Category Archives: deer hunting

The Doe of Contempt and Pity

December 12, 2013 Shawn West Leave a comment

As we settle into the holiday madness, which is immediately followed by a prolonged lull in my hunting seasons (with really no action, outside of occasional coyote hunting, until spring turkey season), I like to take the time to reflect back on the deer season which recently ended.

Like most every deer season I’ve partaken in, I didn’t shoot a deer. Which is perfectly fine, given that some hunters go their whole lives without shooting a deer. I was long ago given to the opinion that for the most part hunting was going to be about a whole lot of sitting time and not a lot of action. This is particularly true of deer hunting. I’ve heard lots of stories and read loads of articles about “aggressive tactics” for most every type of game, and have to agree that from one time or another I’ve had them work. But never so as I chased deer.

There are what I would call “competitive deer hunters” in my life. Men I know that take a personal hit when the hanging pole is empty on a Thursday, and guys that get downright desperate if there’s nothing dead by Saturday at lunch. Some of these are men that can and regularly do walk up on deer. Men that are stealthy and quiet and downright spooky in the woods. That is never going to be me. I hunt with men who have a surplus of hours to devote to trail cameras, scouting, legal baiting, and tree-stand hanging. That is also never going to be me. These men are emotionally invested in deer hunting in a way that I currently am not, and while it is hard for me to feel bad for them, I do feel a twinge of remorse for their situation. Because for me, in a relatively quiet fashion I’ll get into a spot where there are known to be the occasional deer. I’ll get warm and comfortable, and then I’ll sit, wait, and watch. I’ll throw out a grunt on a tube call or turn over a doe bleat now and then, but in reality I deer hunt the way the vast majority of fishermen fish. I’m just out there. Despite the sympathy of those that hunt with me, I’m not certain that they don’t think something is gravely wrong with me.

I never really gave it much personal weight until this past year when I started hearing the same phrase over and over, it became the obligatory suffix to any conversations about seeing and shooting deer, and my nerves became taut and let’s face it, a little raw, with each repetition.

As a camp, we had a good year shooting deer this season. In the first week the camp on the North Bruce Peninsula scored on a pair of bucks, which is about average for us in that area in that time of year, while in the second week three more bucks became venison. In that same second week, our camp was seeing antlerless deer with regularity. My brother had seen six of them by mid-week, which is rare for where we hunt deer. Some seasons, we’ll consider ourselves lucky to see one deer period for the whole two week hunt. The land of surplus deer this is not.

But like I said, maybe it was the timing of the season this year, or perhaps 2013 was a year of propitious conditions for deer survival, or maybe we were having just plain old good luck; whatever the reason, deer were bounding about our hunting area near Parry Sound. I arrived on Wednesday afternoon looking to get a solid three days of hunting in, and the weather outlook was grand. So there it was good weather, good hunting, and a willing population of deer. One straggler made it camp Thursday and he was already tagged out on two bucks from the previous week; while in camp he mostly just did dishes and during the daylight hours he sat in a familiar treestand holding out for a trophy buck. It was looking to be a slam dunk of a week.

But there was to be no good karma for me. Our group was being begrudgingly selective, recognizing the success that they’d had and many does that normally would find their way into our bellies were being left to walk on and fend for themselves in the coming winter. That was until I got there, presumably.

“Well. Shawn can shoot a doe, but all you other guys have shot lots of deer in your lives, so don’t go shooting anything that doesn’t have horns…” I heard this often for the duration of my hunting in the second week.

So it had come to this. My paltry three kills had put me at the kiddy table in this particular camp. A camp filled with what I thought were friends and loved ones; but A-HA! their true colours had come out.

It all started off so promising. Success as a fifteen-year-old in only my second hour on stand as a deer hunter…I must have looked like a shooting star of the deer hunting future. But here I was almost twenty seasons later and that promise had come to naught. A deer hunting hiatus caused by a hectic university schedule, punctuated by brief success with a button buck and a small basket racked seven pointer, and then the subsequent devotion of more holiday time to turkeys and waterfowl then to the hallowed family tradition of deer hunting had made me what I was that week.

I was the pity case.

As the hours and days went on and I invariably failed to take down the doe that was reserved for me, I sensed tension beginning to grow in the 600 square feet of space that we eight grown men were occupying. Questions were raised, casually at first, about what the repercussions would be if someone else other than I was to go ahead and shoot an antlerless deer. These often escalated into full blown arguments about the merits of selective deer hunting in general. My brother said flatly that next year he would not be passing up does early in the week, as since my arrival he had not seen even a flicker of a deer, this despite him having smacked a fat spike buck at the very start of the week.

