NOVEMBER 20, 2020 – (Cont.) Dad liked shattering clay pigeons, but neither that experience nor the shooting of the woodchuck turned him into a gun person; certainly not a hunter. Dad was counter-culture. I didn’t know a single boy (I didn’t ask the girls) in my class who didn’t hunt with his dad. During duck- or deer-hunting season, they’d talk guns and game. I felt a little left out. When I saw a friend and his dad pull into their driveway with a large buck tied to the front grill and bumper, I felt a lot left out.
I tried to convince Dad that we’d have lots of fun deer hunting together. He ended the idea with a single shot: “No.” I folded. That didn’t mean, however, that I ran off and happily practiced my violin. That damned thing was another reminder of how “different” our family was. We didn’t own guns or hunt. The best we could do was a dad who borrowed a shotgun to shoot a woodchuck hooked on lettuce. To add insult to injury, Dad loved Beethoven. The odds were against me ever fitting in with the “guns and game” crowd.
Little did I know, however, that it was worse than that: Dad was an active member of the resistance.
One Saturday in the middle of deer-hunting season, Dad drove out to his tree farm to prune some of the 10,000 pine he’d planted years before. The weather was mild, and Dad was enjoying a brief escape from life’s demands. (Why he’d choose to do that while hunters were on the prowl surprises me in retrospect. That was an era, however, when no one wore a seatbelt either.) The sun was fast sliding toward the horizon when a royal buck with an intimidating set of antlers entered the south end of the property, not far from where Dad was pruning.
When Dad told me the whole story many years later, he said, “That deer was the most magnificent encounter with wildlife I’ve ever had. It was certainly the biggest deer I’ve ever seen—big and regal.”
Man and deer peered at each other for a minute or two before the buck continued his stately gait northward past the planted pine. Dad resumed his work, savoring his close-up sighting of royalty. About 10 minutes later, a hunting party appeared from the south. They hailed Dad and asked if he’d seen a large buck recently in the vicinity.
Dad waited a beat before giving his reply. “As a matter of fact, I have,” he said.
“Which way was it headed?” a hunter asked.
“It went that way,” said Dad, removing his woolen cap and gesturing with it southeastward into the woods.
“Thanks!” shouted the men, as they turned their deer tracking exercise into a wild goose chase.
“Ya, you bet,” Dad said.
It was unknowable as to how long the buck could avoid a hunter’s aim, but at least for the time being, King Whitetail enjoyed safe passage . . . thanks to subterfuge by a loyal subject.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
2 Comments
My Dad did not hunt either. I picked it up on my own. Initially bow hunting and eventually gun hunting for deer and also for turkeys. It’s an amazing way to hike many acres of woods and learn a bit about your quarry.
I think one of my sons is the same–loves archery, BB guns at the cabin (albeit shooting at beer cans atop my wooden saw horse (which, I discovered recently, has dozens of BBs embedded in the wood)). As a young kid, he played “Oregon Trail” (video game) so he could hunt. He never made it past Nebraska. Every time we turned around, we heard “Du-DAH”–which signaled the warning, “There is no more game left in your vicinity. You’ve starved. Game over [so to speak]”–or words to that effect. Our neighbor to the north is a serious deer hunter; makes his own ammo; has multiple stands throughout his acreage. I keep my head down (and off our adjoining 40) at this time of year.
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