Rite of Passage
He stood outside in the setting afternoon sun staring up at the rack of deer antlers attached to the outside wall off my shed. He must have been there for fifteen minutes. I walked up behind him.
“What are you doing,” I asked.
“Admiring your trophy rack,” he said.
“Thanks for saying that, but actually, a four-point Blacktail deer rack is nothing to boast about,” I admitted. “It’s not like the rack of a bull elk, or a trophy mule or whitetail. It’s just something to show that I got one.”
“How many have you shot?” he asked.
“I shot five but killed one just by startling and jumping it. I think it had a weak heart.” I watched his face to see if he was impressed. I don’t think he heard what I said which means I wasted one of my patented snarks.
“I want to go hunting. Will you take me?” he asked.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I answered him. “There are many reasons.”
##
It just so happened, that when I was his age, the call of the wild lured me into its seductive arms also. One day, I had no desire at all to hunt for deer, and the next day, that was all that I could think about.
It started with the widower, Swede, the old, retired outdoorsman who lived in a small house behind ours. Swede knew everything about hunting, fishing, and blowing up stumps. He had guns and fishing gear hidden all over his house. Scattered around the path through his living room, were piles of old Field and Stream, and Outdoor Life magazines.
As he lay in his bed in the evening watching Gunsmoke and sipping on a glass of Canadian Mist, I would leaf through the magazines, reading each story on techniques for stalking, shooting, and dressing a deer. Then I would ask him how he would have done it, and he would recount a story from 50 years earlier when he hunted as a young man.
“I want to go hunting,” I said to him one evening.
“Deer or ducks?” he asked.
“Well, let’s start out with both,” I suggested confidently.
You see, Swede not only had a 12-gauge pump shotgun, but he also had a 10-gauge Marlin Goose gun, and a 30-06 Springfield rifle.
“You want me to go with you?” he asked in his evening slurred speech.
“No, that’s okay. You’re too stove-up to walk in the woods anymore. You just let me borrow your truck and a few guns and I’ll figure the rest out. I think that I am well self-taught from these magazines.
He looked at me with a doubtful look on his face, but then turned back to watch the TV.
“Take what you need out of the rack,” he said, “but buy your own ammo and decoys. I don’t want mine all shot full of holes.”
##
Back then, ammo was cheap. Hunters could dress in any outer clothes they wanted. There were many meat processors to take your game for cutting and wrapping, and all the mountain logging roads were ungated, giving access to hundreds of miles of hunting.
“Now days,” I said to the boy, “a box of shells are $40.00. You have to sneak through the woods with that florescent orange vest on. If you got a deer, there is no place to take it to get it processed, and because people drive up into the hills to dump their garbage and leave their junk cars, the log roads are all gated closed. The enticing lure of deer hunting is gone.”
“I want to go deer hunting,” he repeated.
“Do you have a rifle?” I asked.
“I’ve got a Swede Mauser 6.5×55 that my grandfather left me.”
“Does it have a scope?” I asked.
“Do I need one?” he asked.
“Not if the deer aren’t standing more than 50 feet away, I guess.”
“Look, I know you kid. You will hate yourself after you’ve killed a deer. A deer isn’t just a target. It’s a living being and if you don’t kill it on the first shot, you are going to have to kill it up close when it is writhing on the ground. Deer are just like dogs. They have personalities; they raise families; they are smart.”
The call of the wild had him locked in its tight grip. He needed to go through the rite of passage.
“I want to go deer hunting.”
Obviously, he had not heard a thing I had just said.
“Okay. Get a hunting license and I’ll pick you up at 5:30 in the morning on Saturday.” Even that didn’t deter him.
##
Saturday morning, I drove up to his house at 5:30 only to find all the lights in the house were off.
“That little weasel slept in,” I muttered. “If I try to wake him, it will also wake the rest of the family.”
I was especially irked because I had to get up at 4:00 to get to his house. Suddenly, the light came on in his SUV and he climbed out. He waved and brought out a backpack and his Mauser. The gun was a relic with adjustable iron sights on the back. Most likely used as a sniper rifle back in some distant war. I hadn’t really thought about what he would wear, and I was surprised to see him in a pair of ski pants with an old lift ticket still attached. The legs made a swishing sound with every step he took. Well, who was I to judge – I walked through the woods wearing a hard hat that I had spray painted florescent orange. It gave off the sound of a rim-shot on a snare drum every time a tree limb slapped it.
“Ready to do it?” I asked as he climbed into my Explorer.
“Let’s do it,” he answered.
“By the way, pull open the bolt on your Mauser.”
He did and ejected a shell.
“Did you happen to read the hunting guidebook? There is a section about transporting a loaded gun in your vehicle. Not only will we be deafened if it goes off, but I will have to repair the hole in my roof.”
An hour later, we had pulled off the highway onto an ungated logging road which we drove on for another seven miles. It was just starting to get light. I pulled off the road and we parked at a favorite spot where I had bagged a deer before. I didn’t think that I would be excited about hunting again, but having a fledgling hunter who I could show the ropes to, relapsed me right back into the days when I learned from Swede.
