By: Boe Boe
Coming up with things to say about crappy teams week after week can and does get tedious…not unlike, I imagine, being a food critic assigned to come up with comparative descriptions of the same crappy fast food burgers week after week. “Greasy, yet queasy and vomit-inducing.” “Salty, yet putrid and stomach-curdling.” The same can be said whether talking about Big Macs or the average bag team.
So this week I will tell you all about my weekend spent hunting deer in the Catskill Mountains.
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Hunting is often maligned by non-hunters as the realm of the unintelligent, blood-thirsty, and inhumane. I’ve learned to embrace the fact that predator-prey instincts are a part of my genetic composition. Hunting deer is not only sporting, but it is a more humane way of obtaining food than stuffing cows in pens and force feeding them ground-up pig bones laced with hormones (read Fast Food Nation). As I said, hunting for deer is like shopping for free range steak, only it is much more challenging - and exhilerating. And instead of blissfully getting a prepackaged meal in a sack, you actually have to reconcile the implications of your carnivorous self.
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Day one I was in the woods by 6:00 AM. Since non-hunters think it is unfair to use things like a rifle or scope to hunt deer, I probably shouldn’t mention the state of the art Motorola headsets my dad purchased so we can communicate as if we were a Navy Seal swat team. (But it was pretty convenient to have him be able to give me a discreet heads-up if Dasher and Comet were headed for my twelve-o’clock high.) I glanced at my reflection in my car window before heading into the woods, and chuckled at the thought that with all the camo and the headset I was wearing I looked like a back-up dancer for Beyonce. Looks like the hip hop world isn’t creating their own fashion cues after all...Word! (I briefly thought about asking my father if my call sign could be “S1W”.)
Most of you know all about the ravages of the pesky coyotes and my encounter back in 2005. Within my hunting posse, there has been a two-year-long APB on Wile E. and friends with explicit instructions to leave no prisoners. As I didn’t have the opportunity to venture out last year, I was uncertain if my backwoods brethren had fulfilled their duties. Would this year be any better, or would I once again be shooting first and looking for a dog collar later?
I walked in the woods past the tree stand my father built for my first hunt at 16. It was built between two trees that are joined at the base in a big “V” shape. 2 x 4s connect the two trees like a ladder, leading to a a 3’ x 3’ platform about 15’ up. The past 17 years have taken their toll on the tree stand and it looked to be in rough shape. Several of the rungs were missing and the rails on the platform were falling down. I decided it was too early in the day to break my neck and headed to a group of tree stumps overlooking a brook and a small clearing. I settled in to make myself very comfortable. In short time, woodsy creatures large and small would begin their morning routines completely unaware that there was a predator in their house.
Most of the leaves were on the ground, but there were still quite a few that were rattling around on the trees whenever the wind blew. About 45 minutes pass, and I hear the slow and staccato, “crunch, crunch, crunch” of an approaching deer from behind me. Most of the readers of this blog are familiar with the adrenaline rush you get playing Buck Hunter when a buck runs across the screen and you know you have a very limited time to figure out if there are any horns on it, site your gun, and get a clean shot. Real hunting is like that…times a thousand. And in 3-D.
My heart starts pounding. I S-L-O-W-L-Y turn over my shoulder to get a look at it, and see a doe coming straight for me. 40 yards. Pause. 30 yards. Still doesn’t see me. 20 yards. 15 yards. She stops and sniffs madly at the air. She smells me and then…is completely startled to finally see me staring at her. She stomps her foot four times…she’s either seeing if I will run in fear at that sign of aggression, or alerting one of her colleagues to my presence. We stare at each other eye-to-eye (I’m sitting at the base of a tree) for a good 5 minutes, taking each other in and trying to make something of the situation. She eventually makes her way past me and lazily continues about her business of pawing at the ground looking for nubs of edible plants until she is out of site. I’m glad to have the chance to turn my head back as my neck was getting stiff. But then I hear the crunching again. I turn around, and a fawn is not 10 feet away from me, smelling the air and like the doe, wondering what to make of me. In a couple minutes she tails after her mother and is gone. My heart rate returns to normal. I am disappointed that a buck wasn’t following them, but I am relieved to know that the coyote population apparently has been curtailed. Definitely a good sign.
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That afternoon, I decide to walk around a bit, particularly around the power lines that divide my father’s property from his brother's. Large swaths had been logged on either side to provide clearance from the wires, which afforded some good 200+ yard site lines. I walk along the edge of the woods, looking and listening for signs of movement. Again I hear the tell-tale “crunching” sound of a nearby deer. I turn to my left, lean up against a tree, and pull up my gun, looking through the scope. It is a semi-wooded area, and I easily make out the back hind-quarters of a deer. Another surge of adrenaline is released and my pulse speeds up. Just…look…up! He looks RIGHT at me, and I see a big rack…I have a perfect shot - he’s so close he practically takes up the entire field of vision in the scope. But I remember that a new regulation has been passed that requires bucks to have at least 3 horns on one side. Before I shoot, I have to be 100% certain it meets this criteria…beside breaking the law, I’d face certain lifelong heckling from my family and friends for taking a sub-standard deer. Again, I am amazed that the deer is not spooked by my site and hasn’t “turned tail” in fear of being shot at. And then it becomes obvious why: Despite having huge perfectly bowed tines (12”+) on each side, he has no brow points and in fact was only a spike. I watch him go on his way, and wonder if he will make it to see another season.
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The morning routine was the same for day two. Around 7:00 I see the back of a deer slowly making its way from right to left across the brook in front of me, about 60 yards away. I can’t tell if it is a buck or not, and I stealthily get it in view with my scope without it noticing. It takes a path so that its head is either blocked by trees on its side of the brook, or hemlock branches and a holly bush on my side. My heart is pounding. Then I see a small doe behind it and I suspect it is the same ones that visited me the day before. They continue on their way out of sight. I wait to see if they have a suitor today, but none appears. They come back into sight again, but again they are blocked from view. I watch them intently, as being in the woods hunting deer there really isn’t much else to do. It appears as if they are …licking each others noses??? WTF? I suddenly realize HO-LY SHIT! it is two bucks locking horns in a real life episode of Wild freaking America. I feel as if someone put me in the middle of a film set and my typical paranoia sets in that someone must be playing a joke on me because I never have good luck like this (except at the Seimens Tent in Talledega).
I put the scope on them, unable to distinguish their horns, yet acutely aware that I am witnessing a pretty ass-kicking thing. I was thinking “DOUBLE BUCK” would flash somewhere if I could manage to get two rounds off. They go up and down the hill across from me, but their damn horns are still obscured. It lasts less than 30 seconds, and then they split up and run away from me. Damn! I lower the gun, still thinking that I am in some sort of staged event like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show. Two groups of does, one behind me and one in front of me, also dispersed once the tussle had concluded.
15 minutes later, I hear a single, loud BANG. My father chimes in on the headset, “Meet me at your cousin's farm…” I meet him on a logging road and we walkt to the back corner of my cousin's farm. His seven year old son greets us in a 4x4 tractor, struggling to see over the steering wheel and reach the gas pedal at the same time. “Look what my dad just shot,” he says. On top of a bed of hay is a seven point buck.
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Coincidentally (or not) I didn’t see another buck the rest of the time.
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Have a good Thanksgiving. Safe travels to all.