Category Archives: hunting

hunting, them crooked gobblers, turkey and turkey hunting

Them Crooked Gobblers, Part One: There’s Always a First Time

December 24, 2014 Shawn West Leave a comment

Although Get Out and Go Hunting has taken a brief hiatus (forced by the fact that I have a cripplingly busy winter schedule with my real job; this blogging doesn’t exactly pay the bills), fear not for I have returned just in time for Christmas.

Consider this my gift to you. A last-minute, thoughtless gift that you probably won’t really use and one you will have a hard time re-gifting to others. I’m sorry in advance.

My pining for turkey hunting has come early this year, and I cannot precisely pinpoint the source. Usually I don’t get all antsy to be sitting under a tree on a verdant spring morning until sometime in the frozen depths of February, but this year, I’ve just been sitting around in the evenings, and the mornings, and the lunch hours just reminiscing about gobblers. So to slake my anxiety I’m going to recall stories about my five favourite gobblers.

Today, I will share the tall tale of the first gobbler I ever shot solo.

I came late to turkey hunting. Ontario had been offering a spring gobbler season in one form or another for almost twenty years before I started in 2007. My Dad had been after them for many years by that time and had a nice few gobbler tailfans already nailed to the drywall in the garage, with the year and date of their harvest scrawled beneath each one. In that first rookie turkey season for me I made a whack of mistakes, spooked a bunch of birds, called too much, and nearly got skunked before Dad and I had a frantic tandem kill on a public land turkey (the tale of which will serialized here for posterity at a later date). Still, even though I had come into turkey hunting later in my life, I was hooked completely with the experience. Early spring mornings lured me in, but thundering gobbles and intense close-range longbeard action cemented the addiction.

In 2008 I was focused, and I swore that I wasn’t going to find a way to cock up shooting a longbeard that year, but by the second last weekend of the season I had so far failed even in that respect. I had bumped two gobblers, shot over the head of a third at 35 steps, and had one sneak in silently behind me and gobble in my ear at just ten paces. I was beginning to think that like my deer hunting career, my enthusiasm and early promise were going to be false indicators of success as a turkey hunter.

The second last weekend of the 2008 season was in reality the last weekend for me, with my wife’s sister getting married the following Saturday, and with my work schedule not allowing any other days off to ramble after a strutter. It was crunch time.

My Dad, my brother, and I made our way to a local landowners bush lot early that Saturday morning, and in the dawn I worked some light yelping on a mouth diaphragm. Not getting much response, I reached for my box call and sawed away a slightly more aggressive string of raspy yelps, with a bit of cutting thrown in.

Nothing.

I laid the calls down and slumped at the base of a pile of old, balled up page wire fence and discarded tree limbs. I was set up inside a field edge facing north, and the sun rose slowly over my right shoulder; a treeline separated the field I was sitting on from another un-huntable field further north, but aside from the distant braying of Canada geese and the morning serenades of the sparrows and finches, the woods and fields were quiet. I was still of the neophyte opinion that every yelp I made should get a response and to hear my calls dissipate into the air without a lusty gargle from a fired up tom turkey was disheartening. Some time passed, twenty or thirty minutes perhaps, and then I heard a faint gobble from beyond the northern tree barrier, or at least I thought I heard one. Moments later I heard two gobbles from the same spot, only these were closing the distance to me. I don’t remember with precision what time it was that this happened, and I can’t even really remember the exact spot these calls originated from, but I do remember very deliberately reaching down and picking up my box call to yelp back, and before I even finished the string of notes, I was rebuked with what I was swore were three hefty shouts from beyond the treeline in front of me. But that couldn’t be, we hadn’t seen three gobblers together on this property, or any adjacent ones, all year.

Still it sounded like ‘they’ were coming.

I laid down the box call and positioned myself with two hands on my Remington 870; it was not mounted to my shoulder but I was ready in case it had to be. One turkey popped out of the trees at a fast walk about two hundred yards away. I was elated to have had some interest in my calling. Then another one hopped out of the woods behind it and flapped its wings before falling in line behind the first. I was even more excited…I mean, TWO GOBBLERS! I had called up two gobblers! When a third came out of the woods in full strut, I think I whispered a silent thank you to the turkey hunting gods. As the trio of longbeards began making their way arduously across the field towards me, I very (very!) slowly began inching the gun to my shoulder. I had a monopod attached to the barrel, and it was already in the down position so I had a limit to how far I could swing from left to right, but the birds were making good headway in my direction so I was not worried.

