THE DEER PASTURE

There has been dramatic ecological change at the deer pasture, change in even the last hundred years. The old-timers, men and women of my grandfather’s generation, and even my father’s and uncle’s, still recall the days before “cedar”—western juniper, Juniperus occidentalis—swarmed over the land, sucking the moisture from it, and creating a huge and escalating biomass of extremely flammable wax-coated fuel that one dry and windy day will burn hot and big, killing some but not all of the oaks (which are already being crowded out, killed, by the cedar, with or without a fire) and giving rise once again to sweeping grasslands.

The mountain above where we camp is called the Burned-Off Hill, known also on maps as Green Ridge, so named for the verdant pastures that bloomed there after the last big wildfire in the area, in the 1920s. For a long time afterward there were a ton of deer up there, huge herds that I remember even from my own childhood of the early 1960s, late-season herds of forty or more does, in which might be mixed a few spikes and one or two modest bucks.

Since then, as the cedar has reclaimed the Burned-Off Hill, the herds are smaller, but there are some bigger bucks, which brings us to a further discourse on change: how do you hunt deer in such a tangled thicket? Pretty much gone are the days of seeing deer wander across the wide savannah, canted into the wind like ships at sea. In the old days you could crouch in a grove of oak and cedar and watch such a clearing, particularly during the rut—typically the second or third week of November—and you could see some things.

Now, unless the cedar has been treated mechanically—dozed or cleared with chainsaws (though always, it sprouts right back, grows wildly, enthusiastically; only regular fire keeps it back)—there are fewer such openings, and the deer, particularly the bucks, have learned—not just as individuals, but as entire populations, via the filter of natural selection—to stay in the cedars as much as possible.

A thrilling way to hunt them now is to find a scrape or rub and sit in the cool shade of the cedar bower and wait. You’ll hear the deer coming, their little hooves kicking against the loose granite and sandstone, and then you’ll see, through the dense matrix of so many juniper branches, the tan shins of their forelegs, dappled in that latticed light. Then the legs will come slowly closer, down the little rabbit warren of a trail, and then, best of all, you’ll see the glint of sun on a set of mahogany-brown antlers. You’ll click your rattling antlers together, and blow once more lightly on your grunt tube, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, the breeze will hold in your favor and the buck’s keen bright eyes will not see you, will not meet your eyes (you’ll be wearing a camo mask)—and when the buck moves again and its vision is obscured by a trunk, you can lift your rifle slowly and carefully and take aim.

It’s more like hunting turkeys than deer. It’s certainly not like it was in the old days, but it’s fantastic; that part, the emotional core of it, will never change.

How quickly, though, the rest of the world changes, and particularly once one is no longer a child! There is the far distance of the Old Ones—the exciting and yet also sobering feeling one gets upon discovering a perfect, or near-perfect, chip or arrowhead loose in the granite gravel beneath those slowly eroding giant hoodoo boulders—and then there is the nearer-distance of the old-timers who came just before my grandfather: the Byrd family, related to Davy Crockett, who was given this homestead in gratitude for Crockett’s service at the Alamo; and old Homer Young, who married into that family, and from whom we first took our lease. (Howard married Mr. Young’s daughter; after Mr. Young died, we leased from Howard.)

Our old-timers—Dad and Uncle Jimmy—still almost children, back then—recall that Homer Young would come down in the evenings to play dominoes, and even take a sip of whiskey, and seemed glad for the company.

Sometime after Homer and Mrs. Young settled, the cedar began to encroach, and for a while—half a generation, perhaps—a lone ranch-hand, working diligently and daily, was able, with a single ax, to chop down every invading cedar.

He could not have envisioned a world more different: the stuff of his nightmares, perhaps, as he considered his labors at the end of each long day, hands blistered, but with the cedar kept in check single-handedly, if just barely. One such laborer per ranch, holding back the weeds of the world and believing he could hold back change. But concurrent with his unknown passing, the cedar came, and still comes, an explosion of single-minded enthusiastic photosynthesis.

Because of this, the best way to hunt is to still hunt, whether during the rut or pre-rut, or in the harder times, following the rut. It’s often hot as Hades in the early season, and rattlesnakes are often still active; in such heat, the deer seem to me to be even more crepuscular than normal. There’s a tradition among many Texas hunters to hunt from high towers, in plastic blinds, over machines that spray corn out to the deer and turkeys, which then approach like domestic livestock. While it’s not my place to judge another hunter, I have to say, that style is not for me—to my way of thinking, that changes the hunting to mere killing, and I see no need for that, here in the twenty-first century. As well, it’s so wonderful to hunt a deer deep in the cedar thickets—again, it’s like calling in a wild turkey, except that the deer has keen scent—that I feel a wave of pity for the hunters, or shooters, whose experience is so reduced by such a practice.

Sound carries, in the clean air of the Hill Country, and in November, hiding in a clump of cedar, waiting and watching, at daylight you can hear the mechanical whirr of feeders spraying corn pellets everywhere, followed by the almost simultaneous report of rifles near and far. I’ve had the good fortune to know the pleasure of wilder hunts—walking up on bedded animals, or waiting in the bedded areas, or sneaking through the boulders and catching them in pursuit of does—and it’s all the difference in the world. I’d sooner go to the grocery store than sit like an office-hostage in a cubicle at daylight and wait for the mechanical farmer to spew corn and then, dutifully, the deer-turned-into-livestock to come galloping in. Call me old-school, but to me, there’s a difference between killing and hunting.

More change: Back in the oil-rich 1970s, some Hill Country landowners began experimenting with the farming of exotic game animals—most notably axis deer and Aoudad (Barbary) sheep—with the Hill Country so closely resembling parts of Africa. Over the ensuing decades, the exotics have—as they always will—escaped their fences and are slowly establishing themselves in their new non-native habitat.

Perhaps the greatest change I have experienced is the strange circularity of no-change. I used to wonder if my father and uncle would ever one day take my grandfather’s place as esteemed elder of the deer camp—such a time seemed light-years away—and yet somehow, through the turning of the calendars, it has happened. Just as strange, or stranger, to imagine my brothers and cousins and I likewise one day stepping up to inhabit that position.

The land—the ruggedness of it—has sculpted my brothers and cousins into good hunters. They’ve all killed so many deer, over the years, that they tend now to let them go, save for B. J., the youngest, who at thirty-four is still in full possession of his hunter’s desire. (His birthday, the first of November, is celebrated at each deer camp; another tradition.)

There was a drought this year, like none that any of us have ever seen. B. J. was the only one who killed a deer, hunting it with his blackpowder gun, missing it, improbably, with the first shot, from a distance of only about fifty yards, but reloading (hiding, he said, behind the self-made cloud of blue smoke) and dropping the little buck, a second-year devil-spike, hammerhead-dead. It was good to have a deer in camp, and we were all proud of him and the old-school ways of his blackpowderhood, though in time-honored tradition we ragged him about the little buck’s antlered inadequacies, and about that first missed shot, and we bitched and moaned when we each paid out the dollar tithe we give every year to whomever is fortunate enough to shoot the first deer of the camp, the dollar bills impaled on an ice pick thrust into the much-perforated kitchen cabinet above the old refrigerator.

The rest of us continued to act like old folks, walked the same thousand acres we’ve been walking for decades—knowing intimately every inch of ground—and spent more time remembering than hunting. Such is the luxury of our soft times, and such too is the blessing of wild country, to provide, even for aging hunters like ourselves, a place to do that remembering, as the world keeps changing, deciding in its ancient and graceful and inimitable way day by day what to carry forward and what to leave behind.