As we settle into the holiday madness, which is immediately
followed by a prolonged lull in my hunting seasons (with really no action,
outside of occasional coyote hunting, until spring turkey season), I like to
take the time to reflect back on the deer season which recently ended.
Like most every deer season I’ve partaken in, I didn’t shoot
a deer. Which is perfectly fine, given
that some hunters go their whole lives without shooting a deer. I was long ago given to the opinion that for
the most part hunting was going to be about a whole lot of sitting time and not
a lot of action. This is particularly
true of deer hunting. I’ve heard lots of
stories and read loads of articles about “aggressive tactics” for most every
type of game, and have to agree that from one time or another I’ve had them
work. But never so as I chased deer.
There are what I would call “competitive deer hunters” in my
life. Men I know that take a personal
hit when the hanging pole is empty on a Thursday, and guys that get downright
desperate if there’s nothing dead by Saturday at lunch. Some of these are men that can and regularly
do walk up on deer. Men that are
stealthy and quiet and downright spooky in the woods. That is never going to be me. I hunt with men who have a surplus of hours
to devote to trail cameras, scouting, legal baiting, and tree-stand
hanging. That is also never going to be
me. These men are emotionally invested
in deer hunting in a way that I currently am not, and while it is hard for me
to feel bad for them, I do feel a twinge of remorse for their situation. Because for me, in a relatively quiet fashion
I’ll get into a spot where there are known to be the occasional deer. I’ll get warm and comfortable, and then I’ll sit,
wait, and watch. I’ll throw out a grunt
on a tube call or turn over a doe bleat now and then, but in reality I deer
hunt the way the vast majority of fishermen fish. I’m just out there. Despite the sympathy of those that hunt with
me, I’m not certain that they don’t think something is gravely wrong with me.
I never really gave it much personal weight until this past
year when I started hearing the same phrase over and over, it became the
obligatory suffix to any conversations about seeing and shooting deer, and my
nerves became taut and let’s face it, a little raw, with each repetition.
As a camp, we had a good year shooting deer this
season. In the first week the camp on
the North Bruce Peninsula scored on a pair of bucks, which is about average for
us in that area in that time of year, while in the second week three more bucks
became venison. In that same second
week, our camp was seeing antlerless deer with regularity. My brother had seen six of them by mid-week,
which is rare for where we hunt deer.
Some seasons, we’ll consider ourselves lucky to see one deer period for
the whole two week hunt. The land of
surplus deer this is not.
But like I said, maybe it was the timing of the season this
year, or perhaps 2013 was a year of propitious conditions for deer survival, or
maybe we were having just plain old good luck; whatever the reason, deer were
bounding about our hunting area near Parry Sound. I arrived on Wednesday afternoon looking to
get a solid three days of hunting in, and the weather outlook was grand. So there it was good weather, good hunting,
and a willing population of deer. One
straggler made it camp Thursday and he was already tagged out on two bucks from
the previous week; while in camp he mostly just did dishes and during the
daylight hours he sat in a familiar treestand holding out for a trophy
buck. It was looking to be a slam dunk
of a week.
But there was to be no good karma for me. Our group was being begrudgingly selective,
recognizing the success that they’d had and many does that normally would find
their way into our bellies were being left to walk on and fend for themselves
in the coming winter. That was until I
got there, presumably.
“Well. Shawn can
shoot a doe, but all you other guys have shot lots of deer in your lives, so
don’t go shooting anything that doesn’t have horns…” I heard this often for the duration of my
hunting in the second week.
So it had come to this.
My paltry three kills had put me at the kiddy table in this particular
camp. A camp filled with what I thought
were friends and loved ones; but A-HA! their
true colours had come out.
It all started off so promising. Success as a fifteen-year-old in only my
second hour on stand as a deer hunter…I must have looked like a shooting star
of the deer hunting future. But here I
was almost twenty seasons later and that promise had come to naught. A deer hunting hiatus caused by a hectic university
schedule, punctuated by brief success with a button buck and a small basket
racked seven pointer, and then the subsequent devotion of more holiday time to
turkeys and waterfowl then to the hallowed family tradition of deer hunting had
made me what I was that week.
I was the pity case.
