by Gary Paulsen
And I started to hit. Not the center, at least not always—although I think that is how it happens for truly gifted people such as Howard Hill and some of the trick shooters who travel around doing exhibitions now. I think they always see the center of the center and always hit that point.
But I hit the leaf. Usually at the edge, but again and again. If I let my eye wander and look at the leaf in general I would miss, but when I concentrated I almost always hit, and after practicing this until my fingers were nearly bleeding through the finger tab on my draw hand, I went back to hunting.
There was an immediate difference. I hadn’t gone thirty yards into the woods when I saw a grouse. This one did not freeze. It flew away, but for some reason it stopped on a limb about thirty feet from me. This seemed a bit far, but the tree was situated so that if I tried to move closer I would be in thick brush and unable to shoot straight up. I drew and held and started to release and realized that I was thinking of the grouse as a whole, not focusing. I eased off, cleared my mind of thoughts and aimed again, thinking of the very center of the grouse, and released and knew, knew that I would hit the bird.
The blunt took it almost in the center, driving it back and off the limb, to flop briefly and then to lie still. I moved through the brush to where the bird lay and saw the shaft, the blunt driven completely through as if it had been a sharp point and killing the grouse as fast as a rifle.
And here I found another advantage to using a bow. A rifle destroys flesh—again, because of hydraulic shock as the bullet passes through the tissue. Worse, if it first passes through the gut, it carries the contents of the gut into the meat and ruins still more.
An arrow, even a blunt, makes a simple hole and doesn’t ruin any meat.
That night I cleaned and cooked the grouse over a fire and ate it, arrow hole and all. I hunted the rest of that weekend and took two rabbits and another grouse and they were all clean kills. I ate the meat the rest of that week, cooking it after school, and made more arrows.
Only this time I made broadheads. It was time to hunt bigger game.
There is as big a difference between hunting small game and hunting large game with a bow as there is between hunting small game with a bow and hunting it with a rifle.
First, of course, you cannot use blunts. With deer—or elk and moose, for that matter—the deadliness comes from the cutting power of the broadhead. This was known by primitive hunters as well as modern ones, and they used razor-sharp bits of stone or antler or flint to make a cutting edge that would do more damage as the arrow went through. The truth is, it is possible to kill with a simple pointed piece of wood—and probably all animals in the world, including elephants (or mastodons), have been killed in this manner—as long as it is very sharp and the point is placed exactly right, in the heart, for instance, or for a slower kill, in the lungs. But it is so much easier if there is a widened cutting edge involved.
And so, broadheads.
When I was young we were limited to simple two-bladed heads and the three-bladed. There were no razor-blade-type inserts as there were later, which would vastly improve the efficiency of the heads. The broadheads of the time came very dull and had to be sharpened, first with a file and then with a stone, honed until they could take hair off your arm.
I chose the three-bladed types for two reasons. First, they had an added cutting edge, which I thought was important, but perhaps more significant, they were army surplus (the military term was MA-3) and much cheaper. I understood they were used for “quiet” operations, although even when I was in the army and had knowledge of such things I could find no indication they had ever been used. Whatever the reason, they were available for just ten cents each and they were stout and well made (wouldn’t break every time you missed and hit a tree limb), and while hard to sharpen they would hold a good edge once they were honed. (An aside: Last year for Christmas I was given a bronze arrowhead from about 300 B.C., and while it is smaller than the MA-3 head, it is so similar that I wondered if they didn’t use the antique heads for a model.)
I bought a dozen MA-3s and made twelve big-game arrows using Port Orford cedar shafts I got for four cents each by mail order. I spent a huge amount of time on each arrow, making certain the feathers were perfectly straight and the head was truly aligned so that it wouldn’t “plane” off to the side or fight the feathers for direction when released.
I had already killed a deer with a rifle—actually an old 16-gauge single-shot Browning shotgun with slugs—by the time I began to hunt with a bow, hunting with my farmer uncles in the fall. This was less hunting than it was gathering meat. Men with rifles were posted at clearings while boys and other men were sent to “drive” the woods through and push the deer out to be shot. It was not particularly sporting and was not meant to be. It was gathering meat for the family for winter. I was carrying a shotgun nearly longer than I was tall, staggering through swamp grass and snow up to my waist, when a buck jumped up in front of me and stood still, broadside to me. I raised the shotgun without thinking, cocked the hammer, and shot. The buck dropped, the big slug almost knocking him sideways. I, of course, got buck fever and stammered a yell for my uncle Gordy, who was pushing brush next to me, and he came over and helped me gut the buck and drag him out to the road so we could add him to the row of deer already taken by the posted men. It was my first deer, but it couldn’t really be called hunting so much as just luck for me and panic by the deer, which stood forty feet away while a kid knocked him over with an old single-barrel scattergun and what they used to call a punkin-ball slug.
Hunting, true big-game hunting with a bow, is much more an art and much more demanding, and initially I wasn’t sure how it should be done. Some people would simply find a deer trail and either hide in brush or get up in a tree and wait, on a “stand,” until a deer came by. Others would put on soft moccasins and walk slowly, very slowly, through the woods, as quietly as possible, and walk up on feeding or bedded deer and get a shot at them before they were aware.
