I was reading the "first deer" thread. I notice that things are much different nowadays than they were back when I first started deer hunting here in the NC mountains back in the 70s. My first deer story isn't quite as happy as some of y'all's, but it's as true as I remember it to be, and if you’ll be patient, I’ll tell it to you...
When I was a kid, it was a thing to be talked about for days if you saw a fresh deer track. If you managed to actually kill a buck, you were elevated to local hero status. We had only a couple weeks of deer season. Does were forbidden fruit, no doe days at all then. What few deer there were all lived back in the woods on the National Forest. You didn't see them around on private farmland. They were mysterious creatures of the shadows that we weren't even completely sure really existed at the time, kinda like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Sure, I had heard my dad and my grandpa and a couple of uncles say that they had killed deer years ago, but they were our heroes-they had all done all kinds of superhuman things that were beyond our capabilities. After you heard a few stories from those guys about their experiences in WWI and WWII and Korea, you didn't doubt their ability to do the impossible, like Kill A Deer. And sure, you saw a bug-eaten hide or set of old moldy antlers nailed up on a barn wall every now and then; but we had also seen the sewed-together mermaid and the stuffed monkey-boy at the Fourth-of-July carnival. I had about the same expectations for seeing a live mermaid in the creek behind the barn as I did for actually seeing a real, live buck deer in the woods.
I was about 12 at the time. I had killed mass quantities of squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, coons, possums, grouse and such, but I wanted me a deer in a bad way, so that I could join that elite group of hunters that people spoke about in a hushed, reverent tone of voice. So did my older cousin, who had just gotten his driver's license and an old rusty, raggedy oil-burning pickup truck that you could have slung a housecat all the way through without ever touching sheet metal. We made plans for the opening day of deer season weeks ahead of time. We plotted, packed, unpacked, repacked, scouted, and waited for what seemed like an eternity for the Great Day to arrive. I spent the night at my cousin’s house so that we would be ready to go.
When opening day finally came, we were up about midnight, dressed, and headed to a section of National Forest a few miles from home. I was decked out in longjohns, jeans, a flannel shirt, and an old woodland camo BDU jacket that I had swindled from my brother-in-law who was in the National Guard. It had a patch over the chest pocket that said "Underwood," which wasn't anywhere close to my own last name, and a patch on the shoulder with the insignia of some military unit that I didn't even know what they did; but I was tickled to death with my camo jacket anyway, and was sure I would be totally invisible in the woods while wearing it. My cousin didn’t have a camo jacket, so he was quite jealous of it. I also had on an old faded orange Jones-style hat with the earflaps that folded up inside. I was armed with my late grandpa’s ancient single-shot Savage/Stevens .30-30 built on a breakdown shotgun frame that I had borrowed from my grandma, because the only guns I owned were a single-shot F.I.E. .410 shotgun and a single-shot .22 rifle, neither of which were good Deer Hunting Guns. The .30-30 was a High-Powered Rifle, and therefore an Official Deer Hunting Gun. I had four .30-30 shells in my pocket that my grandma had found in a dresser drawer in her bedroom. Quite likely, no two of them were the same brand, bullet weight, or bullet type. One of them had more rust than brass on it, and some blue-green fuzzy stuff growing around the primer. In other words, I was an Official Deer Hunter and I was ready to go in a big way. The deer didn't stand a chance.
We had a destination in mind for our Great Hunt: A ridge a couple miles back in the mountains where we had actually found a Real Deer Track a couple of weeks beforehand. We were anxious the whole time as we were chugging around the old rutted-out Forest Service road trailing a cloud of blue smoke and rust flakes behind us. After all, it would be daylight in six hours or so, what if somebody had beaten us to our spot? It was unthinkable. Luckily, we got to the end of the old logging road about the time that many people were going to bed, and nobody else was there. As a matter of fact, we hadn’t seen another vehicle or person or light in a house since we left home. We were in luck.
