by Jay Cassell
We didn’t leave the house the next morning until the civilized hour of 7:00 a.m. Though a bit concerned by this, I said nothing. Just as I said nothing when Kent climbed into my truck and started smoking one cigarette after another. Clad in rubber boots, blue jeans, sock hat, and a brown Filson cape coat, Kent looked more like an old trapper than a bowhunter.
We drove out of town, crossed a bridge over a river named Skunk, then took a hard turn onto a dirt road that we followed until Kent pointed a cigarette out over the big fields toward a long line of trees on the horizon. “That’s where we’ll be hunting,” he said.
The sun had only just begun rising over the trees. And in the gray light I could see for the first time how vast the land was here. The field, which a month ago had been covered with corn, was now barren and unbroken save for that single line of trees in the distance.
Kent pointed his cigarette again at an old rusty gate at the side of the road. “Here she is,” he said.
We came to a stop and he climbed out of the cab and fumbled with the lock, checking with a breath of cigarette smoke the direction of the wind, which he watched ride away on the breeze. The gate finally opened, he gave me a smile and a thumbs up when I passed.
For somebody used to hunting the rolling hills and cedar swamps of Michigan, this wide-open country seemed like grossly inadequate deer cover to me. With the cropland now harvested, there was nothing left but the cover along the river bottom. The whole place was like one big natural funnel, exactly what all those deer hunting experts always tell you to look for. It explained our leisurely start; bumble around in the dark in a place like this and you’d easily spook every deer in the woods.
With light upon us, however, we fast parked the truck and ducked into the woods. A deer trail along the muddy bank of the Skunk made for easy walking. Around every bend, we scared up mallards and buffleheads lounging in the muddy backwater sloughs. Each time we hunkered down to watch. Geese sounded somewhere above us. And I looked for them, but the canopy was too dense overhead to see.
Everywhere were these scraggly locust trees and waist-high grass the color of ripe wheat. The grass was covered with in a hoarfrost that soaked my wool pants clean through before we finally stopped and knelt down on the edge of that big opening in the trees. Kent whispered something about seeing the big buck here just the other day. He spread his hand, the one without the bow in it, and put it up to his head to imitate an antler. Then he whispered something else about this being a good spot and that I might want to consider sitting here.
Two big scrapes marked the far side of the clearing and the ground was crisscrossed and trampled with tracks. Though I wish I could say that a little more scouting than this initial observation went into my deciding to wait out the morning here, but there wasn’t.
I made a nest down in the grass on the high bank of the river. But ten minutes into sitting there I got to thinking that the grass would never been enough to break my silhouette if any deer did happen to amble by. Farther back in the woods I spotted a tangle of vines, tree limbs, and stumps that looked more inviting. I collected my things and repositioned here, again clearing a space to hunker down. Yet when I finally got situated I found that, although this new place offered enough cover to break my outline, there was barely enough room to draw my bow.
Things had quieted down and I got to thinking how silly and stupid I had been for moving. As it was, unless I held the bow practically horizontal, I could not even pull it partway back without the limbs hitting or scraping up against something. If any deer did come into the clearing to check those scrapes, the only shot I’d have now looked better than twenty paces, which was a long one for me.
But I sat there for a little while more, afraid to move for everything had fallen so still. There came the calling of more geese overhead and a cock pheasant sounding off somewhere out in the stubble fields across the river. I watched for sometime a fox squirrel, an enormous red and brown one, up in the crooked limbs of a pin oak tree. And then I saw the buck working his way through the tall grass and brush.
Head down, he plodded out into the clearing toward me. It was not the big-racked buck Kent had been seeing all week. But I guess it very well could have been, as I only looked at his antlers long enough to see that he had them. There in the sunlight he was beautiful, a soft color of chestnut in the sun. And I knew right away that I was going to kill him.
As awkward a shot as it was, I felt somehow disconnected from it when it all finally came to pass. The buck took off across the opening, my arrow deep in his chest and a big splash of blood trailing down over his shoulder and leg. But he never made it to the trees.
