In the Public Domain

Silver Reminisce

By Rob Hilliard

“Deer Season.”

Are there two more exciting, enticing, evocative words in the vocabulary of the Ohio Valley hunter? With those two words -- just ten letters -- come the indelible images of Appalachian autumns past slipping into winters. The reminisces of seasons past are as varied as leaves tumbling across the forest floor in a blast of December wind: the gray-pink dawn, the rough warmth of Granddad’s Woolrich coat, the sizzle and smell of eggs for a half-dozen hungry hunters frying on a camp stove, the hits, the misses, and naturally, the wall-hangers.

Many hunters can recite the date, time, place, meteorological conditions, and planetary alignments from every key event in their mental deer-hunting log. I tend to be on the other end of the memory spectrum. That is, while my memories are no less permanent, they tend to roll back to me in a tangle. I can rarely recall more than the most important details of a given event and even less often can I remember the year it happened. In fact, it wasn’t until I started writing this column that I realized this season marks my 25th year, my silver anniversary, as a deer hunter.

Of course, not everything has faded from memory. For example, like every one of us, I still remember my first deer. As with a first love or the first time Dad hands you the car keys, the recollection of the moment is strong, if a little faded around the edges.

Back in those prehistoric days, boys and girls, when rifles had only just replaced stones and spears, Pennsylvania’s doe season was held on the Monday and Tuesday after the close of buck season. For those of us still in the harsh grasp of junior high school, getting one of those two days off was usually the most we could hope for and if you didn’t get your deer then you were done.

For the year.

And so I sat, wrapped in the melancholy gloom that only a 13-year old can muster, waiting for the last few minutes of afternoon light to tick away on my second deer season. Like the year before, my buck season had passed in a blur of too few days afield and too many deer without antlers. Now, even the does had disappeared, taking with them my hopes of having a success story for my buddies at school the next day.

I was perched on the edge of a boulder jutting out from one of many rugged hillsides on state game lands 259, near Cowansville, in Armstrong County (I suppose it’s little wonder that I eventually ended up writing a column on public land hunting). Peering into a grapevine tangle to my left, struggling to pull a deer into view by sheer force of will, I heard a ruckus that made me start to wonder whether the crowd from a high school football game had been somehow transported here to the middle of the forest. With a grand total of about eight days hunting under my belt, I didn’t recognize the whistling, banging, and shouting approaching from my left as a sign that I had accidentally landed in the middle of someone else’s deer drive. But suddenly, as if by magic, deer began to crowd around my rock as if it was Happy Hour at the Salt Lick Bar and Grill.

A buck and a tiny doe bolted underneath the lip of my boulder before I even had a chance to raise my dad’s .32-caliber Marlin (lent to me for this special occasion) rifle. Shadowy, brown-gray forms crashed through the brush on the hillside below me without presenting a shot, and crackling branches announced the presence of more deer out of sight behind me.

Finally, I glimpsed a doe strolling leisurely into the mass of vines to my left. I shouldered the rifle, set the V of the iron sights on the spot where I thought she would emerge, and involuntarily ceased all pulmonary functions. I don’t know if the tunnel vision that I experienced was a result of intense concentration or lack of oxygen, but when she bolted from a different spot, running like her tail was on fire, it took me several seconds to shift my focus and find her in my sights.

Still, I did as I had mentally rehearsed 6,732 times before that moment: hammer back, sights behind the shoulder, follow with the barrel, touch the trigger when you’re sure. A perfect kill shot on a running deer.

What happened next was so stunning that I laid the old Marlin across my lap and stared. Although I knew I had done everything right, the old doe -- my doe -- bounded off through the rocks and leaves as though she hadn’t even heard my shot, let alone felt the bullet. When she got about 50 yards to my right, she wheeled suddenly and stopped broadside. I was able to compose myself long enough to get off another shot, although I’ve wondered over the years if that one even touched her. Either way, she dropped where she stood and I had to restrain myself from making the 20-foot jump off the face of the boulder just to run over to the spot where she lay.