We got out of the truck, which proceeded to roll backwards because the emergency brake didn’t work. We chunked a big rock under the tire and it quit rolling and stayed put. I put on my camo jacket and pulled the earflaps down on my hat. I loaded my .30-30 with the least rusty shell I had. My cousin stuffed a punkinball into his single-shot 16-gauge and put on his Wrangler jacket. He wasn’t a professional deer hunter like me. We stood there awhile. We cut us a chew of tobacco off a plug of Red Coon. We decided that it was time to get to our “stands.” We got out our light. It was one of those big old nightcrawler lights with a red, white, and blue elastic headband. We wired it to a big, square, yellow-and-blue 6-volt Ray-O-Vac lantern battery and argued over who got to carry it. My older cousin won. We headed up the logging road.
We got to the top of the ridge and split up, having previously planned where to sit and to meet up at one o’clock to go back to the truck for lunch, or if /when one of us heard the other one shoot. I had picked out a big log to sit on that was kind of tucked back in some laurel bushes and had a good view down the ridge, and my cousin had picked out a spot on top of a rock cliff where he could see up the ridge and down a holler. I sat down and waited for daylight. And waited. And waited. And waited. It was cold. There was frost on the ground. It was really cold. I waited some more. Finally, it got daylight. I was shivering, which wasn’t good, because the main thing I had heard about deer hunting from the older members of my family was that you had to Be Still And Not Move. I sat there and froze for awhile after it got so that I could see, and chewed my tobacco.
Suddenly, I heard something walking in the leaves behind me. My heart immediately started pumping out adrenaline and kicked up to about 300 beats per minute. I cocked my rifle and slooooooooooooooowly turned my head. I saw movement! It was a squirrel. If it had actually been a deer, I probably would have had a stroke. I uncocked my rifle. This happened a few more times. Then the sun came up over the mountain. Shivering, I watched the line of golden light creep up the ridge toward me. It would never reach me. Then it did. I got warm and quit shivering. Then I went to sleep, because I hadn’t slept a wink the night before waiting for Opening Day, and had been sitting frozen to a log shivering for several hours.
I woke up suddenly because I swallowed my chewing tobacco. This was not a pleasant experience. I coughed and hacked and about puked. I finally got myself under control, and looked at my watch. It was 10:30. I heard something walking through the leaves down the ridge. I cocked my rifle and slooooooooooooooowly turned my head. I saw movement! It was my frozen cousin. He was shivering while he walked, and his teeth were chattering. Apparently, the sun had never reached his “stand.” I uncocked my rifle.
We walked down the old logging road toward the truck where our sandwiches were. We were walking along with our guns over our shoulders, talking about how cold it was, and how we had been fooled by squirrels walking in the leaves. We weren’t all that disappointed about not seeing a deer, because we really hadn’t expected to see one anyway. It was enough just to be out Deer Hunting. Suddenly, there was a loud crashing in the woods below us. A huge brown body came bursting out of the laurel bushes and leaped across the logging road a few feet in front of us. It was a DEER! My mind somehow registered that there were little spike antlers sticking out of its head. The buck bounded up the hillside and stopped about fifty yards away, looking back at us. The rifle came up to my shoulder. I thumbed back the hammer, lined up the sights, and yanked the trigger. The deer stumbled, got up, and took off across the ridge like all the hounds of Hades were chasing him.
We stood there looking big-eyed at each other for a minute. My cousin had his shotgun frozen to his shoulder but had never pulled the trigger, and I was shaking like a dog defecating peach pits. It all seemed surreal. Surely, there hadn’t been a Real Deer there thirty seconds before, but right there were the indisputable fresh hoofprints dug into the soft dirt where it had climbed up the bank of the logging road right in front of us. I had only shot small game before, and all those critters I had hit had dropped right where they were, or at the most thrashed around until I could come up and stomp their heads or finish them off with a stick. But I had shot this Deer with my High-Powered Rifle, and he had just picked my stuff up and carried it off. He was gone. I was devastated.
