The Last Hunter

December 31, 2007 09:34 am

— Will the last hunter out of the woods please turn off the lights?
What is it about the late season, that last vestige of deer hunting that pulls me to the cold, damp and lonely woods to places where only boots will take me and at a time when my chance to slay a buck is remote, as remote, I think, as the place where I have now planted my butt, a butt, I might add, that threatens to wipe out my tracks.
The great thing about deer season is that it goes on for a long time. The bad thing about deer season is that it goes on for a long time.
Besides your standard pair of jockey shorts (no boxers, please), there are two layers of polypropylene, a pair of jeans and insulated bibs keeping the chills from leaving the old wooden chair in the ground blind and reaching the various sections of my anatomy by way of my nether parts.
Not only is there a physical chill, but a mental one as well. This same ground blind in which I sit was somehow a more friendly place in October when the air temperature was unusually warm and other hunters were in camp. I knew, during that amber month, that the cold was not a threat and that if I needed some kind of help, be it someone to abet in dragging a deer uphill or fixing a flat tire in a tough place, that the assistance was available.
Unfortunately, I never needed help dragging a deer. Fortunately, neither did I need help with a tire.
Now, on this sullen day that is not quite yet winter on the calendar, but very much winter in the ground blind and between my ears, it is apparent that I am on my own.
There is still a primordial attraction in such a setting for me. It’s not like my lone-wolf jaunts into the Rockies of a few decades ago, but it’s the best I can do considering the number of candles I’ve blown out and the little twists and turns that happen to one’s muscular/skeletal structure during the various 364-day periods between candle blowings.
Maybe it is the chance, no matter how slim, that I might actually kill a king-of-the-mountain kind of buck during the last couple days of the West Virginia muzzleloader season that pulls me to these settings and gives me enough intensity to make it through the long, lonely, gray, middle-of-the-week day. If it happens, I could say, modestly of course, “Hey, guys. Look at me. I toughed it out and either outsmarted or outwaited an old mossback, wide-antlered buck, the kind I couldn’t get after countless hours in stands and blinds as I held either a bow or a centerfire rifle. I did something pretty neat. Look at me.” Modestly, of course.
It’s never happened yet, but somehow I think it could.
In October, several of us sat around the camp table, eating Aunt Juanita’s fudge and talking big. Trail cameras showed us there were ample bucks, nice bucks, that would soon be hanging on the gamepole, objects for other cameras that would snap each of us beside the bragger bucks we had taken.
Hah!
“Be careful what you wish for,” said the huntmeister. “We know we have these nice bucks, but we also know that all the photos of them are at night.”
No matter. In each of our minds ran the perfectly hot doe that would drag one of these highly respectable deer past our bow stands. At the correct moment, the shooter buck, as everybody calls them nowadays, would stand broadside and just like on The Outdoor Channel our broadheads would fly true.
We got just one. That buck was finally recovered after a primitive group tracking effort, it’s culmination, as described to me, certainly calling for a victory howl by the hunters involved. If they didn’t howl like a pack of wolves that has just scored, they will never have a better reason to do so.
Then in gun season five more fell, nice bucks, but not any of the nasty boys whose antler spreads get out more toward the 20-inch than the 13-inch mark, and certainly not the deer we called Mulie, the behemoth buck that must have been transplanted from Kansas and placed to tease us in front of a trail camera.
So that’s why God made muzzleloader season, to give the addicted among us just one more chance.
“I get tired deer hunting, but I never get tired of deer hunting,” I told the huntmeister one day in early November. I’m thinking now, as I stare out the front window of the blind, that I may have lied, at least just a little.
The front window of the blind is the shape of a TV screen, but there are no knobs or remote controls that allow me to change the picture, to click it until a nice buck appears and then walks toward me, getting into the 100-yard-or-closer range in which I feel comfortable shooting.
God bless in-line muzzleloaders and the scopes that sit atop them. Sorry, Tred Barta, I am not intending to do it your way today. I want to reach out and touch a buck as far away as possible.
I believe that serious bucks, the kind we all seek, pattern us as we hunt. In fact, I am sure they do. They watch us. They listen to us. They smell us. They know what we do, day after day after day after day.
That is why big bucks are often shot by the least experienced hunters, hunters who walk into a patch of woods or brush that veteran hunters would not consider, hunters who reach a particular woodland spot by way of an unusual approach.
