The Deer Shack
Tom Hayes
Actually, what we now call the Deer Shack used to be the Bunkhouse
back
when the Ranch was operating at full capacity and horses had not been
replaced by 4 wheel drives and snowmobiles. At any rate, it is a very
comfortable place to stay for a couple of the weekend nights of deer
season.
Back in late summer, I was “home” and took an
afternoon to take my
fishing guests for a ride around my old haunts and stopped by the ranch
to check in. We walked up the hill to the Deer Shack, which has
deteriorated a lot since the gang and I quit going there every year for
the Hills Deer season. The mice and squirrels have really had a heyday
and the place is showing the neglect.
When I stepped in the door, it is as if thirty years of my
life just
vanished. At that instant, I wished the others were not with me. I could
see the walls lit yellow by the gas mantle lights; I could smell the
wood smoke and cigarettes and hear the excited voices. There was the
clamor of a poker game going on at the table. There were rifles standing
in the gun rack waiting their turns at bucks. There was talk of bucks
and shots and screw-ups and lucky hits. There were tracking stories and
the time the whole bunch of Eastern Hunters from the flatlands all
filled out with nice bucks.
My fishing guests looked around approvingly and went back outside.
I lingered.
There was Bud and Joe and Johnny and Stan and Bobby and Jerry
all
standing there looking at me with big smiles. Bud reached down and got
some blood on his fingers from my first buck and wiped them across my
face and said, “Well, son, now you are a buck hunter.” I had
made the
transition from hunting with them to being one of them. I was 15.
I got a lump in my throat. A tear came to the corner of my
eye. Was it
remembered joy or sadness over the passing of time?
I looked out the window at the meat pole hung heavy with bucks.
Fork
horns and smaller were considered fawns. Even light racked three
pointers (western count) drew criticism and remarks about still having
milk on their tongues. I recalled Bobby kicking snow on one three point
that I shot in mock scorn and giving me a dirty look. He asked my when I
would outgrow shooting the baby ones. Sadly, his age and health keep him
home.
Then I flashed to the time that Bobby and I sat in the deer
shack after
supper drinking peppermint schnapps with beer and playing gin rummy
while we waited for the others to come up from town. By the time they
got in from town, Bobby and I were three sheets to the wind and when
they walked in the door, Bobby and I both were giggling like schoolgirls
and simultaneously shouted, “SCHNAPPS!”
The next morning I can recall praying that no buck would come by me
because I lived in fear of having to listen to my old 30-06 bark into my
aching head. Even the 9 am coffee stirred some pretty ugly sounds down
in the depths of my damaged digestive system. I ate snow, I dozed, and I
froze. By suppertime, though, I was up and taking nourishment – fresh
venison back strap with pan gravy – and had healed enough to sit down
at
the card table with a beverage of choice once again.
The time Mr. Buckhunter, himself, shot a running mulie up
above the
spruce thickets came to mind. I heard the shot and went up to lend a
hand. When I hit the top of the ridge, I saw Bud standing there with his
hands on his hips shaking his head from side to side. I walked up beside
him. Lying there in the snow was a cleanly shot mule deer doe. A doe. I
could not believe it. I looked at him. He looked at me. I got out my
knife and field dressed her. Not a word was exchanged.
We dragged her down off the mountain toward the truck using
Bud’s belt.
None of our bunch even carried a rope. We reasoned that the only deer
any of us would ever shoot would have good horns to use to drag them.
Bud asked me if I would like to tell the gang that I shot the doe. I
told him that I owed him at least that for bringing me hunting with him
all these years.
When we hit the logging trail and saw all the guys standing
by the truck
they asked, “How big is he?” We did not answer, just kept dragging.
As we got closer, they noticed we were dragging the deer with
the belt
and immediately started laughing and hooting and hollering, “Who screwed
up?” They knew.
When we got to the truck, neither Bud nor I said a word. The
guys were
chortling, “Nice doe. Boy, she will be good in the skillet. A lot
better
than some rank tough old buck, ha, ha, ha, ha…”
Bud made some colloquial reference to rectums and I just smiled
without
speaking. The guys all (correctly) interpreted that to conclude who had
done what.
I flashed to another hunt on another day when Johnny (who
was born in
1906 and still looking forward to this years deer hunting season as I
write this) decided to sit in a saddle up on one of the many ridges
while some of us younger guys still hunted in the thickets down in the
valley. We heard a shot and figured that Johnny might need a hand with
some venison so Joe and I headed up the creek bottom. When we got to the
top, as expected, Johnny was just finishing up field dressing a big old
buck with webbing between the tines of his antlers.
We begged for the details and Johnny obliged. He was sitting
half
concealed on a blown down pine near the root ball when a doe came up the
ridge. She kept looking back so Johnny assumed there was a buck
following. The buck approached the doe and she did not run off. Johnny
put his scope on the old boy but did not shoot. Instead, he waited for
the buck to breed the doe then sent the brute to the deer pasture in the
sky. Johnny was proud that he had waited for the genes to be passed
along for the good of the herd.
Joe and I remarked about Johnny’s age and his probable
envy as being why
he held off with the shot until the deed was done.
One of the guys outside the Deer Shack hollered in, “Tom, are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” and went outside to get on with the matters at hand.
We finished our tour of the ranch and went on our way to other
places
filled with hunts of days gone by and days yet to come. We even managed
to catch some trout later on that evening. It was a good day.
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