They closed to within 100 yards or so, all the while alternating between gobbling and strutting and spinning, before hanging out at that distance for about ten minutes. They then began marching a line parallel to my position until they were right in front of me, but still at least fifty yards from being in range. By then I was getting worried. If they slid any more to my right, I’d have to move to put a bead on them, and with my monopod rooted to the spot that was a task that would be difficult to execute without spooking them into the next township. I was distinctly aware of a few trickles of sweat inspired more by the circumstances than the pleasingly warm May morning as they rolled down my cheek, and my one foot was beginning to go tingly from being tucked under my other leg for some time. My arms and shoulders were just glorious though, I had that damned monopod to thank for their freshness.

I made a light yelp and cluck on my mouth call and all three birds hammered back simultaneously, making any adrenaline response I had been having kick into overdrive. I was filled with a sickly sweet anticipation that I have come to know very well since; it is the excitement of anticipation mixed with the absolute dread of buggering everything up. It was intoxicating, and for a moment I was afraid to blink or exhale, lest those wary birds make me for the predator I was and have them make tracks elsewhere.

Then, glory of glories, one of the birds started to break the line and walk my way, this made another bird start over as well. The third compatriot, not wanting to be left out, tried to run ahead of the other two and in short order I had three longbeards bouncing their way towards me at a dead run, gobbling the whole time.

I slid the safety off silently.

All three broke into a strut in a phalanx at roughly thirty yards and the monopod held my bead in a space between two of them. I was beginning to rue attaching that contraption to my gun. The gobbler that to my eye was the largest jumped and swung a wing at one of the others and both the subordinate birds broke strut. It was fascinating to see the pecking order so instantly displayed, and while the one bird stayed in strut safely to my right in a spot where my monopod wouldn’t allow me to get to him, the other two birds began clucking and purring inquisitively. I had only called two or three times since they had broken into the field, but they had marched and trotted right to the exact spot where their ears told them a hen should be waiting.

Since I had no decoy, the birds saw no hen, and I could tell that the two subordinate gobblers were becoming a little agitated by this, since the tone of their purring and clucking was becoming more, shall I say, urgent. The big fella just strutted and spun in one spot the whole time. As the two other birds putted around I noticed that one of them was on a path to walk directly in front of my gun barrel, while the other began picking at some new grass on the field edge. I figured quickly that the spot the one bird would pass would be well in range and just as he approached that spot were the vectors were to converge I bore down on the bead. That slightest movement made him lift his head to full periscope and he looked back over his shoulder towards the strutter.

It was the last thing he ever saw.

At the bark of the gun, the strutter leapt into flight and flew over my head into the bush at a height of no more than ten yards. Had he been a Canada goose, I could have dumped him easily. But he wasn’t a goose and the law says we can only shoot one turkey per day in Ontario so I listened to his wingtips tickle the trees as he powered out of earshot. The other gobbler alarm putted and gobbled off through the low brush to my right, and I watched his shiny black back merge into the woods and fade off into the sun-dappled understory behind me.

A still, black form was laying in the grass at the field edge, with the white bars of one wing held up stiffly like a signal flag. I slid the safety back on, stood and slowly paced off the distance to the lifeless bird. At twenty five steps I put my bootheel on his neck and grabbed his legs below the spur. He lamely flogged my shin with his wing for a moment, but he was soon still again. It was all just too much for me, and standing there with shotgun in one hand and gobbler in the other I let out a war whoop that came from some previously untapped part of my brain.

I was a turkey hunter right then. Before I had been in practice, an apprentice at the feet of mentors and magazines and often contradictory advice and opinion, but at that moment I’d tasted solo success and no matter what the future held I knew I had that one moment forever. I’ve been hunting after and writing about gobblers for six seasons since then and I’ve shot other birds since, but I still haven’t found the words that adequately define that moment of ‘the first time’.

I probably won’t ever have another hunt like that, and in some ways I hope that’s the case. That ‘first time’ was just too picture perfect to sully it with duplication.

As a footnote, that blasted monopod has not been re-attached to my gun since.

goose hunting, hunting, take a kid hunting

Something Special

October 21, 2014 Shawn West Leave a comment

Something special happened on this past Thanksgiving weekend, and it was something I had been planning for the past five years.

In August of 2009, my first son was born and it was a distant wish at that time that one day I’d get to take him hunting with me. After all, not every son or daughter grows up to love the same things their parents love, and my wife and I had long previously agreed that neither of us were going to force our hobbies and pastimes on our kids.