“Whoa,” the serious buck might say, just before taking a bullet to the neck, “I never thought a hunter would come from that direction.”
Hey, if those who hate hunting can talk about animals as if they are humans then so can I.
So here I am. I’m thinking throughout the autumn that big bucks don’t come to a certain field during the day because they can hear that a vehicle has driven near it. Even though the field is alongside a road, if I park some distance away and walk to the field instead of driving, the bucks won’t hear any motors and will be more relaxed. Maybe they will come to the field on their own. Maybe they will follow a pretty lady deer that is still looking for action. Maybe I can use a doe bleat to call one in.
Maybe, baby. I don’t know. Who does, really?
I’d settle for being lucky, for hitting the black powder lottery. I’d settle for a a bear or a coyote or a falling meteor that startles a high ranking buck and makes him run in front of the 295-grain bullet stuffed down the front end of my muzzleloader.
Whatever it takes.
Maybe the bear will follow the buck and I’ll get both of them. Maybe I should buy some oceanfront property in Arizona.
I read Doctor Seuss’s “McElligot’s Pool,” a hundred times to the boys and I’m a believer. It could happen. It certainly could.
I hope it happens soon. I’m cold. Sitting still is hard physical work. If you don’t believe me, go sit in a chair in your living room and don’t move any muscles, at least not much, and you will see what I mean. Your body wants to move. That’s what bodies are made to do. You will experience aches. The quickness of the onset of those aches will likely depend upon your age.
“What a sissy,” I think. “Shut up,” I tell myself, but then I realize that I have been shut up. When you are in such a setting, you let snot run down the back of your throat because you don’t want to make the noise that is associated with ejecting it. You don’t scratch itches unless they become intense. I know guys who hunt with cell phones and walkie talkies turned on. I don’t. I’m always concerned that they will beep or burp or eep or urp or play the Star Spangled Banner just when a buck is walking in. Then I would have to stand up.
I carry these contrivances because after all they could be life savers, but I turn them on only when I want to use them, theoretically to call a friend or a relative to say “I just killed a state record buck.”
Shuhhhhh!
My silent intensity is crazy. I know that. I know people who smoke cigarettes and talk on cell phones and scream into walkie talkies and pee pee near where they hunt and don’t get all the peanut butter from their PBJ sandwiches off their mustaches. They are already home looking at the photos of the nice bucks they killed earlier in the season. And here I am playing like a venison SWAT team’s sniper.
It’s just the way I hunt. Maybe I’d enjoy it more if I merely tromped around the woods hollering at buddies and listening to roger beeps on walkie talkies, but I doubt it. I’d feel as if I was scaring an unseen monster buck.
Sometimes I find myself praying a selfish prayer in the woods. “C’mon Lord. Send a big buck my way. Thanks.”
Sometimes it works, so I do it every once in a while.
The fat lady is warming up her vocal cords, preparing an antlered aria of sorts. Deer season, at least the kind in which you go boom, is about to end. There will still be a few days left to flip arrows around the woods. Good luck.
Somehow I need my combination of grit, hope, silence, prayer and black powder to come together soon. Beam me up a big buck, Scottie.
I’ll take help from anybody.
Luck is better than planning every time. Seriously.
If I get lucky, I hope it is in the first hour or two of the day. Dragging a big buck off the mountain is enough work, but it seems like twice the task when the shot is made as light fades and it is just you, a 140-pound carcass, a rope and a head lamp. For years now, unless my son is with me, I have hunted uphill so that I can drag down. Gravity is a wonderful thing, half of the time.
Still, depending upon the topography and the shot placement, a mortally wounded deer can run downhill, taking its last gasp at the bottom of a hollow that has only one way out, the hard way.
When it happens. When the post mid-life hunter drops the fine animal in a tough spot and tracks it and guts it and drags it and hoists it and checks it and finally gets it home (God, I hope there are still some beers in the refrigerator), there is a sense of accomplishment that cannot be explained to those who are not in the same boat or who have not watched as each of their labored breaths puffs smokey-like into the minute ray of light cast by the small headlamp held to the cranium by an elastic band.
A plus-sized hunting friend of mine lost 9 pounds once while on a particular diet. He likened his reduction to a deck chair blowing off the Titanic. When I am on my own, responsible for 75 or so pounds of meat that is still attached to bone and hide and hoof and still lying on the ground with a measly little drag rope tied to its neck or antlers, I share his feeling of inadequacy. I feel like my candlepower is practically invisible. I seriously doubt that my headlamp would show up on one of those photos taken from space, no matter how many times you zoomed in.