That doe was heavy by our standards, maybe 150 or 160 pounds, making her almost half again as much as I weighed. I wanted to drag her out on my own, but the combination of my spindly body and the dry, rocky ground barely let me budge her and I had to let the rest of our group share the chore of pulling her back to the truck. I guess that’s one reason why I usually insist on dragging my own deer out to this day, refusing the offers of help and ignoring the bemused head-shaking from my ATV-riding hunting partners.

I’m quite sure many of the gang I hunt deer with today are firmly convinced of my insanity, with deer dragging being only one of many reasons. Still, there’s no doubt that the social aspect of deer hunting, especially for those of us who head out in rifle season, is one of its primary attractions. For the past eight or 10 seasons I’ve spent opening day hunting with my brother-in-law Jim Hite, as well as his brothers and neighbors. We’ve spent a lot of hours exploring the social aspects of the hunt, not to mention the crabapple thickets, on an abandoned farm near their Venango County home (OK, OK, it’s private land . . . don’t tell anyone).

When I put my mind to it, I can recall some of the specific deer hunts, like the two does Jim and I shot as we stood side by side behind the collapsing ruins of the old farmhouse. And the four-point (or was it six?) buck I shot left-handed because it came up on the wrong side of my treestand. But the memories that come to mind with no effort at all are those which have little or nothing to do with the hunting itself: my sister Wendy’s cookie care packages on the kitchen counter, the bacon that I cook (always chewy, never crispy) for our traditional pre-dawn breakfast, and, most of all, the laughter. There are times when we laugh so long and so hard that it’s a wonder we ever see a deer at all. And despite the fact that my deer hunting exploits have often demanded that the laughter be at my expense, that’s still the thing I most look forward to each year.

The thought of laughter ringing through the December forest allows yet another memory to tumble out of my mind and come into soft focus. This reminisce draws me back to my mid-teen years, when I headed north to our state’s Big Woods for my first real visit to a deer camp, and my first -- and probably only -- deer hunt with my father.

I should preface this account by telling you that Dad is not a hunter. In spite of being one of the best instinctive rifle shooters I’ve ever known, he’s too industrious, too much of a farmer at heart, and has never found the patience to sit in the woods waiting for a deer when projects could be getting done back home. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the trip he arranged with our neighbors, Dick and Dan Swartzlander, to their camp near Sigel is the only time he’s ever gone deer hunting in his life.

I remember thinking it a bit odd that fall when he told me he was buying a hunting license, and I seem to recall that he had to consult me for advice on the required amount of blaze orange. But he passed it off as something that he “just wanted to do” and, like most teenagers contemplating the behavior of their parents, I let it go with a shrug. Now though, over two decades later and looking back through the lens of my own adulthood and parenthood, I recognize that he was doing what fathers -- the very best fathers -- do. He was trying something that he had no great desire to attempt because he saw that his son loved it. Carrying his dad’s .257 Roberts rifle and wearing what had to have been the most hideous hunting hat ever contrived, he was trying to make a connection.

And connect we did. Our closeness that trip went way beyond having to share a bed in the camp. As usual, I can’t really remember the specifics of our conversation, only the warmth and the merriment. Hunting the rocky, laurel-choked ridges of Clear Creek State Forest, we went nearly the entire opening day without seeing a deer. Funny, but I don’t remember missing them a bit. What I do recall is sitting next to Dad on the roots of toppled oak, watching deer mice poke through the leaves below our feet, and solving the problems of the world. It was one of the very best days of my 25 years in the deer woods.

So many things have changed me as a person and as a hunter in those two and a half decades that I couldn’t begin to recount them. And yet, so much about the hunt remains the same. I still lay out my clothing and equipment piece by piece the evening before opening day, and I still sleep about as soundly as a lamb in a wolf pack that night.

Still, I wouldn’t give up even one of those sleepless nights, not one hour spent flexing my frozen toes and fingertips, not one minute passed straining my ears to pick the crunch of hoofsteps from the roaring wind. If I did, I’d also be trading what I’ve learned on those frozen mornings and gray afternoons. The lessons about deer behavior, about the forest, about my father, and, mostly, about myself will always count more than any number or size of antlers mounted on the wall.

Deer season. I’m already counting the days.