As a young child I was in awe of my father and brothers, as every year they’d prepare for a week in advance of the opening of deer season. Being an observer, and not a participant for several years contributed to the mythological feel of the whole hunting experience for me. I saw all the advance work, and all of the fruit of the trip, as I’d walk into our friend’s walk-in cooler where a dozen deer would be hanging to age before home processing. But I never actually witnessed the actual hunt, not that I was completely uninformed. In my family it’s a tradition that whenever we’d have venison for dinner (a treat) the person who had harvested the venison we were eating would always recount the taking of the deer. So, as the backstrap is put on the table, grab a dinner roll and save some room for apple pie, because this is the story of my first deer hunt.
As I said, I spent a few years just watching my dad and brothers doing what I desperately wanted to do. I just wanted to hunt deer. There were 12 members of the hunting party my family belonged to. Every opening week we packed up enough groceries and hunting supplies (mostly groceries) to last a week in the Texas hill country. Our party hunted on a 2,000 acre ranch which was bordered by the James and Llano Rivers. For a few years, I had been told that if someone dropped out of the hunting party, a spot might open up for me. After a couple of years of this talk, it was decided that I could go ahead and accompany the hunters. I was old enough to work for our friend, Don, who was the leader of the hunt. I swept floors in his welding shop, worked on his farm, and took care of two kennels of bird dogs. I was quite busy after school and on weekends for a while, and in this way I paid for my first hunt. As with so many things from my childhood and early youth, I had grand expectations of my upcoming experience. In fact, although I had never been there, I heard so many stories about the place, I had stitched together images in my mind that seemed more like memories than the guesses they really were.
The arrangement was that I could go. I would be a part of the group, but there was no bunk for me in the bunkhouse. My evening lodging was in a sleeping bag in the barn underneath the bunkhouse. My best friend, Johnny, was kind enough to forsake his own warm sleeping arrangements and throw his sleeping bag next to mine on top of some bales of hay.
The truth is, we all went into the hill country for a week of tradition. One of the more important traditions was the bringing of my mother’s banana bread. A couple of years earlier, Dad had forgotten to ask my mother to make the delicacy. It was a mistake the hunting party almost didn’t recover from. Other traditions included assignments for cooking breakfast, making the gallons of hot chocolate, and a big steak dinner with the ranch owners – kind of a good luck dinner.
As for the deer, I remember sitting in a deer stand with Don. It was bitterly cold, with an even colder wind. Light rain showers turned into a miserable stinging rain as the wind would whip it horizontally through our stand. It was the peak of the rut, and we watched a small buck chasing a few does for half the morning. I spent a good bit of time with my rifle out the stand window, watching these deer and shivering from that horrible combination of extreme cold and buck fever. Don eventually curled up in the bottom of the stand and took to napping. I was convinced his snoring would spook the deer, but I guess if the earlier pecan cracking and shelling didn’t do it, nothing would. After a while, it seems the wind even got the best of the deer, and they bedded down. Eventually we called it a morning and headed for the bunk house. Turning a corner on a hilly gravel road, Don told me to be ready, because we might just see the buck we had been watching. Sure enough, it was where Don had predicted. I started shaking again, this time strictly from buck fever, since the pickup was very warm. Don positioned his Bronco to afford me a shooting angle. I shot my first deer from a resting position with a borrowed .223. The subsequent field dressing of the deer and triumphant return to deer camp completed my initiation as a deer hunter.
I’ve often wished I could say that I stalked my first deer on foot for half a day, and dropped to one knee to shoot, or maybe had to track my deer. You know – something harder, or more sporting. But that’s not the way it happened. What happened was, my friend got me on a deer. And more importantly, he got me hooked on hunting for a lifetime.
Now, would you please pass the gravy?