“I’ve got something for you,” I said. Reaching into my backpack, I gave him a walkie talkie. “If we get separated in the woods, I want you to be able to call me.” He placed the unit in his shirt pocket and with a swish, swish, swish, and the occasional rim shot, we headed up the hill.
This was a hillside that I had come across by accident earlier in my hunting career. I had harvested one of my larger bucks in this same spot. It was steep, covered with moss and ferns and had many wind-fallen trees which we had to navigate under, or over. I watched him as we came to one group of windfalls. He tried to go over the top. As he climbed up the pile, he threw a leg over the top of a log and pulled himself up on top, but the backpack and his rifle caused him to lose balance and he went off the log backwards. Hooking his leg around the trunk, he did a complete playground revolution, minus the cherry drop. I was impressed.
I taught him to look for hoof prints in the moss and keep his eyes uphill for any movement in the trees. I, on the other hand, found chanterelle mushrooms in the moss. This was far more exciting than looking for deer and I would bend down, snip them with my knife and put them in my pack. After 30 minutes he said, “I thought we were hunting deer.”
“True,” I said, “but you also need chanterelle mushrooms to add flavor to the deer stew.”
An hour later, after lunch and a much-needed bathroom break, which I like to call “pine needle panties” which is the result of sitting bare legged on a needle coated, mossy log, we were on our way again, still not seeing any deer.
We came into a clearing next to a creek, where we found buried in the brush, a one-man tent. This tent looked like it hadn’t been used in years. Of course, the first thing that came into my mind was, there is a dead body inside.
“Let’s look inside and see if anyone is dead in there.” I suggested.
“I tell you what, you look inside, and I’ll have my rifle ready just in case someone who is not quite dead jumps out at you.” This put a whole new twist on looking inside, but he did have a good point.
I pulled back the door flap and cautiously looked in. Luckily there were no bodies, but I did retrieve a very nice hatchet which I placed in my backpack next to the chanterelles.
“The day hasn’t been a total loss. Mushrooms and a hatchet. Let’s head back down the hill and call it a day.” I could tell he was disappointed.
Back at the Explorer I said to him, “Give me the walkie-talkie and I’ll put it onto the charger at home.”
He patted down his coat, shirt and pants. “Uh-oh,” he said. Must have fallen out when I did the rotation on the log.
Almost immediately, I heard my walkie-talkie crackle and a high-pitched chirping come over the speaker.
“The dog-gone squirrels have your walkie-talkie.” I muttered. “Do you have Google Translate on your phone?”
Four weeks later was what we call, “The Late Hunt.” It was one more chance to go hunting before the season closed for the year. Naturally, he was eager to go. I told him we would go to a different spot that I had found on google maps, satellite view. It was a large clearcut. Multiple acres of downed and cleared timber. It would be easy to sit in one spot and scan the area with a pair of binoculars to see deer feeding.
“You got a pair of binoculars?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a nice pair,” he responded.
“Bring em. I’ll pick you up at 5:00.”
As we drove up into the hills, I told him about using scent lures to draw bucks out into the open and about looking for fresh dropping piles which would indicate that deer were in the area.
“We’ll climb through the clear cut to see if we can spook one, but then if we find a good vantage point, we’ll stop and scan for a while. That is a nice-looking pair of binoculars hanging around your neck. They look expensive.”
After pulling over at a wide spot on the logging road, we then walked the rest of the way. I had a copy of the Google Maps satellite view of the clearcut which was not visible from the road. This meant that the other hunters wouldn’t know that it was there. There would be no competition.
“Okay,” I said looking at the map. “We go uphill from here through the timber and over that ridge. The clearcut is hidden on the backside.”
Climbing the hillside was difficult. There were large rocks to negotiate, and again, we found piles of windfallen timber which I elected to go under. He elected to go over. I had to chuckle as I watched him once again swing around the trunk backwards, this time including the cherry drop.
Now dirty and disheveled, we continued climbing to the top of the ridge. There before us was the large clear-cut. Steam rose from the frosty logs and rocks below us as the morning sun began rising. We found a spot to sit where we could view the full acreage.
“I’m going to toss a few scent canisters down the hill to draw them out, then I’ll scan this side of the clear cut with my binoculars, and you scan that side with yours.”
There was no response. Then . . .
“I lost my binoculars,” he said quietly.
Almost immediately, my walkie-talkie crackled, and a high-pitched chirping came over the speaker. I grabbed my phone and hit the Google Translate app.
“We see you through our new pair of binoculars and we have already told the deer. Ski pants and a hard hat? Have a nice day, losers!” The walkie-talkie went silent.
“Squirrels. I hate squirrels,” I muttered.
It was his first and last hunting season, and probably for the best. We both realized that it’s hard to maintain the dignity of apex predators when you’re actively being cyberbullied by creatures that eat acorns.
** Title photo taken by Diane Haggith
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