I initially decided to hunt by moving, I think more because as a young boy I wasn’t patient enough to sit and wait. Later I favored the stand method, working from camouflage. And my first bow-killed deer was taken that way.
I was near an old abandoned homestead, long ago rotted to wreckage by the northern winters, and I saw a small buck walk behind the caved-in building. I waited a few seconds at full draw until he walked out. Everything worked as it was supposed to and I hit the deer just behind the shoulder—one of the blades of the broadhead actually cut the side of his heart—and he walked a few steps, and lay down, then curved his head back and died.
But it was my second kill of a deer with a bow that truly applies to Brian’s hunting in Hatchet. Two years later, when I was fifteen, I was hunting and absolutely nothing was going right. Normally, fall in the north woods is a time of clear days and nights, crisp weather, wonderful bright sun and brilliant leaves. That year there was none of it. It rained—cold rain during the day, all day, a soft, gray drizzle that froze at night into a thin layer on the ground, too thin to hold weight, so that when you tried to walk on it you broke through into the cold mud, and everything, everything in the world had a cold, wet drabness that made even my fifteenyear-old bones ache.
It was, paradoxically, the best time to walk-hunt. The water kept the grass unbrittle, so it didn’t crackle and make noise, and the water dripping from limbs covered the sound of walking. Years later I learned that storm fronts create the best conditions for hunting because game animals lie down and are not as wary as normal. It was the kind of hunting Brian would have to do—hunting when it wasn’t necessarily pleasant to hunt; hunting because he had to, hunting to live.
About three one afternoon I came to the edge of a swamp that was absolutely covered with deer trails, many of them so fresh the water was still running into the hoof prints. The swamp presented a problem. I was wearing rubber boots, hardly the thing for quiet walking, although in that weather they weren’t so loud, and
my feet were still relatively dry and even retained a slight warmth. But the boots were only calf high and the water in the swamp was sure to be deeper than that. I would probably flood my boots.
But there were deer tracks all over the swamp.
And I did have matches to light a fire and there were plenty of dead birch trees around for tinder—birch bark is the quickest way to get a fire going in wet weather. If I got wet, I could dry out.
So I nocked an arrow to the string to be ready, stepped off into the swamp and found I had underestimated the difficulties.
On my first step I sank through the muck on top and both boots filled with cold, muddy water. I had been looking down on the swamp from a small hill but now that I was in it, I could see that the grass was much taller than I had originally thought. Once I had sunk into the mat beneath the vegetation, the grass was about four inches over my head and I was soon walking down a narrow almost-tunnel with water pouring into my boots. I could see only about four feet in front of me.
Nobody could call this hunting. Inside thirty yards I was simply trying to keep moving, and in another thirty I just wanted out. I won’t say I panicked—I wasn’t in any danger. But I was becoming intensely uncomfortable and most decidedly not in control of my situation and decided that if I didn’t come to higher and drier ground in a very short time I would turn and go back.
I took one step, then heard the first strange sound.
There are many different aspects of sound in the woods. Birds sing; small things—usually sounding like very large things—scurry through the grass and underbrush and make rustling noises; sometimes heavy things crash down, maybe a dead limb at last falling off a rotten tree pulled apart by a bear looking for grubs or ants to eat.
But all the sounds have reason to them, a sense of belonging. There are only two things that stand out and cause the hair to go up on the back of your neck. One is a sudden silence; during day and night, during rain, even during snow, there is some sound, and when it quits it almost always means that something not good is happening. Perhaps a wolf is moving through, looking for something to kill, or a hawk or an owl is hunting over the place where you are standing. Recently I talked to a man who was attacked by a great white shark while diving and he said that just before he was hit, the ocean, which is usually deafening, grew strangely quiet. “I should have listened to the silence,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d still have my right leg.”
The second kind of auditory alert is sudden or very loud sound, and the combination of the two when it is completely unexpected can be a life-altering experience. I was once in a tent half-asleep when what I took to be a tree limb poked me through the tent material, and I angrily kicked out at it, only to find that I had just kicked a bear in the backside. It had leaned against the tent while smelling around the dead campfire for bits of food. The ensuing snort did wonders for waking me up and changing my whole attitude about kicking bear in the butt.
Now, in the swamp, I heard a great bounding noise, as if something large had jumped in the air and landed on the swamp grass just ahead of me.
And then, half a second later, another one, then another, all coming closer, straight at me.
All of this in about two seconds. Automatically, I raised the bow and drew the arrow back, until the back of the three-sided broadhead rested against the belly of the bow just over my hand.
Another bound.
All was in slow motion now. I had a fleeting thought that it had been raining hard and that the feathers on my arrow were wet. I wondered how it would affect the flight or accuracy of the shot. Then another bound and the grass in front of me parted, and coming at me, at a full run, was a twelve-point buck (six on each side, counted later), and I saw him, not ten feet away, just as he left the ground, and I released the arrow and saw it disappear into the center of his chest, just vanish into him. He was already in the air and hit by the arrow when he saw me and he couldn’t change the direction of his jump but he tried and so instead of hitting me full on, he twisted in the air and hit me with his side as he fell over me.
