony "Bone" Zaffuto heads out for some target practice. Click photo for larger image.

At a camp that prides itself on being unchanged, one thing is surprisingly different: Many members no longer care if they bag a deer. Some don't even try.

"I never in my life shot a deer," offers Warren Fox of Clearfield, who, at 69, is one of the old-timers. He's been coming here since the 1960s. Still, "The only thing I ever shot at was a man, and I missed him. And that was at the request of the government." The other men chuckle.

Truth be told, this area isn't a good place to find trophy deer, especially with the thousands of hunters who descend on it every opening-day weekend. Since the deer feed on mountain laurel rather than farmers' corn, the venison doesn't even taste good.

If you ask Dave "Hoofty" Reiter, "It's too much work shooting a deer." But the club secretary/treasurer, who lives in Sykesville and works at a Chevy dealer parts department, wouldn't miss the start of deer season. "I just like being out and being here."

He nearly goes into a trance slumped on one of the chunky chairs before the blast-furnace fire, which he keeps stoking with another log or a bucket of coal. He stokes himself with glasses of beer and basks in his buddies' company -- what he reverently refers to as "fellowship."

	Doug Righi warms himself by a roaring fire at Stone Camp. Click photo for larger image.

Tonight, when he can stay awake no longer, Hoofty's likely just to stretch out like some of the other men on one of the couches that ring the room.

The serious hunters already will have gone upstairs. That'll include Carl Smyers and his sons Carl Jr. and Dan. Beneath the mounted buck head with a nine-point rack hangs a photo from the 1987 season when, in a 15-minute span, Carl shot a four-point, Carl Jr. a three-point and Dan a spike. Sleeping alongside them tonight will be Dan's son, Mark, who is 14.

Or not sleeping. Most likely, he'll be breathing in the smoke and stories from downstairs, hoping for his first buck and, just as his granddad remembers doing, "shooting deer all night."

There'll be a point where the camp gets quiet, and a point where it starts to get cold. But someone -- Hoofty, maybe Larry -- will have banked the coals so the fire won't go out. In the morning, the first day of deer season, with just a nudge of the old iron poker, the flames will leap to life.

The men who started the Stone Camp in the mountains of Clearfield County proudly pose in a collection of sepia photographs made in 1921.