It’s midnight now and I’m finally able to sit down.
Eight hours ago I was rushing to get home from lunch with friends to get showered, suited up, and out into the woods. It was my last day of a string of vacation days and my window of opportunity was closing for a managed hunt on conservation land. I wanted to fill at least one of the two tags I still had.
My brother Andy shuttled me from the main parking lot at to an access point almost a mile down the road. I had my climber on my back and intended to bushwhack through a dense stand of river birch to get to a clearing where deer trails intersected.
After pushing through the thick forest and reaching the clearing, I realized there were no suitable trees for the climbing stand. I was getting anxious. The sun was slipping lower toward the towering ridge to the west and the air was cooling. I needed to get up and ready to shoot.
Plan B involved reviewing aerial maps in Google Earth on my phone but the resolution was too low to discern between scrub brush and glade. I decided to push west further into the mess to see what alternative I could find.
Ultimately, near a patch of briars adjacent to a cedar thicket, I found a tree with the right thickness. I had to cut five limbs off as I climbed, but I was just glad to have a decent tree to be in. The tree stood on a dilapidated barbed wire fence line and at the corner of a scant East/West trail leading to a less dense area of briars…almost a clearing.
Over the years, I’ve learned to stay on stand until dark. I’ve had so many deer pop out at last light that it’s becoming a standing joke. Tonight was no different. Aside from a gray squirrel every now and then, only birds were moving. Then, as only ambient light remained, the intentional forward shuffling of feet grew and I realized deer were moving.
Amazingly (because this also happens to be part of the standing joke), they were headed to my tree. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a deer magnet on me. For all the trees in the woods, when they come directly to me, I never cease to be amazed. From my perch above the ground, I made out a black nose and gray face moving through the cedars. I came to full draw and began to try to find the deer in my peep.
She was almost underneath me. My hope was the younger doe up front would walk past so I’d have a shot at one of the larger ones in the rear. That hope was extinguished when doe #1 stopped dead on the trail almost below me. Her body frozen, she stamped once then looked up at me. Busted.
Before she bolted, I lined up the shot, though it had to pass through foliage to hit her. I initiated the release, heard the familiar punch of metal on rib cage then watched her run off down the path.
Her blood trail was clear to follow and in one last act of defiance, she expired in a briar patch.
45 minutes after finding her, I was out of the woods and back at the Jeep, ready to quit hunting for the rest of my life. Between dragging that deer through coat-closet thick brush interspersed with briars with my climber on and bow in hand…and at night, soaking my clothing with sweat, I was furious. My anger was only compounded by the dead end paths that caused me to backtrack.
I made it out of the woods at 8:20 pm. Four hours later the deer has been butchered and is now cooling in the fridge. I should be in bed, but need to unwind a bit before I do that…so I’m writing about the evening.
I love my time in the woods; even more when I see something; especially when I bring something home. I do have to say that after all the work of hunting then processing my kill, going back to work in the morning may end up feeling more like a vacation than my time off did.
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