Deer Camp changes you. Every day I climb into the stand and think up a way to start this article, and every day I have tried to start it differently. Saturday, I would have been talking all about SuperCore’s big 8-pointer that he got at 0700. Sunday, I would have probably talked about dropping off Angus with his mom after hunting on his own for two days. The rest of the week, I would have written about jonesing on the pending blast of cold air, or the rain before, or all the encounters I had with deer I really did not want to shoot. Later in the week, I would have talked about all the deer I wanted to shoot, but couldn’t. As I said, deer camp changes you. At least it makes you think differently about things. Maybe I should start at the beginning and just let you see what I mean.

Saturday

It was a warm Opener. SuperCore went to Die Jagende Hütte . Angus went to Lazy Boy. I went to Campground. The moon was so bright I left the flashlight in my pocket. When I stopped to in the field to take off my hat and bleed off some heat, Orion was completely blotted out by the moon. I tried my best not to think of it as an omen. The amount of shooting was unimpressive. I counted 1 1/2 shots per minute. At 0800, I switched on my walkie talkie and immediately got a call from SuperCore. He had seen the 8-pointer I had warned him about, and managed to nail him on the way out of Skunk Hollow. Angus had come in to help. I was needed immediately to organize the recovery. The truck was by to pick me up before I was down out of the stand. When we got back to camp, you could see this big patch of white out out in the pasture below Gobbler’s Knob. That was the buck.

We all went back out in the afternoon. I went to Midway. Angus and SuperCore went to Lazy Boy. Angus grunted in a spike buck with 5 inch antlers that would neither give him a clear shot, nor fully leave him alone. I had a couple of doe come out at last light to graze out in the Garden of Stone.

Sunday

On Sunday, SuperCore went back out to Die Jagende Hütte. Angus took up a new post on HeartBreak Ridge among a clump of cedars. This looks to be a good new ground blind opportunity. He got winded by a doe early in the morning, and she stayed with him for 2 hours playing “You Stink!” from behind every available tree. I must say she was a hoot. I was clear over at the stand at Virginia, and could here her from on the next ridge. Saturday, I had just started seeing deer when the call had come in. It was obvious the Chase part of the rut was in full gear. I had seen doe running about with a small buck trailing behind. Sunday was no different. Doe kept coming by my stand, always paying more attention to what was behind them than what was up the nearby tree. I had four visits, mostly nervous doe trying to get a quick snack of acorns down before having to move on. A buck finally did show after all that hysteria. He had inch-and-a-half antlers and was no bigger than an average boxer. I saw in him how my season was going.

I had to drop Angus off Sunday afternoon. KYHillChick met me halfway. I’ve got to say that there was a lot rolling around in my head on the hour’s drive out and the long hour back. I suppose it is all crystalized in the statement “It gets no better than this!” I’ve been saying that to my sons since they were little, and I suppose the easiest way to read it is to say it is an expression of gusto and fulfillment. That is the way I understood it from my father as we’d be out raking leaves in the fall, or putting up shelves in the basement. He loved work. He loved getting a good job done. However, as I’ve learned it meant and means so much more. I don’t think I said it to Angus on the way into town. I am not sure it I was even thinking it in quite those terms. I do remember that we recently discussed the idea of “Embrace the Suck.” I suppose that is part of this discussion. I can remember my father getting moody and pensive while I was in high school. He was starting to contemplate selling out his business. I was mired in those days in all those mental quagmires that high schoolers seem to get into. “It gets no better than this!” Was my dad telling me to get my head out of my ass and start enjoying life, because it all to soon starts being something you didn’t sign up for and something you didn’t plan, and what you thought you wanted was not what you thought it was at all. Dad did sell out when I was in college and turned around with the cash and made himself a millionaire many times over, so I always thought it was good advice– then and now. Then there is that straight-to-the-bone chill you get an hour after you crawl into your stand and realize you probably are a layer or two shy and should have brought better gloves and you keep telling yourself that the sun will come up and you will get warm, only the sun comes up at Seven and it gets a lot colder until Nine, and in the meanwhile the deer can see you shiver. Yeah, it really does not get better than this, does it? Deer? It feels so good to get one in your sights and see it go down, but there is a good 3 hours work ahead of you, and that’s if you don’t have to chase it down and schlep it out of a ravine.

Angus went home without scoring on his first Opening Weekend as an adult. I never said “It doesn’t get any better than this!” to my son as we were driving out Sunday. I probably should have. I usually do, driving home from camp. Instead, we talked   about the stuff we always talk about.

Sunday evening I went to Garbage Pit for a long sit. I had a 5-inch spike show up. He showed a lot of interest in me and the stand, but hung around and ate acorns until it was nearly dark and then wandered off the way he came.