As the years passed and my rubbery infant son became a rambunctious, energetic toddler, I made not-so-subtle attempts to ingrain a love of the outdoors and hunting into the boy. I provided duck and goose calls as toys, I tucked him under my arm as I watched hunting shows on TV and I often took him into the nearby county forests for nature hikes that, while not technically hunting trips, were always framed as such. I recall a distinct morning in 2012 when my son and I went twenty minutes up the road to a Halton Region county forest tract and walked the wide trails in a new fallen snow. I pointed out deer and rabbit tracks to him, and he made it a point to follow the prints as far as he could. He was beaming and laughing, and I was pretty sure that I had him on the right track.

My toddler son grew to become a small boy, one that was now imaginative and willful, and he began to express disappointment as a three and four year old that he couldn’t come with me to various goose, duck, deer, and turkey hunting trips. He pestered and asked constantly, crying and sulking when I would earnestly tell him he was too little and too young to participate. He had not yet learned even the basics of sitting quietly and he was well in advance of developing anything that a parent could characterize as ‘patience’. Some people, my wife specifically, accused me of not wanting to bring him along as a selfish gesture, thinking that I was concerned with my own success and the possible negative impacts a small, loud, mobile child would have on my hunting results.

The fact of the matter was quite the opposite. My primary concern was that my son’s first hunting experience should be one that was fun, in good weather, and surrounded by action and wild game. Deer hunting and turkey hunting can feature extended periods of inaction, and I certainly didn’t want my boy to think hunting was ‘boring’. At that moment I decided that when he reached his 5^th birthday I would take him on his first waterfowl hunt.

In my estimation, hunting ducks and geese is probably the absolute best way to bring a youth of any age into the hunting tradition. Game is usually active, and in the case of Canada Geese in my area, it is plentiful. For the most part, when the birds aren’t flying the kids can move around, talk, fidget, and generally just be kids. I also find that (my boys at least) really like the noise and commotion around waterfowl hunting, what with setting up and tearing down decoy spreads, the music of the duck and goose calls, waving of flags, and the frequent shooting. That said, hearing protection for young ears (and old ears too I would suppose) should be absolutely mandatory.

And so it was that on the October long weekend I went to bed too excited to so sleep. I remembered my first waterfowl hunts as a young boy and the impression that they made on me; to say I was feeling the pressure to provide a good hunt for my son would be an understatement. 5am came on early, as it usually does, and my alarm buzzed me awake. I was sharing a room at the farmhouse with my son, primarily because my wife didn’t want me to wake her or my other son (who is just a tender 2 year old). When I walked across the room and tapped him on the shoulder, he sprang to life, literally. He hopped out of bed and made for his hunting clothes with an energy that I don’t ever remember having. It was a somewhat chilled morning, and I went through the ritual layering of long underwear, multiple socks, and warm shirts twice in the farmhouse living room; once for my son and once more for me. It was not an emotional morning overtly; there were no clichéd moments of hair-tousling or teary smiles, or even hugs. We just got our equipment on and headed out the door.

Our large group of hunters met at a local gas station and planned the hunt. My son and I, along with three others would go to a nearby cut grain field that geese had been frequenting which was adjacent to a field of standing corn. The plan was to hide in the standing corn and go from there.

We set decoys under the waning moonlight of a rapidly approaching October dawn, and my son rambled around in the shadows, carrying Bigfoot decoys in an awkward but capable fashion. We found our spots inside the first few rows of standing corn, and thanks to a miniature folding seat that one of the hunters with us lent me, I had my boy comfortable and still as the starry night morphed into a calm, bluebird morning. Nothing was immediately flying, and we turned my son free to wander in with the decoys and down the line, where he asked questions and chatted with the other hunters. We spied a thin string of geese to the southwest, and my son scampered back to his hideout next to me. We flagged and called the geese into range, and as they worked another group of honkers fell into an approach behind them. The first group landed, and we worked the back flock, hoping to get them to commit.

Inexplicably, the back flock made it to within sixty yards or so and then slid off line and made for an exit. Simultaneously the group that had landed jumped up and began to depart. Far to my right someone called the shot, and I swatted the nearest departing bird. More shots rang out to the right and we had brought four geese to hand. I trotted out to the bird I had shot and brought it back to my hiding spot. My son hopped off his little seat and came over to inspect the goose, which was a good-sized bird. He asked if it was dead and he tried to pick it up; it was a just a bit too awkward and heavy for him to hoist, but he gave it a good shot. A few more groups came near and although we shot okay, it was a bit of a slow morning overall. But the tepid bird movement couldn’t dampen my spirits, and my son was buoyant to be out hunting. Eventually his small stomach pressed me to get him some breakfast, and the rest of the crew thought bacon and eggs was a solid plan.

