I had just worked my tree stand up the big red oak about 10 feet or so, and pulled my rifle up on a rope. I was untying it when heard a rustling in the leaves up the hollow a ways, and I knew it was a deer. I hurried, and as the eight-point buck walked past me, I had it ready. But there was no shell in the barrel, so I pulled back the action to inject one into the magazine, and when I did, the bullet jammed tightly just below the barrel. I had to watch him walk by, but I really didn’t care. I wasn’t there to shoot a deer so much as I was to see Christy get one. The buck was a nice one, and he never knew I was there; he just ambled by with his head down, apparently intent upon finding a doe.
Just before daylight I had left my daughter in her tree stand, in a spot where she has killed several deer. My daughter has hunted with me since she was a small girl. Today as a teacher, and much involved in her church, she doesn’t get to hunt as much. Sometimes she only has the opening day of the deer season, but she usually kills a deer and we spend the day taking care of it. Last year it was almost noon before a little broken antlered fork-horn buck came by her stand.
I have mentioned before that she has killed five bucks over the last seven or eight years with one broken antler, and not all from that same stand. When I saw that buck I knew he was bigger than any she had killed, but it didn’t matter. Christy usually shot whatever came by, if she didn’t miss. Using a small light 30-30 lever action, she has become a better shot each year.
The buck was walking toward her, but she was several hundred yards away, and I knew the chances were against her seeing that buck in good shooting range in the heavy woodlands around her.
In twenty minutes, I had given up. I said to myself that if he was going to climb that ridge from the bottoms and pass her stand he would have done so by now. As I was thinking that, I heard the loud report of her rifle, then a pause and a second shot. I got down and walked that way, and sure enough, it was the same buck that passed me. I don’t know if I would have shot the buck, but the jammed shell kept me from it, and I am grateful that it did. I favor the muzzle-loader season as a deer hunter, and I will have that time to hunt the woods alone just because I didn’t shoot that deer, and my daughter was tickled pink to finally get a buck that had two complete antlers.
Deer are strange creatures. As I left Christy to field dress her deer, (something she is just learning to do as old dad wises up and doesn’t do it for her) another buck wandered up and stood looking at her for several minutes, only 15 yards away.
“Dad,” she said later, “If only you could have been here, you could have got that deer.” I thought to myself, what a great day it would be if I had to process two deer. One is enough!
I have an old Hobart meat saw made in the 1920’s and I use it to cut some select ham steaks, and of course I filet out the loin steaks and butterfly them as most hunters do. The rest of the meat I cut off the carcass little by little and grind it up, mixed with pork, to use for spaghetti and chili.
The older you get the less enthused you become about deer hunting. Cleaning and skinning and processing several deer each season gets into a lot of work, and too, I enjoy fishing more every year. As for deer, I have killed a lot of them, and it gets to a point where it becomes old hat, especially if you aren’t interested in trophies. I am so tired of hearing some guy spouting numbers when he talks about the antlers on the buck he has taken. Many of those young hunters haven’t seen the buck deer being raised on farms around the Midwest by the thousands just for the sale of their antlers. None of them have seen antlers on deer in Manitoba. Buck deer in Canadian provinces are fewer in number, but antlers up there, if you start touting inches and numbers, dwarf the best you can find in the Ozarks.
In future years however, the record book antlers will be from farm-raised bucks and will not include any wild deer. You won’t always know that, because there are “hunters” now paying up to 50,000 for a half-tame, deer-farm-raised buck which they will shoot inside an enclosure and tout as a wild deer.
I have had several fish mounted, back when I was younger, and mounted ducks and ruffed grouse and pheasants which I have mounted myself have adorned the walls of my office. I learned to do that when I was young, and enjoy it still. But I have no mounted heads here, because when I was younger, there wasn’t enough money to pay for one, trying to make a living as a freelance writer, and feeling that my three little girls deserved that money more than a taxidermist. I lived in Arkansas for quite a time, and I knew men who would do anything for a big buck mount. There were some who baited them, some who spotlighted them, some who devoted all their spare time to getting big antlered bucks. Some of them who were no better off than I was, had four or five deer heads on the wall, and couldn’t find ways to pay all their monthly bills.
It is a fascination that is difficult for some of us to understand, but certainly, a big antlered buck is a beautiful creature. I have shot a bunch of them in my life… with a camera. I have killed a few with a rifle. But I am less impressed with dead deer now than I have ever been. If you want a huge set of antlers, you can find them by the hundreds and hundreds in a deer breeders catalog I have, sent out annually by the people who are raising and selling deer. Some of them are relatively cheap, at only 10 or 15 thousand dollars each. And maybe that’s why some hunters are always talking about scoring numbers, inches and points and beams… because if you find a big enough set of antlers in the wild, that deer too is worth a lot of money. There are some people who will do about anything for enough money.
That, more than anything else, is behind Missouri’s four-point restrictions in the northern counties, an attempt to create more trophies. Trophies bring in trophy hunters, and they spend a fortune on non-resident tags. But that money angle puts a lot of people in the woods who I don’t care to associate with, and that makes deer hunting ever less attractive to me. I will be in the woods or on the waters year-round, and I know that if I wait out the deer season, most of those “hunters” will be gone ‘til next year.
You can see my daughter and her buck, and the photos of that big ten-pointer I took last week, on my website.. www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net
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