DEER HUNTING

For our family and for many like us, deer hunting, which always began on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, was almost as important a tradition as the Thanksgiving holiday itself. Whitetail deer hunters clad in red jackets and caps got up in the dark of early morning and headed for the woods with high hopes of bagging a ten-point buck. During the Depression years and all through World War II, we regularly supplemented our diet with wild game, so hunting was more than a sport. In addition to deer, we also hunted rabbits, squirrels, ruffed grouse, pheasants, wild ducks, and Canada geese.

In the fall of 1946, when I was twelve, I bought my first rifle, a .22 Remington bolt action, model 512A, with a magazine that held fifteen long rifle bullets. I ordered it from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and paid twenty-five dollars for it, money I had earned picking potatoes and cucumbers. I had been hunting squirrels and rabbits with my dad’s .22 since I was nine or ten, so I knew how to handle a rifle and had become quite a good shot.

One Sunday afternoon Pa helped me sight it in, adjusting the rifle’s sights so that when I shot it the bullet would arrive precisely where I intended. Pa’s admonition was to make a clean kill so the animal would not suffer. After a half-dozen shots and a little adjusting, my new rifle was ready for hunting. For my twelfth birthday in July I had received a new hunting knife with a six-inch blade and leather scabbard so I could attach it to my belt. Pa showed me how to sharpen it with a sharpening stone so the blade would easily slice a piece of paper or shave the hair from your arm.

That year I became eligible to buy a license to hunt deer, something I had been looking forward to for a long time. Pa was a longtime deer hunter, and as a little kid I had listened in awe to his stories when he returned from a day hunting in the “wilds” of Adams County. Almost every year he brought home a buck to add to our winter meat supply. He hunted with a shotgun then, and he also brought home his spent shell casings and gave them to me—my prize from the hunt. I still remember the smell of gunpowder that lingered in those used 12-gauge shells.

Now that I was twelve I was ready for my first deer hunt. Finally November 16 rolled around, opening day of the 1946 deer hunting season. Several weeks earlier Pa and I had bought our deer hunting licenses at the courthouse in Wautoma. The license amounted to a piece of paper to carry in your pocket and produce if a game warden asked for it; a metal tag to fasten to the antlers of a buck if you were lucky enough to shoot one; and a fancy back tag with a string of numbers that you wore on the back of your red jacket (this was in the days before blaze orange hunting gear).

By this time Pa owned a 30-30 Savage lever-action deer rifle. Bill Miller, our neighbor and Pa’s longtime hunting partner, hunted with a 30-30 Marlin lever-action. I couldn’t use my new .22 rifle, as the caliber was too small for hunting deer, so Pa told me that I could use his old double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun for my first hunt. Ordinarily a shotgun is used with fine shot for hunting rabbits, pheasants, ducks, and grouse. For deer hunting the law required that you use solid lead bullets, called slugs. I had used some of my savings to buy two boxes of slugs, twelve bullets, which should last for at least two years of hunting.

With a shotgun you do little aiming—you mostly point the weapon at what you intend to hit. But would it be different shooting slugs? I should have shot a couple of my new bullets at a target to find out, but I didn’t want to run out of bullets when I was in the field and a big buck was standing in front of me.

Until the early 1950s almost no deer could be found in Waushara County. The nearest deer population roamed the unpopulated areas of Adams County, the county just to the west of Waushara. So that’s where Pa and Bill Miller and I would head for my first deer hunting adventure. On that cold and dreary November morning, Pa and I were up at 4 a.m. so that we could do the milking and the other barn chores, eat breakfast, pick up Bill, and be on our way. We wanted to arrive at our hunting spot before first light. As Pa drove the old Plymouth through the darkness, he and Bill chatted about other deer hunting trips, about the bucks they had bagged and the ones they had shot at and missed—equally good stories. I’d heard most of them before, during threshing time, or silo filling, or pig butchering. With each telling, the stories improved. The deer were larger and were shot at greater distances and under ever more trying weather conditions: cold rain, snow, sleet, high winds.

My pa was born in Adams County, and he knew the area well. Our family usually went to Adams County every year when the wild blueberries were ripe and ready for picking. Sometimes we visited the site of the log school that Pa first attended back in the early 1900s. The area where Pa and Bill hunted was but a mile from Pa’s birthplace.

Pa parked the Plymouth in an open field, near some deep woods. “This is it,” he said as he turned off the motor and climbed out of the car. My first deer hunting adventure was about to start! We each found our guns and loaded them. Pa had instructed me to carry extra shells in my pocket because the double-barrel shotgun held but two bullets, one in each barrel. If I shot those two shells and missed, I would need to have extra bullets handy for reloading the gun. Both Bill’s and Pa’s rifles held six bullets, so they didn’t have to worry about quick reloading.

The sun began to streak the eastern sky, providing enough light to shoot if we spotted a buck. White frost covered the ground. Pa said we should spread out about fifty yards apart and walk slowly through the woods so we could catch glimpses of each other as we moved along, our guns at the ready. We walked for ten minutes, then stood absolutely still for up to a half hour, then walked some more. Walk and stand … walk and stand. The woods smelled of late fall, decaying leaves mixed with the scent of jack pine that grew abundantly among the oaks. When I got cold from standing—Pa must have gotten cold as well—he signaled for us to move again.

