Deer Hunting Memories

I found the following story last week as I was reading through some of my writings.  I thought that with firearms deer season coming up very soon it would be a good time to post. 

I was riding in a car the other day being driven to the body shop to pick up my car by a young man from Enterprise Car Rental. My car had been rear-ended and the work completed. Just as Enterprise claims, they will pick you up and will also take you where you need to go. The gentlemen and I were talking as we scooted across the O'Fallon streets, bantering about deer hunting as it was the last day of firearm deer season for the year.

As we chatted, I thought about the deer that I have been lucky enough to harvest over the last few years. In the last 6 years, I have only been skunked one season. I went out with friends to deer hunt in my high school years, but I didn’t bag my first deer until I was a freshmen in college.

My first buck, the first deer ever for me, was the largest I have ever harvested. The morning I spied the big creature was a cold one. I spent all morning in a deer stand by a pond the Missouri Department of Conservation had built years before I was born. My family always called in “The Government Pond”. Nothing was moving that morning but the squirrels. I was bored and ready to move on to another spot. So after a few hours of waiting and nothing moving my way, I decided to get up and move to another spot.

I started walking down an old log road. I had been on this road many times before. For years I had been going through these woods, taking this very same trail. I had been down this road riding on top of a pile of firewood that my two brothers, my father, and I just cut, split, and loaded into the trailer. I had been through here with my brothers and friends, carrying rifles, hunting squirrels. Sometimes I walked through the woods by myself, walking either to or from my best friend and cousin Sam’ Halbert’s house to play. Some of those evenings that I stayed at Sam’s too late playing Super Nintendo made for some spooky walks home through the dark Ozark woods.

This particular day, the 3rd day of deer season as I recall it, was a beautiful day. The weather was crisp, cool, and the sun was shining. As I walked along the log road, I came out of the woods into a clearing. The clearing was the miles long cut through the Mark Twain National forest. This was what we called the“high-line’.

The high-line is a 6 strand electric line running from the Lake of the Ozarks to supply electric power to about 42,000 households in Southeastern Missouri. The line runs right across my parent’s farm, in my opinion the only flaw in the view from my mom and dad’s front porch. The large, metal towers were built in concert with Bagnell Dam in the1930’s and stretch across miles of the state. There are two of the metal towers on the family farm, the big concrete footprints holding up tall, metallic beasts strong-arming the tons of wire that drape across the valley and over the hill on the other side of the creek.

I stepped out into the high-line clearing and stopped to look back and forth across the expanse of grass that split the woods in half. One of the looming metal towers was nearby and since I had ingested copious amounts of coffee earlier just to stay awake, I found the need to answer Mother Nature’s call. So I walked to the middle of the clearing and leaned my deer rifle against one of the metal beams near the base of the tower. As I was zipping up my pants, I caught movement in the corner of my eye. I turned quickly to see a doe come out of the woods and into the clearing under the high line. My heart started to race as I grabbed the Ruger Mini-14 rifle and dropped to one knee. I started to bring the rifle up to aim and noticed that not far behind the doe was a buck. He was interested in one thing only and did not stop to check to see if a rookie deer hunter was nearby. He was hot after the doe.

I brought the peep sight up to my eye, found the buck as he strode across the clearing, and clicked off the safety. Right before he stepped into the woods I fired. He dropped. I couldn’t

believe it.

I set the safety back on my rifle and ran over to view my prize. I was amazed. I had my first deer. It was a ten-pointer. I jumped up and down, yelling, probably scared every other animal far away from the vicinity. It was such an amazing moment in my life, my first deer, my first buck, my biggest buck.