Then on the Friday morning it very nearly happened. As I sat on a high ridge overlooking a gully that had seen many a successful deer hunt take place I crunched leisurely on an apple. Between bites, I thought I heard something thumping through the leaves behind me and to my left. I turned and saw the flash of brown and white through coniferous undergrowth. Holding the apple in my teeth I wheeled slowly to my left and shouldered my .308. Bits and pieces of a deer trotted slowly but purposefully through the brush, and all the while I squinted through the scope looking for a spot to slide an ethical and lethal shot into the deer’s boiler room. For what seemed like an eternity I looked, with my finger braced on the safety and with apple juice leaking slowly down from the corners of my mouth and dripping down my chin. Realizing that things were getting bleak I made a desperate bleat with my voice (a sound which if made while holding a Granny Smith apple in your teeth sounds particularly un-deer-like) to stop the beast. The hope was that I could get a safe window to drive home the 160-grain projectile. The animal stopped and looked directly at me. I could see that it was a doe, but that was all as only the deer’s nose, eyes, and ears were clearly visible. Then as quickly as she stopped, she melted silently and wistfully back into the woods. I never saw her again.

All was not lost of course. After all this was the rut, and if the doe had come along, there was a chance that a buck may poke along behind her soon enough. For two straight hours I sat stock-still and silent, staring at the departed animal’s back trail, all the while hoping for a suitor to come follow her path through the woods. Nothing came of it.

Frustrated and ready to eat lunch I turned back to my right and noticed two ruffed grouse drinking from a barely trickling stream some 70 yards below me. With a sharp report, one of the two grouse lay dead. I went down and retrieved my tasty trophy, secretly proud of an instantly lethal neck shot on so small a target from such a distance. By the time I got back to my deer stand, the other grouse had returned, perhaps looking for its departed companion. Feeling confident I fired again, only this time to see the bird powering away for the next county. I decided to call it a break even day for grouse, even if the whitetail deer had defeated me as they typically do. Instantly, I got a text message from camp (cellular service is surprisingly good in spots up there).

The hunters were all back at camp and with bated breath they awaited my report on whether I had connected on a deer with my two shots. I let them stew for a moment, letting them imagine my triumph as I hauled a 12-point monster buck from the depths of the gully, then I sent a picture of the prize-winning bull ruffed grouse back, an act that was met with indifference from my cohorts. Later that same evening, my cousin shot a buck from the exact same stand I had occupied that morning. The next day, my other cousin had a doe meander past him at twenty-five steps while he sat on bench overlooking a meadow, a bench that I had occupied a mere 24 hours before. Exiting my sit on Saturday night I was pleased to find a deer track inside one of the boot tracks I made while I was walking into the stand four hours earlier.

These are the kinds of things that happen to me when I hunt deer. I really do wish I was making all this up, but these tragic truths weave their way through the tapestry of my deer hunting career. Would I have shot that solitary doe? Absolutely. I’m a meat hunter first, and there is little I like more than fresh venison. But things conspired against me…had I not been munching that apple, I may have heard her earlier. If I had set up facing that way, I may have seen her before I heard her. There’s no way to plan and mandate all the ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ of deer hunting, and that’s the magic of it.

But I’m not discouraged. Really I’m not, because for those unplanned hours and hours on stand I’m at peace. There isn’t a thought in my mind other than the focus of deer hunting. No bills, no politics, no responsibilities. Just me, my rifle, an apple to eat, a tree to lean against, and the hope that a deer stumbles upon my happy little situation.

That’s why I do it, and that’s why I’ll keep doing it. Failure be damned.

deer hunting, hunting

The Grumpy, Foul-Smelling Deer Hunter

November 1, 2013 Shawn West Leave a comment

Every year I create a checklist of the gear, clothing and goodies I need to pack for deer season, and just today I put the finishing touches on the 2013 edition of that document. It is a seasonal task that I look forward to far more than I do to other fall tasks such as raking leaves, preparing the yard for winter, and putting ice-scrapers in my car.

You see, the list means deer season is imminent. All the other jobs just mean winter is coming.

This year I left something off the list that has been on it for several previous years, and it is part experiment, part reactionary protest on my behalf that I’m leaving it off. This year, I have sworn not to use any scents or scent control products at all.

And here’s why.