Just as he had in the pre-dawn, James went to the decoys and started to haul them in one at a time, gripping them awkwardly and more than once he almost took a spill in the muddy field. I was smiling pretty much throughout, and it was certainly one of those ‘proud Dad’ moments that you don’t forget. He was all smiles too, and when I asked him if he had enjoyed the hunt he blurted out that he never wanted to stop hunting.

One of our hunting companions that day was GK Calls Field Pro-Staff member Scott McDonald, and after all the decoys were packed and the guns cased, he pulled out a knife and pried one of his several goose leg bands off his lanyard and gave it to my son. My son was a little shy and confused about what the band meant, but once it was explained to him he wouldn’t let go of it. I had an extra lanyard and a beginner duck call laying around, and it is safe to say that this memento has not been out of his sight in the week and a half since he received it.

So I guess I have him hooked.

That afternoon my son stayed in while myself and a few others hit a local cut cornfield and while we saw many birds, we just could not coax them to commit. One group of three strayed too close to my end of the setup and I scratched down two of them. We sat the field until the end of legal light, but that pair would be the only birds we would get that evening. When I arrived back at the farm, my son was pestering my Dad to go out in the morning for another hunt. I asked who he wanted to sit with and my son was adamant that he would sit the morning hunt with his Grandpa, so that was pretty cool. I had never had the opportunity to hunt with my grandfather, so this was another one of those special moments that only comes around once.

I mean how many ‘first’ hunts can there be?

The Sunday morning was a repeat of the Saturday morning; James popped out of bed energetically, we ate a quick breakfast and geared up, making the field in the pre-dawn. My son again helped out with the decoys but this time, instead of hunkering down in the grassy fence line with me, he walked down the field edge and disappeared into the grass with my Dad. The wind was up and it was markedly colder than it had been twenty-four hours earlier, and the birds flew earlier. We were standing up chatting when a group of three mallards buzzed the spread. No one fired a shot.

Shortly after that we flagged and called to a group of geese that swung wide past my friend Brian, but still within my friend’s normally lethal wheelhouse. He emptied his gun and all three birds winged away unscathed, which sometimes happens. While we tried to figure out how that had transpired we saw another group and we worked them down the other side of the decoys, right in front of my Dad and son. Dad reached out with his Remington 1100 and connected with one of the birds, folding it up instantly. When he retrieved it, we noticed that it was not just any run-of-the-mill small goose, but it was a Cackling Goose, a first for Dad in nearly fifty years of waterfowling. My son had no difficulty holding this one, and neither did his younger brother when we all made our way back to the farm later that morning.

We worked more birds and brought a few more to hand, with one winging away wounded before crash-landing in the next field over. My Dad took my son across the shallow ditch we were hiding next to, and they went on the retrieve. It was a convenient time to do so, as my son was getting a bit chilled and going for a walk in the sun perked his spirits up again. This retrieve marked the end of the morning and we once again packed the decoys and headed in for breakfast.

Over pancakes and bacon my son told me all about the hunt with his Grandpa, how Grandpa told him how to hunt geese, and how he helped his Grandpa find the goose that “ran away” as he put it. That afternoon my son and I crashed into blissful afternoon naps before enjoying the traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and friends. It was a fitting way to end the weekend, and it was an apt reflection of the passing on of family traditions to the next generations.

For my part it looks like I may never get to hunt geese alone again. My new hunting partner is already asking about going every weekend we can, and that suits me just fine.

2014 turkey odyssey, hunting, turkey and turkey hunting

The 2014 Turkey Odyssey Begins Today

February 7, 2014 Shawn West Leave a comment

In reviewing past posts to this forum I’ve noticed a distinct trend.

The last few years, right around February, I start to go stir-crazy and begin writing about turkey hunting. I write about preparations, I write about memories, and I write about the malaise and madness that precedes any turkey season in my household.

And this year it will be no different. Except that it will be different, and here’s why.

This year I’ll be pursuing the second bird in my goal of harvesting a Grand Slam, as I go after a Merriam’s turkey in southeastern British Columbia. This all came together earlier this week, and it has been the dominant thought in my brain ever since.

From a hunter’s perspective, this is going to be my ‘trip of a lifetime’ to date. I have been fortunate enough to have a lifelong friend (we’ll call him Chris, because that is his name) who is currently living in the Kootenay region, and he’s an avid sportsman. Once I made the connection between his location and the availability of Merriam’s turkeys in his part of the country, it was just a matter of time before I finagled my way into a turkey hunt with him. Chris has been a lifelong angler, and in the last few years made the leap into the hunting fraternity. That he has harvested more deer in that short time than I have in a lifetime doesn’t grate on me at all. But, you see, despite his successes on whitetails and his enjoyment of upland bird hunting, Chris has never turkey hunted and this is where the adventure takes on another dimension. I absolutely want to harvest one of those dark, hardy mountain birds with the ivory-tipped tails; I want it in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. But as anyone who has chased gobblers knows, there is also a keen desire to introduce others to the ecstatic joys and crippling defeats of turkey hunting and that’s what I intend to do for Chris.