As the hours and days went on and I invariably failed to
take down the doe that was reserved for me, I sensed tension beginning to grow
in the 600 square feet of space that we eight grown men were occupying. Questions were raised, casually at first,
about what the repercussions would be if someone else other than I was to go
ahead and shoot an antlerless deer. These
often escalated into full blown arguments about the merits of selective deer
hunting in general. My brother said
flatly that next year he would not be passing up does early in the week, as
since my arrival he had not seen even a flicker of a deer, this despite him
having smacked a fat spike buck at the very start of the week.
Then on the Friday morning it very nearly happened. As I sat on a high ridge overlooking a gully
that had seen many a successful deer hunt take place I crunched leisurely on an
apple. Between bites, I thought I heard
something thumping through the leaves behind me and to my left. I turned and saw the flash of brown and white
through coniferous undergrowth. Holding
the apple in my teeth I wheeled slowly to my left and shouldered my .308. Bits and pieces of a deer trotted slowly but
purposefully through the brush, and all the while I squinted through the scope
looking for a spot to slide an ethical and lethal shot into the deer’s boiler room. For what seemed like an eternity I looked,
with my finger braced on the safety and with apple juice leaking slowly down
from the corners of my mouth and dripping down my chin. Realizing that things were getting bleak I
made a desperate bleat with my voice (a sound which if made while holding a
Granny Smith apple in your teeth sounds particularly un-deer-like) to stop the
beast. The hope was that I could get a safe
window to drive home the 160-grain projectile.
The animal stopped and looked directly at me. I could see that it was a doe, but that was
all as only the deer’s nose, eyes, and ears were clearly visible. Then as quickly as she stopped, she melted
silently and wistfully back into the woods.
I never saw her again.
All was not lost of course.
After all this was the rut, and if the doe had come along, there was a
chance that a buck may poke along behind her soon enough. For two straight hours I sat stock-still and
silent, staring at the departed animal’s back trail, all the while hoping for a
suitor to come follow her path through the woods. Nothing came of it.
Frustrated and ready to eat lunch I turned back to my right
and noticed two ruffed grouse drinking from a barely trickling stream some 70
yards below me. With a sharp report, one
of the two grouse lay dead. I went down
and retrieved my tasty trophy, secretly proud of an instantly lethal neck shot
on so small a target from such a distance.
By the time I got back to my deer stand, the other grouse had returned,
perhaps looking for its departed companion.
Feeling confident I fired again, only this time to see the bird powering
away for the next county. I decided to
call it a break even day for grouse, even if the whitetail deer had defeated me
as they typically do. Instantly, I got a
text message from camp (cellular service is surprisingly good in spots up
there).
The hunters were all back at camp and with bated breath they
awaited my report on whether I had connected on a deer with my two shots. I let them stew for a moment, letting them
imagine my triumph as I hauled a 12-point monster buck from the depths of the
gully, then I sent a picture of the prize-winning bull ruffed grouse back, an
act that was met with indifference from my cohorts. Later that same evening, my cousin shot a
buck from the exact same stand I had occupied that morning. The next day, my other cousin had a doe
meander past him at twenty-five steps while he sat on bench overlooking a
meadow, a bench that I had occupied a mere 24 hours before. Exiting my sit on Saturday night I was
pleased to find a deer track inside one of the boot tracks I made while I was
walking into the stand four hours earlier.
These are the kinds of things that happen to me when I hunt
deer. I really do wish I was making all
this up, but these tragic truths weave their way through the tapestry of my
deer hunting career. Would I have shot
that solitary doe? Absolutely. I’m a meat hunter first, and there is little
I like more than fresh venison. But
things conspired against me…had I not been munching that apple, I may have
heard her earlier. If I had set up
facing that way, I may have seen her before I heard her. There’s no way to plan and mandate all the ‘ifs’
and ‘maybes’ of deer hunting, and that’s the magic of it.
But I’m not discouraged.
Really I’m not, because for those unplanned hours and hours on stand I’m
at peace. There isn’t a thought in my
mind other than the focus of deer hunting.
No bills, no politics, no responsibilities. Just me, my rifle, an apple to eat, a tree to
lean against, and the hope that a deer stumbles upon my happy little situation.