I am a historian by training, and even if I wasn’t I am a firm believer in the empirical value of history. That is to say that history is as good as an indicator of future results than anything else I have observed. And history tells me that scent control products don’t have a significant effect on success. All the scent control peddlers will of course tell you otherwise, but another trait of mine is a healthy skepticism of any institution or individual looking to ‘sell’ you something. After all, they have a vested interest in having you purchase their product and may take to wild assumptions and promises to sway you to their financial benefit.

But enough of the proselytizing on my part; here’s the (strictly personal and empirical) evidence as I can present it.

Every son probably has some degree of hero worship for his father, but I am not exaggerating to state that my dear old dad has been a veritable deer assassin in his life. Scores of deer have met their demise at the end of his rifle, and a good many of them sported nice headgear. Several of those could be described as “mature” bucks…you know, the kind that, according to our friends in the scent control industry, are so hard to kill that some sort of “nasal confusion device “ or other olfactory trick would be required to give us mere mortals an upper hand. That Dad kills deer is a fact (and one that is not without jealous derision in our deer camp), and here is another fact. My Dad utilizes exactly zero scent control outside of hunting the wind correctly, and even that is sometimes impossible given the wind’s fickle nature. Likewise I can honestly say that I haven’t seen him use a deer scent lure in the nearly two decades that I’ve been deer hunting with him. Dad’s coat regularly hangs next to the camp cookstove, or from a beam adjacent to the dining room table. It isn‘t just my Dad either. Both of my uncles are accomplished deer slayers, and my one uncle shot a 150-160 class buck wearing a coat that regularly hung to dry above the same cookstove where we cooked bacon daily. Not an ounce of scent dispersion technology in that jacket, and yet here we are. I’ve hunted with men who smelled like distilleries when they woke up, and they shot deer. I know others who smoke cigars on stand, and they shoot deer as well. Ditto the guys with wretched coffee breath and the men who sit in trucks that smell like wet dogs and cheese on the drive to their deer stand.

My only logical conclusion to these observed facts is that deer like (or at the very least aren’t offended by) the smell of people-food, retrievers, whiskey, and fine Cuban cigars. All of which seems perfectly natural in my opinion.

Another interesting fact that I uncovered in researching this post was that for decades (maybe even centuries!) deer hunters managed to kill deer without dousing themselves in synthetic attractants, carbon-based odour elimination sprays, or impregnating their undergarments with charcoal. Shocking, I know, but not nearly as shocking as the willful ignorance of this fact by scads of deer hunters globally.

I’m put in mind of a scene that would be patently absurd if what was a joke, but is all the more ridiculous in that the participants were so gravely serious. Just recently I watched an interesting hunting episode on television (I won’t name the show, since I find their production model and hunting practices generally offensive) where a group of ‘hunters’ to use the term loosely essentially drove around an enormous ranch in a truck, where upon sighting a suitable buck would shoot said deer from the modified platform on top of the vehicle, typically from distances of 500 yards or more. Every one of these mighty hunters wore their scent-control impregnated jackets proudly, and a prominent company that specializes in those garments was a key sponsor to the show. And having related that, I’d now like to pose the following questions.

First, how in the world could a deer smell a hunter at such extended distances? How bad do you have to smell that a deer can smell you from nearly half-a-mile away?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, did the scent-control technology also mask the exhaust smell from the noticeably idling truck that the hunters were sitting upon?

Now let me admit openly that I’m not a very good deer hunter. I have difficulty sitting still, I don’t stalk through the woods in a particularly quiet manner, and I’m not that proficient with a rifle (I prefer the embedded forgiveness that shotgunning waterfowl affords me), so I can assure you that this is not some means for me to make myself feel better about my own failings; I claim full ownership of those. But even a deer hunter as inept as I am somehow has managed to kill a handful of deer, all without the aid of any scent control sprays or products.

Now I’m not lambasting scent control at large. I’m sure for the close quarters of bow hunting that a lack of scent control becomes a serious impediment to success. I have no doubts at all about the power of a deer’s sense of smell either, and I have no doubts that lures and attractants can be effective tools. What I’m objecting to in this little tirade is the lockstep and unquestioned belief that a soaking in sprays, additives, and specially formulated laundry detergents is a prerequisite to successful deer hunting (and I’m not even mentioning those special sort of deer hunters that keep their equipment in sanitized bags full of moss, dirt, and doe urine or mock scrape juice…those are pathological signs of mental illness if you ask me).

I’m also not some crank throwback advocating the removal of science and technology from deer hunting; I am just fine with reasonably powered optics, waterproof materials in my coats and boots, and precision shooting rifles. Go ahead and use your scent control, but have no illusions about what is doing either. I’ve worn it in the past and had deer wind me, and I’ve shot the few deer I have without having lathered any of it on my person.

