After arriving home from my last hunting trip, I spent a few days relaxing at home, meeting up with old friends and getting caught up on my reading. On Friday morning, my dad and I packed up our hunting equipment and dutifully headed back into the woods. After an hour-long drive, we arrived at the hunting camp that my dad’s late father had shared with several of his friends and their families. Since his passing two years ago, Grandpa’s share has passed on to my grandmother, and of course she lets us utilize the camp as well.
The camp is owned by a “company” of ten people, including my grandmother. It consists of a large track of land in the woods in Northern Minnesota, and a substantial, muddy lake. Being imaginative people, the lake was called “Mud Lake,” and the camp became known as “Mud Lake Camp”. My first visit to Mud Lake Camp was when I was a small boy, and we were out Grouse hunting with my parent’s Cocker Spaniel, Chloe. Back then, there had been a small, rickety shack for us to take shelter in. Mud Lake Camp has gone under significant changes since then, and the best of which is the construction of a log cabin hunting lodge.
With heated, running water, electricity, and sleeping for nearly a dozen people, this lodge was slightly bigger than the last hunting camp I went to. When Dad and I arrived, we were greeted by my late Grandfather’s good friend, Carsten, and his son, Eric. Also in the camp were a Methodist Pastor from a nearby church, his friend, and the Lodge’s neighbor, who was busily hunched over a map of the area with Carsten. Dad and I swiftly unloaded our equipment, put on our blaze orange, and headed out to the woods. Of course, we ended up not seeing anything but squirrels and Trumpeter Swans that afternoon, and we headed back in to the lodge for some grilled hamburgers and a few vicious games of cards before heading to bed.
The next morning, we arose relatively early (5:30 AM), and headed back out to our stands after a quick breakfast snack. Unfortunately, my new .30-’06 had lost a frame mounting screw, so I was using my youngest brother’s .270 instead. This is the same rifle I had used to harvest my first deer, so I was very comfortable with the last-minute switch.
A side note, when I called Ruger to get a replacement frame screw, they sent me one, free of charge, with no questions asked. Since it was my first time calling for service, they took down some information, and within a few minutes I had an email letting me know the part had shipped. So there is a bit of a shameless plug for a company I have already written about, twice (no they do not pay me, although I am very open to that concept).
Back to the heart of the story. I trudged out in the pre-dawn darkness and arrived in my grandfather’s old stand at about 6:20 AM. Legal shooting hours started around 6:45 AM, with sunrise near 7:15 AM. I clambered into the deer stand and settled down to wait. At about 6:30 AM, when the light is just starting to cut its way through the forest gloom, casting everything in a grey hue, I heard something running on the ridge about 200 yards to the west of my stand. When I looked, all I could see was the outline of a deer running along the ridge, about three-quarters of the way up. It was not yet light enough to tell if it was a buck or a doe, so I just watched it run off into the forest.
As I sat there, alternating between pondering the great mysteries of the world (but what if there was a third shooter during the President Kennedy assassination? One to whack the real shooter and make sure Lee Harvey Oswald got framed?) and dozing off, the light slowly started creeping up from the East (as it tends to do). Around 7:00 AM, I heard, and then saw a deer approaching from the Northwest, trotting up and down the rises and draws that are scattered throughout the woods.
While I had a doe permit, it was only valid in a certain area, and we had hunted in that area the weekend before. As the deer approached my stand, it was yet too dark to tell if it was a buck or a doe. As I watched the deer settle down a short distance from my stand, I could not see antlers, so I assumed it was a doe. I watched the deer for a while until it walked behind a small hill, shielding it from my view. With my rifle up and resting on the edge of my deer stand, I watched off to the North West (where the deer had come from) in the hopes of seeing a buck chasing this doe.
Nothing came, and I could still hear the deer rustling around behind the hill. As the sun came up, the deer took a step out from behind the hill, walking up another rise away from me. I glanced at the deer, as I still thought it was a doe. As I started looking back to the North West, I did a double take, where those antlers? I slowly brought my rifle and scope to bear on the deer’s head as it crested the rise and started following it to the South. Sure enough, there were little spikes sticking out of its forehead.
Leaning over the edge of the stand, I looked through the scope of my rifle at the deer, with the cross hairs held just over the edge of his neck. I was unsure if I wanted to shoot. It was a big decision for me, do I let this deer walk away and hope for a larger one to come by, or do I shoot now, thank this deer for his life, and fill my freezer? At that point, it had been quite some time since I had last shot a deer (accounts differ but it is somewhere between 6 and 8 years). As the deer walked South, he was headed towards a thick patch of brush. There would be no chance at a shot after that. I made my decision to fire.
