One of the things that is usually a sure tip that the deer hunter you are talking to is a newbie or a poser is when he gets to talking about distance. A few years ago, I had a guy come up from Georgia to help with an install here at the plant. We got to talking about deer hunting. He was all set. He was going to be hunting at his club– all thickets and swamps. He had a brand new bolt gun in 300 Win that “was going to give him the extra reach he needed.”

In the back of my mind, I got to wondering how he was going to need a 300 Win to go hunt in the swamps, but I let it pass. I’m sure there are plenty of places in Georgia where a 300 yard shot is not out of the question. That was the range he was talking about.

A few months later he left the company and one day I was gossiping with one of my compatriots. Turns out our buddy did own a 300 Win . Yes, he did have a membership in a club, but he spent most of his time drinking at camp and had never gotten past firing a few shots with his rifle and never gone beyond just having it bore-sighted. The kick had been too much for him.

Now, I’m not calling anyone who hunts with a 300 Win Mag a poser. I’m not saying guys who talk about shooting deer at 300 yards are liars. However, I am saying that most real deer hunters who live in the real world see real whitetail deer at really close distances. In real woods east of the Mississippi, you can be hard pressed to get a shooting opportunity past 100 yards, and you can go your entire real hunting career never needing to shoot much beyond that. I’ll take one more step out onto the limb and say that if you regularly hunt deer at ranges over 100 yards, you are passing up huntable deer that can be shot closer than that.

Deer in the real world really can be had at close range. My question is this: Why would we believe otherwise? At least some bow hunters get deer every year. At least some shotgun and crossbow hunters do likewise. Why deep recesses of our psyche cause us to think that the archetypal deer is 5 to 10 times more distant than it really is?

I have a theory on this. It starts off in the days of Western Expansion. The whitetail, the elk, the bison had all been extirpated from their range in the East. They were now but old men’s memories and the dream of the young. They were out in the wide open spaces of the West, and they became fictionalized and mythologized.

The zoo here in Cincinnati had a deer pen and so did a couple of the local parks. That was it. Real deer were behind fences. Wild deer were strictly dream animals for most of us and stayed that way for 2-3 generations. In this part of the world, if a farmer saw a whitetail he told the whole county and everyone could remember where and when it had been seen. I grew up wanting to go out with plaster of Paris and hunt deer tracks– just the tracks were that rare. I did not see my first deer in the wild until I was 17.

Where we knew about whitetail was from magazines and movies, and the places they were hunted always seemed to be out West somewhere or up North somewhere, and they all seemed so far away. About that time telescopic sights became a regular consumer item, and after WWII folks began to have better access to newer high velocity cartridges. Put it all together and you have an exotic animal being hunted with exotic hardware in an exotic place.

Now you don’t have to dream anymore. They’re in our yards, eating our hedges. They’re like 4-legged locusts. You don’t need exotic hardware. I have heard it opined on this forum that a claw hammer and an oatmeal cookie can be used, but the magazines keep churning out the same old fantasies. The liars and posers still don’t make the connection. The newbies are still dreaming. To all of them, the deer are still way out there somewhere. They are, but the distances are in the mind. The whitetail still lives in a part of that Jungian archetype of the Wasteland.

I believe that part of what is causing the world to lose interest in sport hunting is rooted in this dichotomy. We no longer envisage a pristine wilderness. The real Frontier closed a century or so ago. The mythological one is closing now. For a few grand you can buy yourself a B&C-class whitetail hunt and for $50K you can buy yourself a climb to the top of Everest. Big deal. Yawn. It’ll be out for the Wii by Christmas.

Then you have those that live a different myth through hunting. Deer can represent many things. For me, it ended up as two things. The first is food. I got hooked on the idea that deer was meat you had to run down yourself. It’s not pretty. I know it’s not popular in the culture, but there it is. For me, it’s the ritual of taking life and turning it into sustenance. It’s an intimate thing too. If it’s too far out, it loses the reality.

The other myth that resonates in me is a turn on this whole Wasteland thing. To me, the Frontier never closed. It just went into hiding. No matter where you go in this world, you will find it– in forgotten lots, behind supermarkets, on the other side of the rusting chain link fences. This is becoming the realm of the whitetail and the coyote.

My little piece of heaven is not too distant from that. Granted, it’s out in the country, but it’s post-agricultural. Two generations ago, it was a bustling farm. It’s the rural equivalent. It’s also just a generation or two away from having its own divided highway and strip mall. Don’t worry. It’ll come. My point is this: the world of Man has temporarily lost focus on it, and its quickly reverted to forest. It bears no resemblance to its pristine past 200 years ago, any more than a Zen garden resembles Big Sur. The resemblance is in my head.

You don’t need 7mm Rem Mag to explore that frontier. You don’t need a 3-9X Leupold to see it. If my eyes weren’t going, I probably wouldn’t even need iron sights. It’s that close. In between the abandoned barns and rusting machinery, around the old barbed wire they come. If you just find a likely looking spot and go and sit quietly, they all come. I haven’t seen the bear yet, but I have the elk. The deer and turkey and coyote are all there.

This post has already been read 1293 times!

Views: 5

Related posts:

The Role of Personal Ethics in Hunting Any close calls? Did you fall? What kind of bullet do I use on deer? Working Comfort Zone for Deer Hunting What Makes the Perfect Deer Rifle? PT1 The Chambering How does the .270 caliber work on whitetails? Deer Rifle Advice In praise of Slugs