Astronaut 1: Look, there in that corner of West Virginia. It looks like a headlamp in the woods.
Astronaut 2: Probably Sawyers dragging out a doe.
Astronaut 1: Do you think we should radio down to get him some help?
Astronaut 2: Nah. He likes doing that kind of stuff.
Those itty-bitty head lamps — quite necessary and handy, by the way, because they free your hands for hard work — focus our attention into one little sliver of light, while we are surrounded by a world of dark.
I know this. Two decades ago a gut pile from a deer would lie in place for days. Not any more. A gut pile, including liver, kidneys, lungs, heart, intestine and a half ton of gorp, disappears overnight now. Something eats those things and quickly.
Thank God this isn’t the northern Rocky Mountains where grizzly bears live. Grizzlies have come to associate the sound of a rifle shot with dinner. The bears reason, in their bear brain sort of way, that if they get there fast enough, before the hunters do, that they get to eat an elk or a deer. Get there a little slower and at least they have a gut pile. Guides in those parts are gutting and packing meat and getting the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible before the country’s largest carnivore arrives.
Still, the huntmeister has a trail cam photo of a black bear so big, so blocky, so physically undefined that we call him Volkswagen. He has no neck and you cannot see beneath his belly. I have nothing against Volkswagen, but hope he is on the other side of the property when I am doing late-night meat retrievals.
The huntmeister is as law abiding a nimrod as I have ever shared woods paths, lies and venison stew with. He says, though, that should someone stick a bear with an arrow and a trailing job becomes necessary at night, that at least one of us will be packing heat as we seek the bruin. He says that he would rather go to a courtroom and explain to a judge why we did what we did rather than visit an emergency room or a funeral home. Seems like solid thinking to me.
A lot of laws, such as the one that you can’t carry a firearm while bowhunting, are made to keep dishonest people from breaking the law in a more effortless fashion. As times and circumstances change (i.e. larger bear and coyote populations in the Appalachian Mountains) common sense needs to begin to factor into the regulatory process.
You know how when you are hunting and you hear a shot? What do you do? You probably look at your watch. Almost everybody does. And you think, “I’ll bet that was Uncle Charlie up at the low gap beside the well back in the trees. Maybe he got that 6-point we’ve been seeing.”
I try not to do that... look at my watch, that is. I like to try to let the day pass as it wants to. Edward Abbey in his book “Desert Solitaire,” wrote that when he was working at the newly established Arches National Park in Utah that days passed slowly as days should. That’s what I strive for in the woods. Slow days. No watch.
So here I am looking at my watch. It’s 3:23 p.m. In mid-December that means there are about two hours of daylight left for legal shooting. Clouds or rain or snow further decrease that illimunated window of opportunity. This is, though, the time of day that crepuscular animals such as alpha bucks are more likely to move and, 99.999999999 percent of the time, a wallhanger buck that is shot and killed has moved for one reason or another. You just don’t walk up on them while they are bedded and plunk them dead. Something either startles them or attracts them to get them out of those safe havens in which they bed during the day.
I may not get another day in the woods this blackpowder season. This could be it unless I get a whole lot of lucky. I know, though that I have a better chance of killing a buck here than I do if I was sitting in my kitchen or at my computer terminal at work or in a barber shop. My one outstanding attribute, when it comes to hunting, is persistence. I spend as much time afield as possible. So maybe that will all pay off in the next (it’s 4:11 p.m. now) 69 minutes.
Maybe not.
The beautiful, horse-drawn coach has turned into a pumpkin. The cedars of Lebanon have fallen. The Boston Red Sox have won the World Series... again. Legal shooting time has expired.
Often while I am in the wooded world, I find myself giving thanks for the beautiful setting and for the chase and the game and the sweat and the blood and the challenge that continues to inspire and nourish me.
At or near season’s end, though, often in the dark or on a windy ridge or a steep slope, as I feel that year’s hunt slipping away I find myself in a spiritual mindset that is mine alone and practically impossible to explain in print, though I believe that some of you who have read this far very likely experience it as well. Isn’t it something, though?
For this year, however, the party is over. Where is that light switch?
Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.

Photos

The buck called Mullie

The bear called Volkswagen