NEWBURY, Vt. — Aaron Byron Cole knew how to find excitement, from an early age.
“He was always getting into trouble,” said Cole’s aunt, Selenda Girardin.
Cole was a toddler when his mother left the family dairy farm in South Newbury to deliver a baby at Cottage Hospital, where Cole had been born three years earlier. Cole took the opportunity to explore the farm, until he put a pitchfork clear through his big toe.
Girardin recalled Cole’s mother at the hospital saying, “That boy in the emergency room sounds just like my Aaron.”
Cole wasn’t one to let the injury slow him down. Throughout his childhood he was always running through the farm and the surrounding woods, digging worms, brainstorming a business idea, or avoiding the one animal he detested: the rooster.
Once, his brothers found him hiding in the grain box to avoid the bird, who was perched on top.
“He had one fear, and that was the rooster,” said Girardin, who still lives in South Newbury.
The rooster might have been the one creature in nature that Cole wasn’t entirely at ease with.
Cole, who died Nov. 20, 2019, at age 65, was known for being one with the wilderness. He was an expert trapper, hound hunter and woodsman.
“You could ask him anything about wood lore,” said Girardin. “He knew every bird by the sound.”
Cole attended local schools before enlisting in the Air Force. When he was stationed at Pease Air Force base in Portsmouth, N.H., Cole would drive home to South Newbury whenever he had the chance.
“He would get a long weekend and drive all the way down just to be back on that farm for two days,” said Frank Bryan, Cole’s father-in-law and a lifelong friend of the Cole family.
After serving his country, Cole worked as a lumberjack, using his father’s oxen for extra might. At the end of the day he would hop on the back of one of the giants and ride it home the way most people would ride a horse, said Melissa “Lee” Bryan, Cole’s mother-in-law.
Never one to hold a traditional job, Cole sold firewood and trapped nuisance animals to make a living.
“He was always the one to call when people had a skunk problem,” Girardin said. “People used to joke that he had a skunk he would let out.”
Cole’s great passion in life was hunting bear with his hound dogs.
Frank Bryan, a retired University of Vermont political science professor known for his work on Town Meeting and the state’s rural culture, recalled driving through Bradford, Vt., one icy night when he saw Cole and his dogs burst from the woods.
Cole stopped just long enough to yell to Bryan that he was on the trail of “a big one” before disappearing into the woods again.
Butch Spear, president of the Vermont Bearhound Association in Newbury, Vt., said that Cole was out in the woods with his dogs for more than 47 years.
“He loved hounds,” Spear said.
Because of that, the thrill was in the chase, even on the many nights Cole came home empty-handed, Spear said. “People who hunt hounds, whether for bear, coons, or coyotes, it’s for the love of the sport, of using a hound to chase prey. It’s to see how a dog can use his nose, his intelligence.”
Trapping and hound hunting are no longer popular, but that never bothered Cole, Frank Bryan said.
“He wasn’t concerned about other people. He did his thing, and if you didn’t like it, that was your problem,” he said.
In fact, Cole never cared much for political correctness. He never worried about finessing his conversation based on who he was talking to.
“He wouldn’t give in to the popular opinion,” Frank Bryan said. “He had no preconceived notions, he called ’em as he saw ’em. I always loved that about the guy.”
Cole knew what he liked and stuck to it. Girardin recalled offering him a fancy beer when he came over for dinner.
“ ‘I’d rather have my Bud Lite,’ ” Girardin recalled Cole saying before going to his car to get it. “I was stuck with the expensive beer that I’d opened.”
Cole was a bachelor until his 50s. Then, he reconnected with Rebecca Bryan at his mother’s funeral. The two had played together as children, but after that, they were smitten, Girardin said.
“They seemed to be very happy,” Girardin said.
In his later years, arthritis, hearing loss and other ailments kept Cole from getting into the woods as much as he was accustomed to. It was a hard adjustment after a life on the go.
“He physically did so much more than his peers,” Frank Bryan said. “He’d chase those critters all night long and up the next day. In the last few years, it beat him up too much. Boy, it took a lot to keep him down.”
Cole died in November after an extended illness, his father-in-law said.
“He just ran out of steam,” Frank Bryan said.
Cole’s family asked for donations in his memory to the Vermont Bearhound Association to help youth learn about the sport that Cole loved.
“That was his passion,” Frank Bryan said. “Hunting and fishing in the old Vermont tradition.”
Kelly Burch can be reached at burchcreative@gmail.com.