The deer walked slowly south as I centered my cross hairs right behind his shoulder, where the maximum chance of fatal damage occurs, and started to steady my breathing. As I flicked off the rifle’s safety, the distinct click brought the deer to a halt. The buck had stopped with his head behind one tree, and his shoulder, the area I had been aiming for, behind another, with his neck in between. Worried that he may bolt after being alerted, or possibly having him sniff me out from all the different scents in the woods, I settled my cross hairs on the neck, where the spine meets the shoulder and the trachea, carotid arteries, spine, and esophagus reside. Praying my rifle had been sighted in properly, I squeezed the trigger.
There is a split moment, the briefest of instants, when you pull the trigger where you enter the surreal. Everything unfolds in slow motion. The muzzle flash is distinct and bright, separate from the barrel rise, which is separate from the sound of the gunshot. You know the gunshot was loud, but your brain does not register it. Instead, you hear the muffled thump of the bullet impact, followed by the forlorn thrashing of your quarry as their last few seconds run out. The barrel returns to its original place, and you watch as your prey falls silent. It is a surreal, religious experience, primal in nature and brutal in execution, yet if done correctly, results in near instantaneous death.
After the shot, I sat there for a few seconds watching the buck where it lay, preparing for a second shot I knew I would not need. I texted my dad and let him know I had shot a deer, and that I was going to go get it and start the cleaning process. I took a line toward the two trees that had hid the buck, and started walking up the rise to them.
When I got there, I panicked a bit, as the buck was not where I thought he would be. I freaked out for a second, had my shot not been as good as I had thought? Did the buck get up and run away after I got out of my stand? Frantically, I started searching for a blood trail by walking in expanding semi-circles away from the direction I had come. As I searched, I discovered that there was a slight dip, followed by another rise, and on that next rise lay my deer.
Relieved, I ran up to the deer, said a quick prayer of thanks, discovered that he had eight little tines on his antlers, and set to dragging him toward the trail. Unfortunately, in my hurry to drag the deer to the trail, I had failed to account for the curvature of the trail, and ended up dragging the deer nearly 200 yards more than I needed to before I met my dad on the trail. With Dad supervising, I gutted out the deer, and we walked back to the lodge to get my truck to haul the deer back to the meat pole.
Dad and I strung the deer up on the meat pole, and headed back inside the lodge to relax and wait for our hunting companions who were still sitting in their stands. They all trickled back in eventually, and none of them had seen any deer for themselves. A few of our party left after the morning hunt, leaving me, my dad, Carsten, and Eric to have breakfast and finish off some of the bigger Mud Lake Lodge chores, like hauling in duck blinds and duck boats off the lake. Or, in my case, the chore of sitting around listening to the neighbor talk and awkwardly laugh at everything while I waited for the other three to get back in.
After the cleaning tasks were completed, Dad and I set out to fill our last deer tag. Carsten and Eric decided to forgo the evening hunt, opting instead to head back to Carsten’s home to watch the University of Minnesota Gophers Football game. Neither Dad nor I saw any deer, but we did see several turkeys, four of which strutted around my stand for nearly and hour while I frantically tried to look up the Minnesota Turkey Hunting regulations on my phone. It turned out their season had ended two weeks prior, and I was forced to watch them strut around like they owned the place, rather than relegating one of the larger toms to the Thanksgiving table.
After a quiet evening hunt, Dad and I made it back to the lodge for some venison brats, salad, and some time to relax. We had some visitors that evening in the form of some old friends from when my family lived in Fargo, but other than that, the night was rather quiet. We headed to bed after some preliminary packing, and awoke early for one last hunt on Sunday morning.
The hunt Sunday morning was relatively uneventful in terms of deer, although I did see four Ruffed Grouse from my stand, one large owl, and what appeared to be a one-on-one, no-holds barred Squirrel fight club right next to my stand. On the way back in, I saw six more Grouse, so when it came time to gather all the stools and pads from the deer stands scattered throughout the woods, my dad brought along a shotgun he borrowed from the lodge. This proved to be fruitful as we shortly had one “Bonus Grouse” alongside the deer I had harvested the day before.
Dad and I finished packing and cleaning up the lodge, loaded the deer in the bed of my truck, and took off towards home just before noon on Sunday. It had been an incredible week of hunting, enhanced by the good fortune of bagging a deer after several years. The most important, and best part, however, was the incredible time I was able to spend with my family while participating in an ages old tradition that I have always loved.
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