So this year, I’m going with my own musky, natural odour in the woods. With maybe just a hint of bacon grease splashed on as well, for luck. We’ll see how it turns out.

deer hunting, goose hunting, waterfowl hunting

Perfect Moments of the Not-Too-Distant Past

October 15, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

As I write this, I’m sitting at Pearson Airport waiting for a flight to Montreal, but I’m really back at Saturday afternoon on the banks of a drizzly beaver pond, cold water dripping off the brim of my hat, straining my eyes for the slightest movement in the faded gray skies that frame the rust, gold, and brown leaves of the treetops. Our group of six intrepid waterfowlers had kicked a few dozen mallards out of this hole on our way in, and we’d been waiting in vain for the last few hours for them to return as they usually do. A misty drizzle became steady rain, and then became a misty drizzle again. Once or twice it outright poured, and all the while a breeze hung around, becoming just strong enough to make the wings on the flapping decoy spin and to ensure that the parts of you that weren’t waterproof got clammy and cold.

Yep, it was a duck hunter’s kind of afternoon. The ducks just hadn’t read the script.

At some point, almost through spontaneous regeneration, six hunters became eight and with nothing flying we just decided to stand around and trade stories and jokes. Some of the boys had just got back from moose hunting, and there was ample entertainment from them. Someone recited the clips from an offensive sound file they had received in an email, and we all laughed. At one point something very funny was said, because I found myself in fits of hilarity while wiping away tears of laughter. It is probably better that I can’t recall exactly what it was that made me break down that way, as I’ve found that airport boarding areas aren’t the wisest of places to begin giggling like a maniac.

Some ducks came in and a few fell, with Tack’s yellow Lab Levi making quick work of the retrieves. Then we went back to standing around and telling stories and lies. We milled around and carried on quiet personal conversations that were punctuated with group laughs. We talked about hunting, baseball, women, new guns, new calls, and decoys. We threw sticks in the pond and then did personal play-by-play as Levi negotiated the decoy lines and the submerged twigs as he fetched them.

Eventually the wind and rain frustrated us enough that we went and wrangled the dekes; with our guns slung over shoulders we headed for the trucks.

Here on Monday, they just called for priority boarding, but my mind barely acknowledges the announcement. I’m in my memories from Sunday, when we went into a puddled grain field with high stubble and good cover in the ditch. Misty fog wisped around, and once again prospects were good for some gunning. Hunkered down in a line we scratched down a drake mallard that came screaming into one of the de facto ponds that were slowly but surely taking over the field; it almost didn’t matter that we missed the other six ducks that were with him. To be fair we didn’t cover ourselves with glory on that performance, but we compensated on a low flying trio of geese that swung wide in the field before winging towards the gap we had left between the two dozen shell decoys. Some clucks, moans, growls, and shotgun reports later, and none of them made their way out of the field. A few more ducks worked the spread, but all high and wary. Pleading comeback calls and raspy chuckles failed to persuade them and after countless circles they lit down in a deep, fast-moving ditch one field over. Our man Hastings went on safari to jump them up, and as his reward he crumpled a brace of them for his game bag. As flocks of dozens and dozens of ducks traded on an increasingly strong wind, the fog blew off but a rain was fixing to blow in. With Hastings stalking the ditches a field over, and with Tack answering nature’s call well up the ditch, it was up to Rory, Dane, Lucas, and myself to work the calls on six big geese that broke away and once again made our fakes. Just moments before we had failed to lure in a group of forty or fifty geese that showed interest, but just weren’t convinced. This group though, were coming in on a wire. Low finishing work on my Tim Grounds Super Mag combined with good calling from Dane on his GK Giant Killer and from Rory on his Doug Schuyler Voodoo Medicine Man sealed the deal and as the birds put their feet down at fifteen yards, we all began sawing away on our pump guns. As two geese winged away we collected the ones that stayed behind and went back to the cover of the ditch. As the rain began to fall we decided to call it a morning and after a picture or two we packed the decoys, weaponry, and our birds back to the trucks. One large breakfast and one superb nap later, We cleaned up the farmhouse, packed up, and began the trek back home. Hours of hunting, laughing, and being out in the wilderness all seemed to race by as we re-told the tales from the hunts, the details compressed in my mind by the fleeting enjoyment of it all.

