One Single Point

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Minnesota’s firearms deer season opened breezy and cold in the Northern woods. Perched on a shaky metal tripod, I rotated slowly in the deer stand’s chair, scanning for a white tail sneaking out of the woods and through the meadow in front of me. I’m hunched over, doing my best to contain my body heat inside the blaze orange parka and surplus issued “cold weather” gear the Air Force issued me in a previous life. My blood has become thin from four years living on a tropical island in the Central Pacific, and I shiver against the chill.

In years past, the opening minutes of legal shooting hours are marked by a steady stream of single rifle shots echoing through the woods. Dozens of hunters all over the woods ended their hunting seasons with the first deer they see. This year, the morning twilight a half-hour before sunrise, the opening of legal shooting hours, was marked by only sporadic gunfire.

About a half hour after sunrise, a young doe, maybe a year and a half old, stepped into view on the trail entering the meadow right in front of me. She be-bops around in the meadow and I watch her. The doe is less than 50 yards away from me and broadside, the equivalent of a six-inch putt with the rifle in my hands, and I do have a doe tag.

I don’t even raise my rifle, I just watch her. She keeps walking, dipping back into the forest in front of me. The doe doesn’t seem worried at all, casually trotting through the woods, stopping occasionally to nibble on the tree saplings and long grasses poking through the dead leaves on the forest floor. Eventually, I lost the doe as she put more and more trees between us.

For another two hours I sat perched in that tripod, scanning and hoping a nice, mature buck would follow the doe. No luck. Cold, with a running nose and frozen toes, I opt to walk back to the cabin.

The walk back is over a mile, almost a mile and half. The older and wiser members of camp typically drive their four wheelers and pickup trucks close to their stands. Opening morning, I thought it would scare the deer. On the way back, I thought perhaps I was mistaken and all I had done was get sweaty walking out, freeze in the stand, and get sweaty walking back.

I arrived at the cabin after an hour of walking back in thick, winter boots. I could smell breakfast cooking before I could see the cabin, the scent growing ever more tantalizing as I arrived at the cabin. Leaving my blaze orange, boots, and overalls on the cabin porch to air out, I stepped into the warm confines of the cabin.

There were twelve of us, including me, my dad, and both my brothers and the cabin buzzed with energy. In addition to the doe I saw, other hunters saw deer, mostly does and small bucks, but nobody shot one. Nobody was willing to end their season so early for a deer that could grow another year. Proper forest management and all that. We will see how they feel on Sunday evening when most of them are in their last sit of the season.

The hunters in camp recharged with breakfast, followed by naps, and then gathered our gear to set out again for an evening sit. Some of us shuffle stands, trying different spots to ambush deer in the woods. No matter where we sit, the result is the same. A few deer seen, no deer hanging from the ceremonial meat pole at the end of the evening.

Night in the deer cabin is more raucous than the day. Drinks flow, hearty food pile onto plates, and loud, overlapping conversations echo around this sacred log hall. I’m the first member of the third generation of camp owners, my Grandpa and his friends founded the camp over thirty years ago. For thirty years, deer hunters have congregated here together, carrying on an even longer tradition.

We trickle off to our beds after the whiskey runs out and the dishes are washed and put away. Some of the hunters stay up far too late, others go to bed as soon as the whiskey weighs their eyelids down. Before too long, overlapping conversations are replaced by overlapping snores.

As we did on the first day, we woke before dark, pulling on our warm clothes to shield us from the bitter cold that permeated the forest. This morning, I am to head even further from camp, to a stand at the far Eastern edge of the parcel of land we care for. My brother, Elliot, and I allow ourselves to be talked into hitching a ride at least part way.

Elliot and I end up waiting impatiently while one of the younger hunters drags themself out of bed and gears up. By the time we load the truck and start our drive, shooting hours are upon us.

We drop Elliot off on the trail by his stand, then Becker parked his truck in a pull-off further down the trail. Becker and his little brother were headed to stands near the parking spot. I still have another mile to walk. I start hustling down the trail, carrying my issued cold-weather overalls threaded through the straps of my hunting bag slung over my shoulder, my rifle in my hands as I walk as quickly and quietly down the trail as I can.

I make it less than a quarter mile, barely two hundred yards past Becker’s stand when I hear the crunching leaves of something trotting through the woods on my left, to the North. At first, I ignore it. Squirrels have a tendency to sound like deer when they run through the leaves on the forest floor.

The sound continues, and I realize the walking is getting closer. I pause my power walk and slowly scan the forest to my left. Then I see it, the unmistakable silhouette of a deer running through the woods. Running towards me. I raise my rifle to draw a bead on the moving deer, only to find my scope has fogged from being brought out of the warm truck to the cold air.

I look over the top of the scope, my rifle still in my shoulder. The deer keeps trotting right at me. Through the woods, I think it is a doe. As it gets closer I can make out one dorky spike antler sticking out of the deer’s head.

He hits the edge of the woods at the trail and stops. We stare at each other. Time stands still. I reason there is only one reason this young buck would be so dumb as to run right up on me. A doe must have run across this way before I made my way up the trail, and this young buck is determined to mate with her.

When I was stationed at Hanscom AFB, my wife and I lived in Watertown, just outside of Boston. For some reason, our neighborhood was overrun with skunks. Our dogs got sprayed a couple times, which was a real problem. In rural areas, the answer would be to shoot the skunks. Watertown was decidedly not rural, so I started placing live traps baited with peanut butter and old sandwich meat in our back yard.

Now I was faced with another conundrum: once you catch a skunk, what do you do with it? I asked people in my office and the overwhelming response was to take the skunk to the woods and let him go. A new problem set arose: once I release the skunk, how do I keep him from spraying me? How do I ensure someone else doesn’t get sprayed? I knew the answer to those questions, I simply asked it to the members of my office for them to understand what happened next.

Each trapped skunk was kept in the trap, thrown in the bed of my truck, and driven to a public hunting area outside the city. The trap was a simple PVC tube, with two gated ends. One gate was triggered by a lever inside the trap, the other was simply secured in place with a pair of latches. Once trapped, the skunk would be facing the sealed end, unable to turn around or, more importantly, raise its tail to spray. I would set the trap, tail side down, on the forest floor, unlatch the sealed gate, and step back.

Then, I poked the trap with the barrel of my shotgun. The trap would fall, and the skunk would scurry out. I made a deal with the members of my office. If the skunks ran straight into the woods, I would let them live. If they turned towards me or looked like they were going to spray me, they died.

No skunks ever took the deal. All of them turned, all of them died.

I made a similar deal with this young, single-point buck. If he stopped chasing the doe, if he turned and headed back North, I would let him live. We stared at each other, my heart pounding in my ears while I looked over my rifle scope, watching him.

Six feet away from me, at the edge of the forest, the buck stepped South onto the trail.