A Hunter
I wasn’t always a hunter. My father never taught me the skills needed to hunt because he wasn’t a hunter either. Nor his father before him. Sure, dad might have shot a squirrel or two on the odd occasion from the back porch of his grandmother’s cabin in rural North Florida, or killed a woodpecker for a dollar, but he wasn’t a hunter. And even though he didn’t have a problem with guns (he did buy me my first .22 when I was ten), he never really took me shooting all that much either. Besides mine, we didn’t own any guns. But whether it was my uncle Gary bringing my cousin and me out to the Everglades with any number of guns, rattling off rounds at the small, mostly unsafe range at Camp Universe, or the father of a friend bringing us to hidden lake with his twelve gauge, the butt stock of a rifle or shotgun seemed to find its way to my shoulder often. I shot as often as I could through my teens and early twenties whether it be by loading up the pockets of my Walmart safari vest with a brick or two of of cheap .22 ammo and heading out to the swamps of South Florida with my trusty Marlin 60 where my buddy and I would shoot virtually anything that moved (or didn’t move!), or sitting on the basketball court of his house with our heavily modified Crosman air rifles in to the wee hours of the morning waiting for rats to come to the various piles of rancid cheese or peanut butter we would set out. Though extremely flexible, we had a set of ethics in the swamps, or at least we thought we did. We could shoot anything we wanted with two exceptions: no alligators (avoiding jail was our primary concern), and no Smooth Swamp Birds (SSBs) which we thought were too cool to shoot (not knowing that they are virtually all protected and that we’d incur heavy fines in the event we decided to pull the trigger on an egret or a heron). We shot tens of thousands of rounds in those swamps and killed lots of animals in those days. I vividly remember making a finch essentially vaporize when I shot it at about four yards. Anything that I thought was a frog was toast. We learned just how tough a buzzard was. We didn’t set ourselves on killing as much as we could. We were trying to become better shooters. We didn’t kill because we were malicious, but because we thought we needed to in order to become better marksman. Those animals were collateral damage. But killing as a means to be a better shooter isn’t hunting; it’s just a side effect.
After I moved from South Florida to Kentucky I didn’t shoot for a number of years. I was new and the only shooting range I knew of had burnt down not long before I moved here in 2003, and I didn’t know where there was public land where I could just go out and shoot like I did in the swamps of the Everglades. Everyone I knew when I first moved was in graduate school in a very liberal English department. Finding someone who knew where I might go shooting, or someone who might take me along with them, wasn’t very likely. Some were very hostile about personal gun ownership. But there was still something about shooting that called me. Even though I had no place to shoot, I bought my first AR15 and kept it in the closet for years before I actually shot it. In fact, the only time I took a shot at anything between late 2003 and 2009 was when I killed a woodpecker that decided pecking on the framing outside my bedroom was a good idea. I even bought a Gamo air rifle specifically for the occasion.
It wasn’t until six years after I moved to Kentucky that I finally found a place to shoot, and I started shooting all of the time. But one day as I sat on the bench blasting out the eye of a prairie dog target at one hundred yards with my Savage 17HMR I had a thought:
You know, eleaf, as much fun as sitting and shooting at paper is, the logical end point of all of this practice and preparation is to use this skill hunting.
I had thought about hunting quite a bit in the two years between realizing that I wanted to hunt and getting out and hunting. I bought gear, started watching hunting shows, and began reading as much as I could on the internet. I didn’t know any hunters, not any well enough to ask if I could tag along with them anyways, and had no idea what I was doing. Where do I go? What do I do in the event I found a place to go? What would I do in the event I were to kill something? All of these questions are the result of never having been taught the skills that most hunters receive from their fathers or grandfathers. I didn’t have that benefit.
I’m not sure what it was about hunting that lured me. I had never hunted before, nor was I exposed to it very much. I wasn’t interested in trophy hunting as a sport (which isn’t to say that I’m opposed to taking trophies), and I hadn’t eaten enough game meat in my life to decide that I wanted a freezer full of venison. But I did understand hunting as a challenge; a personal goal that I could define and see through. It was about setting a task that was both as physically and mentally demanding as I wanted it to be and rising to that task. About doing what all physically abled men have evolved to do over untold generations.
Living in twenty first Century America and having a solid education, I don’t need to hunt my meat in order to support my family, but after having had a heart attack at a young age and taking on the role of stay-at-home dad I felt like I needed to contribute something meaningful to my family other than making sure my children got to school and home again. My entire cultural background is rooted in the idea that the man brings home the proverbial bacon. Since I couldn’t do that, I was going to bring it home quite literally. It was a way to have both personal goals as well as meet a cultural imperative. Hunting meant that I could once again make a unique contribution to my family. I could provide healthy meat for us to eat, something that was important in light of my already having had a heart attack so young, and teach my boys the importance of being self sufficient and setting personal goals and attaining them.
After two years of trying to make a go of it on my own I was getting nowhere. An equally inexperienced friend of mine and I made a few unsuccessful squirrel hunting trips,* and I still had no idea how to go about a hunt for larger game, and I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to finding out. A few months after my heart attack my family and I took a trip out to Glacier National Park. While there I did some backcountry hiking and had an interaction with the largest whitetail I’d ever seen (not that I had seen very many mature whitetail deer before). Not long after peeing just a few steps outside of my hammock at Gunsite Lake (I wasn’t about to walk the quarter mile to the toilet at four am in grizzly country), a massive buck woke me up grunting and scraping where I had left my scent. He was letting me know he was the proverbial big dog in those woods, not me.** It was then I knew that I needed to hunt. I’m not sure why, but there could be no more guessing. No more flaking. No more hoping that someone would call me asking if I wanted to go hunting with them. I knew that I had to take the initiative and make it happen.
In the months following my trip to Glacier I started to do some research in to outfitters. I quickly discovered that we have some of the best whitetail hunting in the country right here in Kentucky, and plenty of guides to help me get one. Every year there are massive bucks taken in the Bluegrass state, but something about being out west kept me peeking at outfitters in the wide open spaces. Hunting isn’t just about stumbling on an animal and killing it so I could put its horns on the wall (though my trophies do look mighty nice up there), but about being in nature. Having time to do more than look at it, but to truly interact with nature. To learn how animals live. To anticipate them in their own element and to beat them to the spot. Of course I could learn to hunt from one of the many knowledgeable guides in Kentucky, but there was something about being out west. It seemed more natural; like the west existed so that I could hunt it. Like so many before me, I saw an opportunity to find something out west. Something that I needed.
After making dozens of calls to outfitters in various states out west, I finally decided on one in Wyoming. I was fully forthcoming in my inexperience and was seeking a guide who would do more than show me some deer and tell me which one to shoot, but someone who would teach me the skills I needed to find them myself, how to determine which one to kill, how to kill them in the most humane way possible, how to find it once I had killed it, and what to do with a deer after I found it. Hunting is a year-long process made up of many steps, not just the pulling of the trigger. This blog is a reflection of that process from my experiences.
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* It’s just as well as neither of us knew how to gut and prepare a squirrel in order to eat it.
** In retrospect, I’m not sure why a whitetail buck was so interested in what he perceived as my scrape months before the rut would begin, but he was on it within forty minutes, and being only six feet away, he had no trouble waking me with his scraping and grunting. I’m just glad it was a deer because at first I thought it was a bear.