We climbed up the hillside to where the Deer had been standing when I shot it. The leaves were scuffed up, and what was that? BLOOD! In the leaves! A trail of it leading off across the ridge! I reloaded my rifle with my next-least-rusty shell, and we started following it. There was a pretty good trail for a while, and then it petered out to scattered drops. Then we found where the deer had stopped, and there was a pool of pink blood with bubbles in it. We knew that it had been hit in the lungs, and would die. We kept following the blood. We followed it for a long way, clear across the ridgetop, through a laurel thicket, and down the hollow on the other side of the mountain, as fast as we could. I couldn’t understand how the deer kept going. Later on, after I gained more experience, I realized that my buck was standing quartering strongly away from me, and I had shot it through only one lung. At the time, I didn’t realize this, and I only wanted my deer. We kept following the blood. Of course, if we had stopped and let it bed down and die, we would probably have found it close by, but we didn’t know to do this. We kept pushing it.
The blood trail led all the way down the hollow. Sometimes it was good and plain; sometimes it took us several minutes of circling to find the next red speck on the leaves. We came to a gravel Forest Service road. We saw where the deer had slid and fell down the road bank. At the edge of the road was a pool of blood where the deer had lain. On the shoulder of the road were fresh tire tracks, deer hair, and a bloody drag mark that ended at the tracks. We searched all around, but there was no more blood. Slowly, we realized what had happened. Someone had driven along the gravel road at just the right time, had seen my deer, and had loaded it up and took off. We stood there looking at the tracks, but there was nothing to do about it.
I never found out who stole my deer. It was a couple more years before I even got a shot at another one, but I will never forget my first buck. They may have taken his body, but they can’t take him completely away from me. He still lives right there in my mind alongside my first burning, smoky shot of liquor, my first uncertain intimate encounter with a willing female, my first anything else that really, really matters. For as long as I live, he'll always be there standing on the hillside fifty yards away, looking back at me over the sights of grandpa's old .30-30.
When I was a kid, it was a thing to be talked about for days if you saw a fresh deer track. If you managed to actually kill a buck, you were elevated to local hero status. We had only a couple weeks of deer season. Does were forbidden fruit, no doe days at all then. What few deer there were all lived back in the woods on the National Forest. You didn't see them around on private farmland. They were mysterious creatures of the shadows that we weren't even completely sure really existed at the time, kinda like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Sure, I had heard my dad and my grandpa and a couple of uncles say that they had killed deer years ago, but they were our heroes-they had all done all kinds of superhuman things that were beyond our capabilities. After you heard a few stories from those guys about their experiences in WWI and WWII and Korea, you didn't doubt their ability to do the impossible, like Kill A Deer. And sure, you saw a bug-eaten hide or set of old moldy antlers nailed up on a barn wall every now and then; but we had also seen the sewed-together mermaid and the stuffed monkey-boy at the Fourth-of-July carnival. I had about the same expectations for seeing a live mermaid in the creek behind the barn as I did for actually seeing a real, live buck deer in the woods.
I was about 12 at the time. I had killed mass quantities of squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, coons, possums, grouse and such, but I wanted me a deer in a bad way, so that I could join that elite group of hunters that people spoke about in a hushed, reverent tone of voice. So did my older cousin, who had just gotten his driver's license and an old rusty, raggedy oil-burning pickup truck that you could have slung a housecat all the way through without ever touching sheet metal. We made plans for the opening day of deer season weeks ahead of time. We plotted, packed, unpacked, repacked, scouted, and waited for what seemed like an eternity for the Great Day to arrive. I spent the night at my cousin’s house so that we would be ready to go.