From my personal perspective as a writer it is a veritable gold mine of inspiration. The process of booking the trip, assembling the gear, packing, tracking down licenses and tags, transporting the weapons, the committing to memory and documenting of the unique beauty of that part of Canada, and ultimately the hunt itself will be fodder for post after post on this humble corner of the internet. If my fingertips could salivate at the prospect of so much writing, they would.

For those unfamiliar with the Grand Slam concept, it is the harvesting of all four sub-species of wild turkey. The sub-species in question are the Eastern, of which I’ve shot a handful now, the Merriam’s, which lives in pine-covered, mountainous Western regions, the Rio Grande found throughout the west and mid-west United States, and the Osceola, a bird localized only to the Florida peninsula. Only the Merriam’s and the Eastern inhabit Canada, so there’s a special sub-category of Grand Slam called a Canadian Slam, that to date has only been claimed to have been completed by seven people. If I can tag a Merriam’s I’m one step closer that select club. But the history of Grand Slams and their relative ease or difficulty is a tale for another time.

The key thing is I’m going. Convincing my employer, and more importantly my spouse, took some doing, as I am unbelievably busy with the former and often at odds about hunting trips with the latter. But this is a limited time opportunity, and I just had to make it happen. My dad has always said that there may come in a time in a man’s life when he reflects on the past, and the worst thing to have to do is to sit and regret a life’s opportunities not taken. With that said, since I have the means, the time, and the desire, there is literally no reason not to book the flight and get out there.

Chris and I have already had a few chats about this trip, and aside from the chance to travel and share the Kootenays with a friend who not only stood at my wedding, but one who also got shamelessly drunk with me on several occasions in our rebellious teen years, and who has known me literally since pre-school, the greater excitement is in getting him geared up and ready to go. As shown in previous posts, I am a confessed gearhead and nowhere do I have more goodies, toys, gadgets, and accessories than in my turkey vest. Since I have accumulated this small fortune of equipment organically over the last eight years I hardly expect my comrade in arms to gear up completely in just a few months. But for anyone starting out as a turkey hunter, as I told my friend, a box call, a locator call of some sort, a face mask, and some turkey-specific shotgun shells is enough gear to start out nicely. A box call is the easiest interface by far to make convincing turkey sounds, and a good crow call can be used at almost any hour of the hunt to prospect for gobblers. The utility of a good face mask goes without saying; ditto for reliable shotgun shells.

Then we just need birds.

I’m not particularly sure as to the relative abundance or scarcity of turkeys in Chris’s area, but he’s indicated that he’s got a line on a few likely spots. Public land is in abundance by all accounts, and in some rudimentary topographic map research I’ve done seems to point to mixed upland forests interspersed with clearings as one of the more dominant terrain features. There are spots in the area that just have the look of a gobbler’s haunt, and the hope is to get a scout/hunt in on the Friday afternoon when I arrive, then just hitting the woods hard for up to three days before my return flight late on the Monday. Reviewing the terrain has also opened my eyes to the sheer ruggedness of the area. For an Ontarian flat-lander like me, this is truly a high country hunt, and even though there is much higher country even further to the west of this trip’s home base, I imagine there will be some up and down climbs required to get onto birds. For my part, I’ve been hitting the treadmill since my tolerance for climbing mountainsides and delving into valleys could be politely described as ‘inadequate’ after a deer season and Christmastime that was filled with rich meals and plenty of liquid celebrations.

Like everything else in my life, my goal is to embarrass myself as little as possible and vomiting from exertion in front of one of friends is not on bucket list. So that’s the plan. Stay tuned for updates as I stroke milestones of the list. Next up, wrangling a travel case for my shotgun. Perhaps a bit of a test-and-compare piece for my next post.

So come April, I’ll be opening up this year’s turkey season in Ontario in late April, and then part way through May I’ll be running to BC for this hunting smash up with a chum. Birds notwithstanding I am already anticipating four epic days of laughs, scenic vistas, good eats, and plenty of time afield, and I look forward to putting all those memories in here.

Because creating memories and sharing the hunt with friends and family is what it is all about when I get right down to it.

deer hunting, 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.