It was like being hit by a truck. I went down, arrows and bow flying. One of his legs tangled in the bowstring and in the violent kicking to get loose he broke the bow and several arrows that had been tossed out of my quiver as I went over backward. (I was indeed very lucky not to have fallen on one of the broadheads, the fate a year earlier of a man I knew. He fell out of a tree-stand onto one of his own arrows; the broadhead cut the artery on the inside of his thigh and he bled to death before he could get help.)
In this case, other than being soaked and covered with mud, I was unharmed. The deer had been hit solidly. The arrow had driven into the center of his chest and slightly up, hitting the heart almost exactly in the middle. After colliding with me, he had continued over in a sideways somersault, bounded to his feet, taken two staggering steps, then settled, rather than fallen, in the grass.
I was a mess, with broken arrows and the bow in pieces, string wrapped around my head and the deer kicking his last. I had been told to always test a deer by poking it to make certain it was dead so that it couldn’t kick you when you leaned over it. But as I rolled to my feet and moved toward the buck, my hunting knife in my hand, I saw that he was truly dead. His eyes were glazed and gone and he wasn’t breathing. I felt the sadness that comes with killing when you hunt but also the elation that comes with having succeeded—it makes for an odd mixture of emotions. I gutted the carcass and cleaned it out with grass to keep the meat from rotting. Heat from the guts as they begin to decompose will cause this, even in hard winter, because the hair keeps the carcass warm and allows the internal organs to go off.
I had taken a very large buck—even dressed out he was close to two hundred pounds. At the time I weighed about a hundred and thirty. I was in the middle of a quagmire swamp two miles in from the road where I’d left my bicycle. And then it was four miles back to town.
I was to learn, as Brian learned later, that there is sometimes a huge difference between hunting and killing the animal and dealing with the results. I had to get the deer back to town, where I knew a butcher who would cut the carcass up into freezer-sized packages in exchange for a quarter of the meat.
I somehow horsed the buck out of the swamp; it took me well over an hour to go the short distance to higher, more solid ground. Once there I used the bowstring and my belt (I would never again hunt without a fifteenfoot piece of light rope in my pocket) to rig up a waist harness, which I looped through a hole in the buck’s lower jaw, then around my waist, so that I could drag the dead deer to the highway.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I mean, I knew it would be hard work but it sounds simple. I would just take my time and drag the deer to the highway, then tie him across the bicycle in some way and push him back to town.
Except that I was dragging an animal that weighed more than me and there was no snow to make the dragging easier.
It was a nightmare. I started dragging in midafternoon and I had not gone a mile when darkness caught me. With the dark came increased rain, and I was on the verge of making a wet, cold, very dreary camp. I didn’t have a raincoat on, just an old canvas duck jacket that was semiwaterproof, and I was soon soaked and getting colder.
I stopped dragging the buck before hard dark and set up camp in some willows. Luckily I was on the edge of another small swamp—there were hundreds of them in this area—and I found some dead birch skirting the grass area. With my knife I cut bark from one of the dead trees and used it for kindling. Then I covered the bark with small pine twigs broken off from the underside of dead limbs that were still relatively dry. I had matches, of course. I would not go out without matches. I had waterproofed them with melted wax and I carried them in a waterproof case. I used one of them to start the birch bark and at length had a sputtering half-fire going. I added what partially dry wood I could find under trees, stacked more wet wood on top and soon had a good-sized blaze crackling away, which did much to bring my spirits up.
Of course I was starving, but I had plenty of meat. I cut strips of rib meat off the buck and cooked them, tallow and all, draped over the fire on green sticks (green so that they would not burn), and ate them when they were just short of burnt. They tasted—without salt or pepper or bread—incredibly fine and I must have eaten four or five pounds of meat before I was at last full, my mouth and tongue caked with venison tallow. Then I gathered all the wood I could find by firelight, until I had enough for several nights. I lay near the fire, dozing and adding wood all night.
The wolves came not too long after midnight, brought by the smell of blood and meat. I could see their eyes in the firelight, and for a few moments I was afraid and missed my bow terribly, but the fire kept them well away. They probably would not have bothered me, but I still had some broadheads, which I determined to use as hand spears if necessary. This comforted me.
The wolves left well before first light and when it was bright enough to see I went to work on the carcass. I skinned part of it down the side and used the raw skin to make a better harness than just the belt around my waist. After a meal of cooked rib meat and peaty-tasting water from a spring nearby, I set off dragging again.
I dragged until I couldn’t stand it any longer, until every muscle in my body was on fire. Then I tried to haul the carcass in an over-the-shoulders fireman carry, but I only made about fifty yards before my legs buckled, so I stopped and took a break, building another fire and cooking some more rib meat. It actually occurred to me only half in jest that perhaps the best solution was just to stay out in the woods until I had cooked and eaten the whole deer. It was the weekend and my folks probably wouldn’t miss me—they didn’t know where I was half the time and would probably think I was staying at a friend’s house. But at school, where I was mostly flunking, they would notice that I wasn’t there.