There was no need to sit and wait, no time to replay what had just happened, or second-guess the shot. That buck was dead, and lying there in sunlight in the open like that I remember thinking he looked as dead as anything I had ever seen. I stood and walked over to where he lay. And though I’m almost always in somewhat of a haze at this moment—the moment when the hunt has ended and the magic of the moment is realized—this time I remember feeling as detached as an executioner.
I don’t think it’s possible to have too clean a kill when bowhunting, but too clean a hunt, yes. The shot I’d made was as near to perfect as any I have ever made, and I’m sure some would probably say that the events of the hunt seemed pretty much perfect, too. After all, I had not even been on stand fifteen minutes—in fact, I had not been in Iowa more than fifteen hours—and already I was standing over a deer.
But frankly, I felt as if I had cheated somehow.
Yet the feeling abated when I set about the field dressing chores. Whereas the killing of the buck seemed so quick and easy as to not be believed, there was no mistaking the reality of its blood, the warmth and stickiness of it on my fingers, and the smell of bowel and gut so heavy in the air that I could almost taste it going down.
I dragged the deer back to our meeting place, liking the feel of the rope digging into my shoulder and the subtle burn in my legs coming up. Noticing myself breathing heavy again, for the first time in months, I thought how frantic I had become—not simply to kill a deer—but to have again the very feeling that came over then. The weight of the tiny buck was real. And I suppose I come all this way to be reminded of that—to feel the weight—and in the knowing realized once again that there is still another life outside my ordinary one, and that I, along with most men, do indeed live what Thoreau called lives of quiet desperation.
The Third Deer
BOB BUTZ
I believed in deer long before I’d ever actually seen one. Looking back, it is not a stretch to say that I grew up revering them as something sacred. To me, a deer was the incarnation of God albeit one that left its tracks and sign upon the earth and occasionally came out from behind the curtain of brush to reveal something in its teaching.
My memory is sharp as glass recalling the first deer. It passed my hiding place by way of happenstance. After school I would often hide inside the massive trunk of a tree killed by lightning. I’d squeeze into that damp and darkened chamber through a gaping hole between the roots. I recall the footfalls in the leaves, held my breath thinking surely I’d been followed. Looking back on it now, my hiding place was little more than a rotted old stump, cut it in half so that a couple feet over my head was splintered and open to the sun. Through a knothole I spied the deer browsing down the trail, closer. I reached my arm through a woodpecker hole hoping to sweep my fingers over her back, hoping to touch as she craned he neck picking crabapple blossoms. But then she snorted and was gone.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time wondering about deer. The gnarly black locust swamp, my childhood haunt, had its share of raccoons, opossums, skunks, and squirrels. Cottontail rabbits and a few whitetail deer. I loved all those creatures, but the deer I found most fascinating. Perhaps it was their size and the fact that the swamp was so small. Deer seemed as big as cows, yet they lived in the shadows like rabbits. Until that first deer, all I ever saw were tracks and piles
of their dropping like shiny black pearls.
The sign, those black heart-shaped tracks, deepened for me the mystery of deer. The tracks lent a silent record of their passages, their trails left for me to decipher like some forgotten language more mystifying than Egyptian hieroglyphics or the cave paintings at Lascaux.
I killed a deer when I was fourteen; a doe that took my arrow and came up kicking like a bronco. I remember the air, so cold, the zip of the arrow piercing her ribs, and the white vapor puffed from the gory hole. She took a little hop and the smoke, a twirling, wispy trail like from a candle blow out streamed upward. Her breath had quickened a little, too, so that all around was a fog and the pattering of blood spilling onto the leaves.
She bolted away, taking wonderful, high, bounding leaps. I remember she appeared flying until in midair she died and fell a skidding crash, legs tangled in a mass of thorny bushes and old logs.
I used to believe that if I lived good and honest and true that I could make deer appear simply by closing my eyes and filling my head with images of them. I still think there’s something to this, even though on the surface it sounds absurd.
To me, deer were a making of wind and light, a vestige of the shadows in the morning and the sound of cawing crows. In the woods, every stick that snapped, every rustle of leaves, carried the promise of deer. Deer were everywhere and all around me. And if I concentrated hard enough on trying to draw the elements together, if I opened my heart and became the vessel, deer would appear seemingly out of nowhere, conjured as if by magic.