Each step I made was the ultimate in expectancy. I walked with one finger outside the trigger guard and my thumb ready to pull back one of the hammers on the shotgun, a necessary step before pulling the trigger. I walked through hazel brush and black raspberry bushes that tore at my clothing and scratched my hands. I walked around a huge white pine blown down by a summer windstorm. All the while I kept an eye out for Bill and Pa, who walked on either side of me, and for the buck I hoped would appear before me. We walked and waited all morning and saw nothing—not so much as a deer’s white tail disappearing in front of us.

“Time to eat our sandwiches,” Pa said when twelve o’clock rolled around. I was hungry as could be; it had been a long time since breakfast.

“This afternoon we’ll drive over to that high ground near the Roche-a-Cri,” Pa said as we ate. He was referring to the Roche-a-Cri River, which snakes its way through this part of Adams County. With our brief lunch break finished, we unloaded and cased our guns and drove the few miles to the river. Slowly Pa maneuvered the Plymouth across the wooden bridge that spanned the river, then up a steep grade to a little field where we parked the car and once more prepared to hunt. “Let’s hope we have better luck on this side of the river,” he said.

“Can’t be any worse than this morning,” Bill said as he uncased his Marlin and loaded it.

“Tell you what,” Pa said. “Let’s do things a little different this afternoon. Jerry and I will make a little drive through these woods. Bill, you walk down to that crossroad.” He pointed down the road about a half mile. “You watch for what we kick out. If there’s a deer in there, we’ll move him your way.” This patch of woods was less brushy than where we had been that morning, which meant Pa and I could walk a hundred yards or so apart and still see each other.

I had never driven deer before, so I followed Pa’s lead. Every few yards or so, he would yell, “Arr-roop, arr-roop.” When we began the drive, Pa said I should try different ways of yelling, making sure each yell was loud enough to be heard at least a half mile on a windless day. As I walked along, I practiced several yells. One sounded something like a dog. Another sounded like I was driving cattle, a version of “Hi-yah!” After a few tries at various calls, I settled on a version of Pa’s “arr-roop,” which was fairly easy to do and at the same time could be yelled loudly enough to be heard at some distance. I was discovering that driving deer, like so much of deer hunting, was more art than skill (not to mention the considerable luck that had to be involved).

The purpose of a deer drive, of course, is to shake loose any deer that may have bedded down in the area and send them in the direction of a hunter with a rifle. As I walked along, I concentrated on my yelling, varying the volume and trying to walk and yell at the same time and not run out of breath. I had just let out what I considered my best rendition of “arr-roop” when I glimpsed something under a big oak tree. I immediately stopped walking and yelling and concentrated on the movement, thinking it must be a squirrel, or perhaps a grouse. I strained my eyes in the direction of the movement. At first I saw nothing but a floor of fallen leaves and the grayish black trunks of oak trees. Then I caught the movement again and focused on a pair of ears flicking. I immediately thought jackrabbit, as the area was known for them. Then I spotted another set of big ears and followed the ears down to heads. Two deer, a buck and a doe, lay in the dead leaves, their ears twitching back and forth. The buck had a big rack of antlers, bigger than any I’d seen Pa bring home from the woods.

It was the first time I had ever seen deer in the wild. My hands immediately began to shake. My heart was pounding so loudly I was sure the deer could hear it, but they didn’t move. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the little breeze I had been facing was pushing my scent away from them. I eased behind a big oak and pulled back the hammer on the shotgun. But then I wondered if it was legal to shoot a deer lying down. Pa had never done that, at least he never said he had, probably because he’d never been as lucky as I was now with two deer, one of them a big buck, resting no more than fifty or sixty feet from me.

As I raised the gun to aim, it occurred to me that Pa had never said where to aim when a deer wasn’t standing. He had told me to aim just behind the front shoulder, so the bullet would strike the animal’s heart and result in an instant kill, with no suffering. But I couldn’t see either deer’s shoulder; all I could see were antlers, ears, and a sliver of neck.

I aimed the heavy shotgun at the buck’s neck, realizing that the barrel was jerking up and down because of my nervousness. Then I remembered Pa saying to take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then squeeze the trigger. If you pull the trigger, Pa said, the gun will jerk sideways and you’ll surely miss.

Kaboom, roared the shotgun. The stock slammed into my shoulder like someone had hit me with a sledgehammer. I stumbled backward a couple of steps but didn’t fall. My ears were ringing and my hands were shaking, and through the gun smoke I peered toward my target. With the roar of the gun, both deer jumped to their feet, glanced briefly in my direction, and bounded off with giant leaps, their white tails waving. I had missed my target completely.

I flipped open the double barrel, ejected the spent cartridge and replaced it with another from my pocket. What would I tell Bill and Pa? I returned to yelling and walking, hoping I’d run into another buck resting near an oak tree and have another chance. (After more than sixty years of deer hunting I have yet to run into another deer resting in a bed of oak leaves within easy range.)

I emerged from the woods and spotted Bill nearby. I asked him if he’d seen anything come out of the woods.

“I saw a buck and a doe come out way down there,” he said, pointing toward a little opening in the trees. “They were on a tear. I didn’t have a chance to shoot before they disappeared.”

“Oh,” I managed to say in response.

“Was it you that shot?” Bill asked.

“It was,” I said proudly. “I saw that big buck a-bounding through the woods. I fired once, but he was too far away for a decent shot.” I decided then and there that no one, not even Pa, needed to know the real story.

On my first day of deer hunting, I learned a lot about hunting. I also learned what to share about the hunt, and what not to share. It would have been better if I had bagged the buck and added some winter meat to our dinner table, but sometimes a good story is even better than a slab of venison steak—at least, that’s what I still tell myself after many years of deer hunting.