It’s the only music appropriate for such a serious-minded moment, despite the Rolling Stones tune that keeps inexplicably peering over the lip of your consciousness, almost demanding you let anyone within earshot know you can’t get any satisfaction.
The next hilltop holds no game and after realizing it’s probably time to start heading home, you turn onto the logging road to begin the slow uphill climb back toward the truck. A minute later the sun cuts a window through the low gray overcast and the momentary burst of solar energy makes the icy treetops explode with the light of a trillion diamonds. While fumbling for the small camera in your backpack, you pause with the realization no picture could reproduce the scene, or more importantly, the mood of the moment. As quickly as it opened, the window shuts, leaving you in the suffused light of a winter morning the same color as clam juice.
You are a mixture of feelings as you head back toward “civilization.” The season is in the final innings and no venison yet resides in the freezer, but you’ve had many adventures with good friends and seen extraordinary things. On the ledger, you are on the red side of the profit margin, but just barely.
After all those previously mentioned miles of life experience, you’ve finally learned the success of a hunt cannot be measured in poundage or inches. Those help, but they’re not the sole reason you spend an inconsiderable amount of coin and sweat. Perhaps you’ve finally grown up, at least as much as an otherwise feral human male is capable.
Snow Hunt
A famous last word
There is a special magic when hunting in the snow, especially for deer, especially in late December. You move unhurried and thoughtful through inaudible flakes sifting down onto the silent landscape, alone except for your thoughts. Occasionally, an overloaded branch silently spills its burden with a silent powdery explosion, the last bits of sparkling shrapnel slowly sifting down toward the forest floor. There is no sound on the gray windless day other than your own breathing and the quiet hiss of a few inches of powder sliding over freshly oiled boots. Walking through the ermine-coated woods with a muzzleloader, your thoughts are more inward than toward the hunt itself.
As the season fades into finality a few days before Christmas, you are hunting solo because your regular partner has already tagged a nice buck a few weeks before during the general gun season. You were happy for him, at least in the intellectual side of your brain, while your green-hued ego positively simmered with jealousy. Fortunately, you’ve got enough miles under your boots to keep the little bastard in check — mostly. Instead, you told your partner “Congratulations!” a couple of times and slapped him heartily on the back with 99% sincerity.
Winding Down
Alone now in the final innings of the season, you find yourself pondering the waning year, replaying all the crucial events and wishing you could have another shot at a few things. You worry about the here-and-now, along with the things we are leaving for future generations. You’re worried about politics, your next oil change, your retirement portfolio and a million other things both huge and unimportant as they randomly turn through your head like the wheels on a slot machine. However, those thoughts are dismissed after a moment because right now is not the time to worry. Right now is time to carefully stalk over the next ridgeline.
Standing on the crest, you pause for a few moments and survey your domain. The tiny creek below is barely audible from your vantage point as it curves around to caress the sandstone cliffs of the small valley as it slides over a bed of clear gravel and bedrock. This isn’t really wilderness, it’s simply second-growth forest covering land too steep to farm in the otherwise corn-infested Midwest. What it lacks in true boondocks charm is made up by a great bedding habitat for the resident deer while they sleep off their corn and soybean feeding binges. It might not be prime elk territory in Colorado, but some of the local whitetail bucks wouldn’t be a pushover for their bigger-country cousins.
After taking a swig from an icy canteen and slowly masticating a piece of salty venison jerky you made from last year’s deer, it’s easy to imagine being a pioneer 150 years ago and finding this land for the first time. You often have similar thoughts when carrying the front-loader. Feeling the solid heft of the hand-built .54 caliber Hawken cradled in your arms, it seems at once an anachronistic throwback yet capable enough to win wars and expand national boundaries.
Everything about these charcoal burners is experiential — the greasy feel of the loading patches, the noisy confrontation of the hammer tormenting the lockwork, the sulfurous smell of exploding double-F blackpowder — for tradition’s sake, only the real stuff is allowed in this gun, thank you very much — and the palpable history behind all of it. Using your thumb, you lovingly rub off a bead of melted snow from the oiled brown octagon barrel and start slipping down toward the creek thinking of Barber’s Adagio.
A Chance Meeting
The cosmic balance sheet suddenly changes as you crest a small rise and look into a small opening along the road. There, three deer are searching intently for a few remaining wisps of green grass beneath the snow. You have been stalking so quietly the deer are unaware of your presence. For a second, your ego momentarily escapes its cage as you revel in a smattering of smugness at your matchless woodcraft, even though a football team wearing tap shoes could have walked through the woods today without making a sound.
Frozen like a camouflaged statue, you watch as the deer feed along for a few moments. The group is an older doe accompanied by two yearlings, probably her offspring, ambling aimlessly about 60 yards away and slowly quartering toward the left. The wind is in your face and the deer should feed even closer if they do not spook.
The deer continue moving, pausing, head up and looking, head down and feeding, repeating ad infinitum. Amazingly, they’re still unaware and unconcerned about your presence. As they disappear behind a small clump of scrubby trees, the muzzleloader comes to your shoulder in practiced but painfully slow motion. So far, so good. You wince involuntarily at the rude click of the hammer locking back to the full-cock notch but the deer don’t hear it in the snow-muffled landscape. Finality is certain, regardless of outcome, within seconds.
The biggest deer appears from behind the tree and, after a slight imperceptible adjustment, the front blade sight steadies just behind her shoulder. The blade is nestled properly in the buckhorn rear sight, you’ve got a good offhand shooting position, the distance isn’t far and you couldn’t ask for a more near-perfect setup. If the percussion cap does its job — not always a guarantee — and the powder does its job and the ersatz modern mountain man makes a proper trigger pull and follow-through, the result is almost guaranteed.
The deer are still mincing about when they suddenly freeze, now aware something is very wrong as their strange supernatural senses kick in. You don’t believe in such stuff but you’ve seen animals do this enough to know there might be something to ESP, remote reception or other such twaddle. In fact, you actually plan on this moment happening whenever stalking close to big-game animals.
The petrified tableau is like one of those faded old deer-hunting prints adorning the walls of all hunting shacks but it’s very real, populated by intelligent warm-blooded creatures engaged in a true matter of life and death. This is the crux of the pursuit, the moment non-hunters don’t understand and devoted hunters can’t explain.
Things Can Change
Suddenly, something strange happens — “Merry Christmas!” is heard as a voice rudely breaks the silence, sounding like a cannon shot in the calm. After a split-second pause, the deer jump, reverse directions in mid-air and bound away, vaporizing into three white flags flashing through the trees until finally disappearing over the hill.
Slowly lowering the gun, you wonder why you spoke up and consider the possibility cold has frozen more than a few brain cells. It confounds you, but only a little.
Trudging back the final half-mile to the truck, a tiny smile hangs on your lips. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he is currently wearing a hunter’s orange cap. Besides, you can always tell the guys you didn’t see anything worth shooting today — and you’d be telling the truth.
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