Monday

More of the same. SuperCore went to   Die Jagende Hütte. I went back to Campground. The same deer showed up in pretty much the same ways. In one instance, a doe came in and spied me. She was not particularly put off by my appearance, but she was curious. As I watched, she circled the stand, and came around my downwind side. All the while she was stopping to munch acorns as she found them. Then, about 20 minutes into her appearance, a forker showed up from another direction. For the longest time they carried on a conversation in that inscrutable deer language of looks and subtle gestures that amounted to a lot of lust and desire coming from one and a whole lot of indifference from the other. After quite some time doing this dance, the doe seemed to break the fourth wall and looked straight up at me. “Do you see what I have to put up with?” she seemed to be saying with her eyes. It was a look of utter exasperation and I gestured back to her with a knowing shrug. She took that as a sign and took a single leap that got her away from both me and the buck. She then kicked her back heels once at both of us and then walked off slowly indicating to the buck that she did not want to be followed. The buck looked up at me; I do not know if he was looking for advice or what, and then he put his head down and started eating acorns.

Is this the way deer see God? Is He an Omnipresent and Omniscient being up the tree in Hunter Orange and most of the time the rifle barrel is pointed away, and when it isn’t, you generally don’t live long enough to know?  Do deer pray to that Hairy Thunderer in Orange asking for acorns, or to be rid of a nuisance boyfriend? And what do they make of it when the Hunter/God just shrugs the kind of shrug I used to see the Camp Survivors shrug.  What do I make of it– that little cherubic kid now gone to seed some 50 years?  What can you do but shrug and say “This, today, is as good as it gets!”

Tuesday morning I tried Midway again. SuperCore went to Die Jagende Hütte.. I just wanted to see if the deer might come out wandering in the field if I was not at Campground pestering them. They did not. Instead, I got a chance to read about Waterloo from a book I snatched off Gutenburg.org. I dozed a little here and there– not exactly what you would call a thrill-packed hunt. I kept nodding off, but I kept waking up when my nose got too close to the front of my jacket, and I would hear myself snoring. It sounded like it was coming from down a long corridor with a tight echo.

Tuesday evening, SuperCore went home to do a load of laundry and re-group. He was back after sundown. The rain started around 3 PM. I went out to Hammond North. This is not a blind or a stand, just an old dead tree that took over a decade to fall over. I sat out in the worst of it– driving rain and 35 mph gusts, but mostly just a hard drizzle. You can ask me why I did it. I usually stay out of the rain when I can, because it really mucks with your gear. I suppose I wanted to kick it up old-school for a change. I suppose I just wanted to go out in it all to say I’d been out.

Wednesday 

I went back to Campground. SuperCore went to Die Jagende Hütte. I was determined that, if nothing else showed I would give up on the idea of another large buck in the neighborhood. I was visited by half a dozen deer, mostly all doe. The big thrill was watching the spike with 5 inch antlers worrying the heck out of a sapling, trying to show off to two doe that treated him like somebody’s kid brother. I had a disturbing thing happen Wednesday. Partly to do a shift a wind and partly to the wear and tear of hunting, my clothes had started to stink. I don’t mean like a bum-on-the-bus kind of stink or even men’s locker room kind of stink. No, I mean the imperceptible scent level that we can only begin to imagine. I can’t smell it. I doubt you can, but when the Shamanic Baking Soda method starts to wear thin, the deer can surely see the difference. Most of Wednesday was spent with the deer getting within about 80 yards of my stand and then throwing on the brakes and snorting. I had doe playing “You Stink!” for 3 hours.

I responded by pulling out a plunger and a wash tub and a bag of baking soda and re-doing all my underwear and bibs– wash and rinse and then hung out to dry. The outer layers– bibs, parka, gloves, hat, got the dry treatment of a serious dusting with baking and then sealed up overnight. The underwear froze overnight, and did not thaw out until this afternoon.

In the evening, I went out to the Blackberry Patch. It is a new stand I put up for Angus. I just wanted to have at least one good sit out there this season. It overlooks all of the big pasture to the west. This is the place where, in 2001 before the deal closed, I was planning to build my cabin. There was about a month there, back then, where I was pulling together years of dreaming and scheming and trying to get sketches together for a project that would run 5 years at minimum. Back then, the plan was to put up a cabin tent, then a picnic shelter, then a stone fireplace, then wall in the shelter and build a cabin, and lastly put up a 2-story bedroom addition for myself and the kids. It would have been a major undertaking for KYHillChick and me and the kids, but I had it broken down into do-able steps that could be accomplished on weekends. It all went up in smoke when Dad came out in late August and decided he liked the new property so much , he was buying the plot next door with the promise I would help him re-hab the existing house for a getaway for Mom and Dad. The place I had picked stayed a grove of scrubby locust trees and a patch of blackberries. Mom and Dad liked what I did with the place, but age was catching up with them. Dad was having trouble driving at night. They were just coming out for the day. Finally they had a bad wreck back in 2003 and in caused them to think twice before driving long distances for the heck of it.

I remember him coming back from a trip out with the current owner. They were both old muleskinners and they went out in Orey’s truck to talk mules and have Dad see what he had just bought.

“Orey takes me out,” said Dad, “And we’re on this high spot and I asked him to show me how much I was buying.  He pointed to a ridge, and said it wasn’t that ridge or the next one, but way out in the distance– I owned to the bottoms between those ridges. I couldn’t believe I had that much land!”