It happened this way often enough that I believed the power some kind of gift. But then I killed a deer, thinking the killing would lend proof to my power, my understanding. I killed to make their wildness my own. Following her blood, finding her dead. In her ebony eye my reflection. I ran my hand over her walnut colored hide, the rounded belly, the putrid smell and searing heat of her twisted insides. Her blood on my hands. I peeled the hide away, marveling at the corded muscles under the fur intertwined, and in doing so parted some of the mystery. But not all. Something remained, something wild and untouchable. The third deer, a buck, I conjured out of the morning mist, a buck whose antlers appeared a mass of tangled, jagged, ivory-tipped tines. His shoulder and flank creased with muscle. He stopped on the edge of my range and pawed at the ground, then raised his head to sniff the air and those antlers fell across his back like those of a bugling bull elk.
I remember the buck turning and the arrow streaking along its path. The white feathers flashed on his side. The arrow thumped and cracked as if striking bone, then disappeared, and the buck wheeled around and was gone, and nothing moved for a long time after that.
When the fog finally burned away, I fully expected to see the deer—my deer—lying there dead somewhere in the valley below, revealed to me with the morning mist like a gift. But he was not there, nor was there any sign of him in the place where he had been standing. The woods had changed so much since the half-light that I thought maybe I was standing in the wrong place. But then I saw the black Earth, the overturned leaves and the fresh dirt kicked up along the path the buck had fled. Then I saw my arrow, stuck in a tiny sapling with not a speck of blood on the shaft.
There was nothing in that moment but silence, a swift and passing silence. And it’s that silence I remember most and how it seemed the only thing that belonged to me.
The Rack
JAY CASSELL
“I found his antler, Dad,” the throaty voice of my six-year-old son, James, crackled over the telephone. “I saw it in the woods when Mom was driving me home from school, right near where we went hunting! Are you coming home tonight?”
When I told him that my flight wouldn’t get in until 11:00, and that I wouldn’t be home until midnight, there was a disappointed silence over the phone. Then, “Well, okay, but don’t look at it until morning, so I can show you. Promise?”
I promised. We had a deal. I told him I’d see him soon, then asked to talk with his mother.
“Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too, James.”
Unbelievable. My son had found the shed antler of the buck I had hunted, unsuccessfully, all season. The big ten-pointer I had seen the day before deer season, the one with the wide spread and thick beams. He had seen me that day, having winded me as I pussyfooted through some thickets for a closer look. I think he somehow knew that he was safe, that he was far enough away from me.
I had scouted the 140-acre farm and adjoining woods near my home in suburban New York, the farm that I had gotten permission to hunt after five years of asking. “You can hunt this year,” Dan the caretaker had said to me during the summer, when I asked my annual question. “I kicked those other guys off the property. They were in here with ATVs and Jeeps, bringing two and three friends every day they hunted, without even asking. Lot of nerve, I thought. Got sick of‘em, so I kicked ‘em off. Now I’ll let you hunt, and your buddy John, three other guys, and that’s all. I want some local people on here that I know and trust.”
When Dan had told me that, I couldn’t believe it. But there it was, so I took advantage of it. Starting in September, I began to scout the farm. I had seen bucks on the property in previous years while driving by, but now I got a firsthand look. There was sign virtually everywhere: rubs, scrapes, droppings in the hillside hayfields, in the mixed hardwoods, in the thick hemlock stands towering over the rest of the woods. I found what were obviously rubs left by a big deer. In a copse of hemlocks near the edge of the property, bordering an Audubon nature preserve, were scrapes and, nearby, about five or six beech saplings absolutely ripped apart by antlers.
With James’s help, I set up my tree stand overlooking a heavily used trail that seemed to be a perfect escape route out of the hemlocks. James and I also found an old permanent tree stand, which he and I repaired with a few two-by-fours and nails. This would officially be “his” tree stand—or tree house, as he called it.
