We opened camp this year on Friday in the midst of a snow squall, though it took less than 24 hours for the weather to devolve into what has passed, in recent years, as the same ol’, same ol’ opening weekend weather. Hot. Windy. Sunny. Weather that goes with deer hunting like a family vacation goes with tropical rain.
Trev missed a rack buck on the first day, and on the second, he and I pushed a steep oak cobble where we figured Mr. Big might be bedded down to ride out the heat. The cobble stuck out like a birch burl from the mountain face – maybe 50 acres of crevasses and boulder fields, the oak and beech clinging for dear life at seemingly impossible angles. Trev snuck up a stream and took a stand on an escape trail at the south end of a prominent set of ledges. I came in from the north, swinging sapling to sapling up the vertical hillside and into the heart of the bush. (That last line’s a touch too proud of itself; had a monkey been watching my clumsy ascent, he would have felt lucky that his kind hadn’t followed us humans down the evolutionary off-ramp.)
In the thick of it now, I paused to admire some bobcat signs near a series of small caves, and, my momentum broken, considered stopping to take lunch. I had a south-west exposure here and a book full of Breece D’J Pancake stories in my pack, an author our new assistant editor Meghan Oliver turned me on to. Real good writer who wrote – he’s dead – nice, fractured, coal country stories about rural Appalachia. Anyway, it might have been a wonderfully relaxing afternoon up in God’s country, eating and reading, dozing and quote-unquote hunting. But then, out of nowhere, I heard Trev shoot, and several minutes later a buck came tearing through the draw. I shot him and he dropped. Later, upon reconstructing the frenzied few minutes, we learned that Trev had hit the deer’s horn, in fact, took the end of it right off, which probably makes him the only man in Vermont to have legally harvested a one-pointer, or, a one point anyway. We’re going to make him his own plaque for the antler tip.
All joking aside, it was an awfully special hunt for the fact that I got to share it with my brother. Hunting’s generally a solitary pursuit in my tribe, so to team up in this way and be successful will make this buck especially memorable.
Otherwise, I’ve seen surprisingly little wildlife in the woods over the past four days. Plenty of red and gray squirrels, a few red-tails, a few barred owls, a mess of corvids, but that’s about it. The buck was the only deer I saw in those four days. No turkeys except for the boys in camp. No canids, or mustelids, or anything exotic. Even the Bruce spanworm moths were noticeably absent. Probably the heat had everything bedded down on a southwest hillside, wiling away the time with whatever the animal equivalent of a Breece D’J Pancake book is.
What have you seen out there, hunters?