Dad, it really never got any better than that, did it?  It’s been 3 years now since he past.

Thursday

The Polar Vortex had finally set in at deer camp. Low temperatures had been in the mid-thirties. Now they were in the mid-twenties. I went to Virginia. Things were just as before. Doe kept coming by. I had six show up at once and mull about around the base of the ladder munching acorns. It was fun eye candy, but I could not get the rifle up without them running. The good news is the reworking of the baking soda regimen had returned my kit to complete scent invisibility. I had given up on the idea of bagging a big buck– they just were not on the property. However, I was to find even shooting a doe was not going to be all that easy. Around 0900 two doe came in and camped out near the stand. I got the rifle up, but the lead doe walked through a hole in the cedars a little before I could get the sights on her. The second doe was right behind. She walked into the opening and. . .

BLAM!

. . . I expected a quick run and a quick finish. I had the Savage 99 out. I had a new scope on it. I really wanted to see how it worked. Ooops. The deer ran 20 yards and then stopped at 40. I expected it to fall with the blind staggers. It did not. She looked back at me in disgust and she and her buddy left making a long arc from my front all the way around my right side. I never got another shot. Once I was down I could see what happened. I could see the deer well with my scope, but standing where the deer was, I could spot all sorts of small branches nearer to her than to the stand. At 60 yards, the bullet must have snapped a twig and gone careening. I was able to follow their trail for a couple hundred yards and that brought me to a view of all of the mouth of left leg creek. No blood. No deer. It was a complete miss. The Savage 99 completed its season with an unbroken record of only taking big bucks. For some reason it just won’t shoot a doe.

Now I come to Thursday Afternoon, and the reason I am sitting here on Friday trying to get caught up on my writing. As I set out Thursday Evening, I was now in a brown-n-down kind of mood. I have been that way in other years. At some point you have to surmise that all the big antlers you have seen to date are all you are probably going to see and start working on filling the freezer the best way you can. By Wednesday all the players had been on the court, and all we had seen so far was the big 8 that SuperCore had taken, a dozen or so young doe, and less than six males ranging from buttons to a small forker that showed up on Wednesday. Yes, I could see myself holding out for a buck, but it was time to take a doe. I went back out to Midway. Temperatures had not budged over freezing all day. I was walking in a cloud of fresh baking soda. I felt ready. I settled in at Midway shortly before 4 PM. I was reading a 19th century account of Jackson’s defense of New Orleans. It is funny, but time has muddied the waters. Nowadays you hear more about how greedy American businessmen had brought on the war in order to exploit Eastern Canada. From the perspective of 110 years ago, you can still sense the anger over what was deliberate goading by the English, trying to wrest control of the continent from their former colonists. Normally I read a paragraph or two and then go back to scanning the woods. It keeps me quiet and I am scanning with my ears even when I am not scanning with my eyes. At 5, I had an hour or so left of hunting. I put the book down and picked up the rifle. 18 minutes later, what appeared to be doe came out at 120 yards on the near side of the Garden of Stone.

My season had gone poorly so far. It got worse when the deer immediately turned away and started grazing, back to me in the gathering gloom. I had my new Hawkeye out. 30-06 was more than enough to get out there. It was Thursday. I was now just trying to get something in the freezer, but I was not going to inaugurate my brand new deer rifle with a Texas Heart Shot. After 50 yards and 10 minutes of grazing, the deer turned broadside. The head went down and the lower part of the deer began to mix with the taller tufts of grass left by the recent mowing. I have to admit I was not looking really close for any headgear.

BLAM!

The deer ran 20 yards, obviously hit, and disappeared at the treeline. I left the blind and walked out across the field. I was beginning to scan the woods and wondering if I was going to have to chase the deer into the ravine when I spied the carcass, toes up in the small margin of tall grass in front of the barbed wire fence. That is when I discovered the 5 inches of spike. My search for The Big One this year was definitely over, and I had killed one of the spikes that had been deviling the doe around my stand all season. At the time, I could not remember exactly if it was Ohio or Kentucky that used to have a 4-inch minimum. This was beyond either. I went and checked later as I was telechecking the deer: only buttons are exempt in Kentucky. I had killed my buck for the year.

Look don’t get me wrong. He’ll eat as good as any doe. He’ll always be one I remember. He will be mounted on the spike wall with the rest, and I will point to him each Opener as I recite “He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d. And point a finger at his mounted antlers saying ‘These wounds! These wounds, I gave on Opening Day'”

It’s kind of like my Dad leaning back on his shovel, wiping the sweat off his head and with a wry grin saying “Son, it does not get any better than this, does it?”

It’s now past sundown. I went out for a bit, not expecting much. I got busted on the way out to Hammond North, but managed to see a couple of deer cavorting out in the Garden of Stone just before I headed in. It is bitter cold and the temperature is supposed to go to 18F tonight. I came in early to wait for a call. KYHillChick is coming out with Angus. I’ll meet them halfway on the AA Highway and then bring him back to camp.

More later. Deer Camp ain’t over yet.

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