And now, less than twenty-four hours later I find myself about to put away the laptop and wing my way east into la belle province. The exigencies of career and parenthood will take precedent for a while longer.

But with any luck, it won’t be long until I’m back on a shore or aside a field, hands braced on my 870 Express, waiting for the birds to drop their flaps and put the landing gear down. Like a golfer’s hole-in-one, those perfect moments of the past keep me chasing the next ones.

deer hunting, goose hunting, hunting, turkey hunting clothes

Shotgun Memories

August 28, 2012 Shawn West Leave a comment

It is always in the home stretch before a hunting season that I get all nostalgic about hunts gone by, and this year is no exception. Some time ago, my father wrote a piece for the CK Times website (the link is here) about the things he had been privileged to see throughout a lifetime spent in the wilderness. His lifetime is far from over (I hope) and he’s still making memories every year as he heads into his early sixties. I’ve got a significantly longer time to go to even up with the years Dad has been hunting, and given the different paths our lives and careers are tracking on (Dad grew up in a rural village and spent 30 years working for Ducks Unlimited, where his work responsibilities often took him into the wild spaces he loves…I grew up in a mid-sized city and my job often takes me to airports, office high-rises, and business-level suburban hotels) it is unlikely that I’ll ever accumulate the literal decades of time that Dad has been in the woods, fields, and marshes. Since I won’t equal his time afield, I thought I’d at least steal his premise for a post and talk about some of my fondest memories experienced while I was lugging a firearm through the wilderness.

First off, it may just be easier to tell you the fondest memories I have that don’t involve a hunting experience: my wedding, the birth of my two sons, and winning a couple of Regional soccer championships as a teenager. Aside from those, pretty much everything else I hold dear to my mind involves guns, mud, blood, friends, fur, feathers, and the outdoors. But here are some specifics to get you primed for the opening of whatever hunting season is coming up near you.

The very first morning I ever hunted turkeys, the dawn broke exactly how I figured it wouldn’t. My idealistic mind pictured an early morning sunrise, with the glossy feathers of a hefty tom shimmering into view, and the big gobbler stopping in front of me and getting a headful of lead #6s. After all, that’s how every turkey hunting video I had ever seen had run. My experience was significantly different. A low grey sky gave way to misty drizzle, and inside of ten minutes I was soaked in all the places that a hunter hates to be soaked. The seat of my pants was dampened, but my hopes were not. Then I heard it for the first time in the wild, the gobbling of tom turkeys. They were the width of two fields away, and I never got a visual on them but they hammered away in ‘row-row-row your boat’ fashion for fully forty minutes. I was hooked for life after that, and if you haven’t heard a couple of gobblers sound off like that through the fog and the mist, well, you haven’t lived. That morning I even managed to call a tom in, but he obviously hadn’t seen all the hunting videos that I had…he stayed in the woods behind me and never came anywhere near where I could see him, let alone shoot. I had other encounters in the other years since, but that first drizzly, misty, foggy, damp morning sitting on a vest-cushion with wet underpants as I listened to the gobblers do their thing was all I needed to know that I was doing something good with my time.

I had never seen geese side-slipping until my second or third season of hunting them, but the first time I saw it I think I actually shouted some term of wonderment out loud. We were hunting a field in the days before layout blinds, and we were all safely stationed in the fenceline crouched under low shrubs or sitting in tall fringe grasses. A gaggle (to use the term precisely) of geese were winging towards us, but I sensed from instinct that their flight path was taking them beyond us. They were high and they were moving fast. The one-by-one in a pattern that seemed both planned and utterly chaotic the birds began flipping over onto their backs, dropping speed and altitude with every barrel-roll. My young eyes had never seen anything like it and I was in awe of this controlled plummeting. As fast as they dropped in the birds set their wings and the contrast between their rapid descent and the near hovering that they did as they committed to the decoys had me completely bewildered. Someone shouted to take them, and I managed to drop a single goose from the middle of the flock. This was coincidentally one of the last, if not the final, time that lead shot for waterfowl was legal in Ontario so that hunt has some historical significance for me too.