When opening day finally came, we were up about midnight, dressed, and headed to a section of National Forest a few miles from home. I was decked out in longjohns, jeans, a flannel shirt, and an old woodland camo BDU jacket that I had swindled from my brother-in-law who was in the National Guard. It had a patch over the chest pocket that said "Underwood," which wasn't anywhere close to my own last name, and a patch on the shoulder with the insignia of some military unit that I didn't even know what they did; but I was tickled to death with my camo jacket anyway, and was sure I would be totally invisible in the woods while wearing it. My cousin didn’t have a camo jacket, so he was quite jealous of it. I also had on an old faded orange Jones-style hat with the earflaps that folded up inside. I was armed with my late grandpa’s ancient single-shot Savage/Stevens .30-30 built on a breakdown shotgun frame that I had borrowed from my grandma, because the only guns I owned were a single-shot F.I.E. .410 shotgun and a single-shot .22 rifle, neither of which were good Deer Hunting Guns. The .30-30 was a High-Powered Rifle, and therefore an Official Deer Hunting Gun. I had four .30-30 shells in my pocket that my grandma had found in a dresser drawer in her bedroom. Quite likely, no two of them were the same brand, bullet weight, or bullet type. One of them had more rust than brass on it, and some blue-green fuzzy stuff growing around the primer. In other words, I was an Official Deer Hunter and I was ready to go in a big way. The deer didn't stand a chance.
We had a destination in mind for our Great Hunt: A ridge a couple miles back in the mountains where we had actually found a Real Deer Track a couple of weeks beforehand. We were anxious the whole time as we were chugging around the old rutted-out Forest Service road trailing a cloud of blue smoke and rust flakes behind us. After all, it would be daylight in six hours or so, what if somebody had beaten us to our spot? It was unthinkable. Luckily, we got to the end of the old logging road about the time that many people were going to bed, and nobody else was there. As a matter of fact, we hadn’t seen another vehicle or person or light in a house since we left home. We were in luck.
We got out of the truck, which proceeded to roll backwards because the emergency brake didn’t work. We chunked a big rock under the tire and it quit rolling and stayed put. I put on my camo jacket and pulled the earflaps down on my hat. I loaded my .30-30 with the least rusty shell I had. My cousin stuffed a punkinball into his single-shot 16-gauge and put on his Wrangler jacket. He wasn’t a professional deer hunter like me. We stood there awhile. We cut us a chew of tobacco off a plug of Red Coon. We decided that it was time to get to our “stands.” We got out our light. It was one of those big old nightcrawler lights with a red, white, and blue elastic headband. We wired it to a big, square, yellow-and-blue 6-volt Ray-O-Vac lantern battery and argued over who got to carry it. My older cousin won. We headed up the logging road.
We got to the top of the ridge and split up, having previously planned where to sit and to meet up at one o’clock to go back to the truck for lunch, or if /when one of us heard the other one shoot. I had picked out a big log to sit on that was kind of tucked back in some laurel bushes and had a good view down the ridge, and my cousin had picked out a spot on top of a rock cliff where he could see up the ridge and down a holler. I sat down and waited for daylight. And waited. And waited. And waited. It was cold. There was frost on the ground. It was really cold. I waited some more. Finally, it got daylight. I was shivering, which wasn’t good, because the main thing I had heard about deer hunting from the older members of my family was that you had to Be Still And Not Move. I sat there and froze for awhile after it got so that I could see, and chewed my tobacco.
Suddenly, I heard something walking in the leaves behind me. My heart immediately started pumping out adrenaline and kicked up to about 300 beats per minute. I cocked my rifle and slooooooooooooooowly turned my head. I saw movement! It was a squirrel. If it had actually been a deer, I probably would have had a stroke. I uncocked my rifle. This happened a few more times. Then the sun came up over the mountain. Shivering, I watched the line of golden light creep up the ridge toward me. It would never reach me. Then it did. I got warm and quit shivering. Then I went to sleep, because I hadn’t slept a wink the night before waiting for Opening Day, and had been sitting frozen to a log shivering for several hours.