Opening day couldn’t come fast enough. James and I talked about it constantly. Even though he’s only six, and can’t really hunt yet, he couldn’t wait for deer season. He knows what deer tracks and droppings look like; can tell how scrapes and rubs are made; can even identify where deer have passed in the leaf-covered forest floor. My plan was to hunt the first few days of the season by myself while James was in school, and then take him on a weekend. If luck was with me, maybe I’d take the big buck and could then concentrate on filing my doe tag with my son’s help.
Opening day came and went, with no trophy ten-pointer in sight, or any other bucks, for that matter. A lot of other days came and went too, most of them cold, windy and rainy. Three weeks into the two-month-long season, on a balmy Sunday in the 50s, James and I packed our camo backpacks with candy bars and juice boxes, binoculars and grunt calls, and at 2:00 p.m. off we went, on our first day of hunting together. When we reached the spot where I always park my car, on a hillside field, I dabbed some camo paint onto James’s face, which he thought was cool. Then we started hiking up the field and into the woods, toward the hemlocks.
We saw one white tail disappear over a knob as we hiked into James’s stand. I didn’t really care, though. This was the first time I was taking my son hunting! It would be the first of many, I hoped. I wouldn’t force it on him, just introduce him to the sport, and keep my fingers crossed.
At James’s stand, we sat down and had a couple of candy bars. “Can I blow on the deer call now, Dad?” I said yes, and he proceeded to honk away on the thing like a trumpet player.
“Do it quietly,” I advised. “And remember, always whisper, don’t talk loudly. And don’t move around so much!”
What with James honking on the call and fidgeting—checking out my bow, looking around, pointing to the hawk soaring overhead, crumpling up his candy bar wrapper and stuffing it into his pocket—I was sure no self-respecting deer would come within a mile of us. None did, not to my son’s stand, or to mine, or to the rocks where we later sat, overlooking a trail and those ripp
ed-up beech saplings, until darkness finally settled over the woods. But that was okay.
Hiking out of the woods, we met my friend John coming from his tree stand.
“I saw that ten-pointer today,” he began, giving James a poke in the ribs with his finger.
“Where?”
“Up near those hemlocks, the same area you and I have been hunting. We were probably 100 yards away from each other.”
“Well, what happened?” Part of me was saying, Great, he got the buck! The other part of me was saying, Pleeeease tell me you didn’t shoot him. John looked at me sheepishly.
“I was watching that trail, and I saw a doe headed my way, right where I always put my climbing tree stand. Then, right behind her, I saw a buck—you know that six-pointer we’ve seen over by the lake? Well, I started to draw back on him—he was only 30 yards away—but then I saw some movement to my left. It was HIM! Cutting through the hemlocks. That six-pointer and doe got out of there fast, and the ten-pointer got to within ten yards of my stand, stopped broadside to me, and then looked up straight at me!”
“Did you shoot? Did you shoot?”
“I couldn’t. I was shaking too much. I mean, I could even hear the arrow rattling against the rest. Eventually, he just took off down the trial. Man, he was something. Must weigh 200 pounds!”
Later, driving the short ride home, James said, “Hey, Dad, how come. John didn’t shoot that deer?”
“Shooting a deer is a lot harder than many people think. Even if everything else is right, sometimes you can get so nervous that you just can’t shoot, no matter how much you want to. John’s time will come, though. He works at it.”
I didn’t see the buck until two days after Christmas. Hunting by myself, I left my normal tree stand and circled around to the backside of the hemlocks. At 4:00 p.m., I was wedged between some boulders that overlook a well-used trail. It was 20ºF, getting dark, and I was cold and shivering uncontrollably. But I kept hearing a rustling behind me. Another squirrel. But it wasn’t. Suddenly, 60 yards through the trees, I could see a big deer headed my way. It was moving with a purpose. It stopped at what appeared to be a scrape, and I could see a huge symmetrical rack dip down as the buck stuck his nose to the ground. Then he stood up, urinated into the scrape, turned, and headed back into the hemlocks. If he had kept coming down the trail, I would have had a clean 15-yard shot. It wasn’t meant to be.
