It has been quite a while since I wrote anything about the spiritual aspects of deer hunting. Frankly, I have been bogged down so much in the nuts and bolts of things like lead casting and such I have not had a chance to spend the time to really formulate what I needed to say. That does not mean I do not give it a lot of thought.

Thirty-some years ago I used to travel around the I-275 loop on the west side of Cincinnati and wonder what it would be like to hunt the vast stretches of bottom land forming the mouth of the Great Miami River. I knew there were deer there; frequently there would be a roadkill carcass in the berm. I always looked for deer in the fields. Back in the early 80’s I was out driving a lot, trying to get permission to hunt. I drive that stretch quite a bit now. There is no guessing about the deer anymore. I can regularly see a dozen or more between Petersburg, KY and Miamitown. Last March, I counted 30 carcasses in a mile of road as the snow melted. I have seen plenty of turkeys there too; the first time I have seen turkey in Hamilton County. I knew they would get there eventually.

It gets me to thinking about why I go all the way to Bracken County, Kentucky to hunt. It’s 63 miles from the house. The bottoms are less than 20 miles. Part of it is simply it is darn hard to get access to hunt anywhere in Hamilton County. Yes, it can be done, but Hamilton County is very built up. Most of it is subsumed by Cincinnati and satellite municipalities where any sort of hunting is banned. What is available to hunt is getting more and more urbanized. The unincorporated areas west of Cleves is about all that is left, and the big corn fields are slowly being turned into softball fields and junk yards.

I remember years ago driving all the way up to Wilmington, Ohio to do a morning’s squirrel hunt on a friend’s family farm. It all seemed so pristine and bucolic, but I came to a peninsula in the back woodlot and found myself neatly squeezed between the back end of a Kroger parking lot on one side and the FedEx runway on the other with large cargo jets landing over my head. The wide open spaces of the Great Miami River bottoms are no longer fields and woods, but are rapidly becoming residential and light industrial. I was offered a shotgun hunt there twenty years ago. The only problem was  it was  in the back end of a steel yard. The fence around it was 8 feet high with barbed wire at the top, but the deer were getting in and becoming a nuisance. I looked the place over and thanked the fellow for his kindness and never went.

This brings me to a point. Hunting for me is not about meat. It feeds something else in me. It has more to do with where I hunt and how I hunt than what I hunt. I have tried hunting deer with a Walmart at my back. It ain’t the same. Even on public land, I kind of feel weird. If you are reading this somewhere out west or up in the great trackless north, you may be scratching your head. Around me, public land is not hundreds of thousands of acres or even thousands or that many hundreds of acres. Unless you drive a ways, you are talking about a WMA of maybe 2000 huntable acres with every turnout and parking lot filled on the Shotgun Opener.

I am happy on my own 200 acres, shared with just my family. I can really look forward to each visit. I can go sit in my stand on the Rifle Opener and feel safe. I can hear trucks on the county road a mile or so away and dogs barking at the neighbors over on the next ridge, but I don’t have a housing project or a Kmart at my back. It makes me wonder: why is this acceptable to me?  Why don’t I need snow-capped mountains and unnamed lakes to feel at peace?

This is not wilderness. There is very little wilderness left in the Greater Ohio Valley. Most of the larger parcels of huntable  land d are second growth forest on reclaimed land. Even my place has the remains of three different settlements dating back before Kentucky as a state. No, what I have is an echo of wilderness, just enough to satisfy.

Have you ever seen a Zen garden? A Zen garden is kind of neat idea. The idea is to artificially create a landscape that can cause the viewer to contemplate things larger than what is ostensibly there. Buddhist monks in Japan got into this idea. A bunch of rocks, neatly raked can represent an ocean. A big rock in the middle can stand in for an island. It ends up kind of coming off like a overly-manicured golf course, but instead of whacking balls around the monks contemplate the Universe.

I pass a little Zen garden nearly every day. There is a Catholic convent on the way home, and some of the nuns must be broadening their horizons. It is right out by the road. I cannot fathom how you could seriously groove on the thing without having the traffic interfere. The other day, however, I saw a couple of doe munching on the lawn next to it, and it got me to thinking.

That is kind of what we’ve got here at deer camp, a Zen garden. Only I like game roaming around on mine, and I like to do my contemplations with a 30-06.

This  pic could have been taken at any Kentucky Waffle House in mid November. Look at these guys. They all seem to be wearing Hunter Orange.  What’s the difference between that and this?

I’ll tell you what: the hat. It ain’t legal in Kentucky if you don’t wear the hat, but then I guess they come from a place with a warmer climate. The Conservation Officers must be giving them a little slack.

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