I woke up suddenly because I swallowed my chewing tobacco. This was not a pleasant experience. I coughed and hacked and about puked. I finally got myself under control, and looked at my watch. It was 10:30. I heard something walking through the leaves down the ridge. I cocked my rifle and slooooooooooooooowly turned my head. I saw movement! It was my frozen cousin. He was shivering while he walked, and his teeth were chattering. Apparently, the sun had never reached his “stand.” I uncocked my rifle.
We walked down the old logging road toward the truck where our sandwiches were. We were walking along with our guns over our shoulders, talking about how cold it was, and how we had been fooled by squirrels walking in the leaves. We weren’t all that disappointed about not seeing a deer, because we really hadn’t expected to see one anyway. It was enough just to be out Deer Hunting. Suddenly, there was a loud crashing in the woods below us. A huge brown body came bursting out of the laurel bushes and leaped across the logging road a few feet in front of us. It was a DEER! My mind somehow registered that there were little spike antlers sticking out of its head. The buck bounded up the hillside and stopped about fifty yards away, looking back at us. The rifle came up to my shoulder. I thumbed back the hammer, lined up the sights, and yanked the trigger. The deer stumbled, got up, and took off across the ridge like all the hounds of Hades were chasing him.
We stood there looking big-eyed at each other for a minute. My cousin had his shotgun frozen to his shoulder but had never pulled the trigger, and I was shaking like a dog defecating peach pits. It all seemed surreal. Surely, there hadn’t been a Real Deer there thirty seconds before, but right there were the indisputable fresh hoofprints dug into the soft dirt where it had climbed up the bank of the logging road right in front of us. I had only shot small game before, and all those critters I had hit had dropped right where they were, or at the most thrashed around until I could come up and stomp their heads or finish them off with a stick. But I had shot this Deer with my High-Powered Rifle, and he had just picked my stuff up and carried it off. He was gone. I was devastated.
We climbed up the hillside to where the Deer had been standing when I shot it. The leaves were scuffed up, and what was that? BLOOD! In the leaves! A trail of it leading off across the ridge! I reloaded my rifle with my next-least-rusty shell, and we started following it. There was a pretty good trail for a while, and then it petered out to scattered drops. Then we found where the deer had stopped, and there was a pool of pink blood with bubbles in it. We knew that it had been hit in the lungs, and would die. We kept following the blood. We followed it for a long way, clear across the ridgetop, through a laurel thicket, and down the hollow on the other side of the mountain, as fast as we could. I couldn’t understand how the deer kept going. Later on, after I gained more experience, I realized that my buck was standing quartering strongly away from me, and I had shot it through only one lung. At the time, I didn’t realize this, and I only wanted my deer. We kept following the blood. Of course, if we had stopped and let it bed down and die, we would probably have found it close by, but we didn’t know to do this. We kept pushing it.
The blood trail led all the way down the hollow. Sometimes it was good and plain; sometimes it took us several minutes of circling to find the next red speck on the leaves. We came to a gravel Forest Service road. We saw where the deer had slid and fell down the road bank. At the edge of the road was a pool of blood where the deer had lain. On the shoulder of the road were fresh tire tracks, deer hair, and a bloody drag mark that ended at the tracks. We searched all around, but there was no more blood. Slowly, we realized what had happened. Someone had driven along the gravel road at just the right time, had seen my deer, and had loaded it up and took off. We stood there looking at the tracks, but there was nothing to do about it.
I never found out who stole my deer. It was a couple more years before I even got a shot at another one, but I will never forget my first buck. They may have taken his body, but they can’t take him completely away from me. He still lives right there in my mind alongside my first burning, smoky shot of liquor, my first uncertain intimate encounter with a willing female, my first anything else that really, really matters. For as long as I live, he'll always be there standing on the hillside fifty yards away, looking back at me over the sights of grandpa's old .30-30.
Well done .. Billy from the hill. Really enjoyed that!
I should have known.
