My Last Day As A Big Game Hunter

November 22, 2007, 10:00 am; posted by
Filed under Articles, David, Featured  | 1 Comment

For three years I hunted with my in-laws, using a borrowed rifle to trudge through the woods of Northern New York and the Adirondacks in search of the elusive whitetail deer. Much of my failure to notch a “kill” may be due to the differences between my criteria for selecting a hunting spot and the criteria of my fellow hunters.

My father-in-law and brothers-in-law based their selection on things like the presence of a “deer run” (a brownish line left when deer kick up the edges of fallen leaves, exposing the darker, older leaves underneath). They looked for “rubs,” saplings damaged when deer rubbed their antlers against them to scratch an itch or sharpen their antlers, depending on whose mythology you believe. They looked for “deer scrapes,” patches of forest floor scraped clean of leaves by a buck, then soaked with urine to attract does. (This is not something I recommend; in fact I would personally be terrified of a woman this would attract, but “deer are queer folk,” as they say.)

I personally looked for a large tree with a generous portion of soft leaves deposited beneath its boughs. From this vantage point, I would carefully set my gun aside, lean back against the base of the tree, and happily munch sandwiches and drink hot coffee from my red-capped thermos bottle while enjoying the beauty of an autumn day. My jaunts into the woods were less a hunting expedition and more a sort of armed picnic; I imagine the local deer population, after some initial wariness, came to view me with a mix of relief and amusement. I was obviously not out to kill any of them, intent only on defending my own food in the case of any aggressive move on their part.

My last day of hunting came in 1985. I was informed by the clan that a hunt was scheduled for Thanksgiving Day. We would gather at the Watertown homestead, the children would play games, the men would hunt, and the women would prepare a feast for our return. I have to admit it sounded very enticing. Also, I still had a small bit of hope that one day, an extremely stupid deer would stumble upon my position and wait patiently for me to get my rifle, remove the safety, and shoot it down, fulfilling the prophecies of our patriarch and making me an instant hero. This could be a banner day for me.

The day came, bringing with it 4 inches of snow, ruining any chance of a comfortable seat on the ground enjoying my usual picnic lunch. But so what? Only an imbecile would ruin his appetite on Thanksgiving morning anyway. We kissed our wives, piled into the car and drove to the woods for the hunt. After several hours of standing around in the wet snow, I heard the triple retort of a rifle (the universal hunting signal for SOS) and made my way back to the car to find Paul Sr. and Paul Jr. lounging around, without Craig.

“Are we leaving?,” I said hopefully.

“Nah, I think Craig got lost,” said Paul Jr.

“He’s not lost. He just got turned around in them tamaracks,” my father-in-law quickly added, waving his arm to the west in the direction of the shots. “He’ll work his way out.”

So we waited. And waited. An hour passed, then two. There were more signal shots, more dismissals about the tamaracks, and no one did anything. I am no hero, don’t get me wrong, but I was cold and hungry and knew that only a 30-minute ride and a missing brother-in-law stood between us, a blazing woodstove, and a feast of enormous proportions. Something had to be done.

Then it all came together for me. We were hunting in a patch of woods bordered by roads on two sides. We had parked on the E-W road, walked a short distance up the N-S road, and entered the woods on the left side of the road. Craig was firing his rifle from amongst the tamaracks on the right side of the road, so he would have had to cross 4 inches of freshly fallen snow to get there. Not only that, but he had showed me the heel of his new boots that morning, taking childish pride in the fact that they left a kangaroo imprint on the ground wherever he walked.

I easily found where he had crossed the road and followed his tracks to the tamaracks, surveying the muddled mess as he had obviously confused his tracks by crossing and re-crossing them. I fired my rifle off and immediately Craig cried out, a few dozen yards away. He emerged, looking scared and relieved all at once, and thanked me profusely all the way back to the car. I was a hero. For thirty minutes.

By the time we reached town, my father-in-law’s insistence that he knew Craig was “just turned around in them tamaracks” and would eventually work his own way out, plus the calming effects of being “found” and safely headed for home, had a profound effect on Craig. By the time he told the story at the house, it ended, “…and then I ran into Dave, and we walked back out together.”

No deer. No credit for clear thinking and rescuing the lost. And I was two hours late for Dinner on Thanksgiving Day. My hunting days were over.


Comments

1 Comment to “My Last Day As A Big Game Hunter”

  1. Steve on November 26th, 2007 10:17 pm

    I loved that armed picnic line… I don’t know why the comments and polls are being sketchy. I’m trying to fix it, but I STILL don’t have Internet here, after a month…

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