Staying with goose hunting, the first time I had ever heard really, truly proficient calling for any type of game was on a goose hunt. We had set up in a deep ditch in the Ferndale Flats on the Bruce Peninsula (the ditch being the only decent cover) and had put out a dozen or so decoys. After some time, a line of geese on the southern horizon became visible, and they were making for our setup, or at least that is what I thought. At about 200 yards or so, there arose such a sound from the next field east of us that I was sure there was another flock coming. The most true to life clucks, moans, and bawls I’d ever heard drew the attention of the flock from the south and they swung wide of us before setting their wings and dropping to the field on our east side. Six shotgun reports and a few falling birds later it became immediately apparent that a very accomplished goose caller was working the ‘field next door’. So it went for a couple flocks more, and though we managed to score a few birds as they fled the gunfire east of us, it wasn’t the hunt for us that it could have been. But it didn’t matter, at least to me, because my eyes had been opened to a whole new dimension of goose hunting. After the hunt we waited on the side road for the other group, and as it turned out we had been hunting next to a championship-calibre caller: Craig McDonald. He was hunting in the area with his Dad (they had a cottage in the vicinity) and while I was expecting an arrogant ‘professional’ (don’t ask me why) he was exactly the opposite; he was nice and humble and offered a few tips, and he had the nicest truck I’d ever seen to that time. The next week I went out and got my first short-reed goose call, an instructional CD, and started to practice in ways that drove my girlfriend (now my wife) insane. I’ve done a contest or two myself, but I’m still not even close the level of calling that we were treated to that day. Nonetheless, I can pinpoint that hunt as the start of my obsession with game calls. Now my wife knows who she can blame for the soundtrack to her life.

I may have told this story before, but with the early goose season looming, it bears repeating again. On an early goose hunt in 2006 we spent the better part of a very hot September morning rolling hay bales into a makeshift set of blinds on a field that geese had been loafing in during the early afternoons and returning to in the evenings. As with all things in goose hunting, as soon as the bales were setup, we went to get some lunch. Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as we drove off, forty or fifty geese dropped into the field to hang out. We devised a plan of attack and secretly began a broad circle that led to us stalking from hay bale to hay bale until we were within sixty yards of the birds. On a prearranged signal our friend Tack began herding the birds our way. When he was just under a hundred yards from the birds they got up and began to head out. They came our way broadside and a mere twenty feet off the ground. Inside of fifteen yards Rory, my cousin Dane, and I opened up the shotguns; we had to wait that long just for them to provide safe shooting options. I crumpled a bird with my first shot and then missed in the most embarrassing of fashions on my second and third rounds. Dane and Rory both emptied their guns, and Rory managed to re-load and pop two more rounds as the birds put altitude and distance between us and them. Angry at myself such atrocious shooting, I trudged out to pick up my goose. I was dumbfounded to find that I was the only one picking up a bird: my cousin-Dane has a well-deserved reputation for being lethal with a shotgun, and Rory is no slouch either. Yet here we were: eleven rounds spent and one goose to show for it. Dane muttered various curses, exclaiming that he could see the tongues and eyes of the birds, among other things. Rory blamed the soreness in his cheeks from wisdom tooth extractions performed just days before. For once (and probably the only time since) I was able to look smug and bask in some accolades. And the laughs…man did we laugh about that. A while later, just as we were about to call it a night, a big flock came rocking and swinging into our decoys and we all redeemed ourselves, scratching down another eight birds. That day at the hay bales was certainly one for the memories.

One of my fondest deer hunting memories isn’t even of hunting deer. After a long cold day in an early November downpour, we had a sumptuous steak dinner. We ate whipped potatoes, Brussels sprouts slathered in butter, sautéed mushrooms, and perfectly seared T-bones that were big enough to force all the other fixings off your plate. Long after many others had turned in my cousin Luke, my brother Donavon, myself and the camp’s oldest member Frank Sweet turned off the generator, lit up Frank’s old Coleman lantern, and sipped cold beer while we swapped stories. We talked about women, and hunting, and government, and literature, and told entertaining jokes and stories from our lives (although Frank had a significantly larger well of jokes and stories to draw from) while the rain fell on the roof and tinkled against the chimney pipes. I don’t even recall what time we all eventually turned into our bunks that night (and the rain persisted to keep us all in camp the next morning) but I do recall thinking that there was no greater relaxation than just sitting around with the guys telling benign lies to each other, remembering girls we’d loved, and figuring out all of the world’s problems in one go through. I was secretly sorry for those who never had (or never would) experience moments like that, and it was bittersweet to know that it was one of those perfect moments that would pass, and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to re-create it. Frank would be taken away by heart failure the next spring and that just reinforced the fleeting beauty of the times spent in the hunting tradition. The loss of a friend like Frank, while sad, also galvanizes me every year to go out and make as many memories count as I can. And in less than two weeks my friends, my family, and countless others will re-embark on that journey.

Enjoy your journeys as much as I’ll enjoy mine and maybe I’ll see you in the fields.