Every year I know exactly where I will be at 6 a.m. on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. I’ll be at the Jordahl farm in Richland County in a deer stand, probably the one about halfway up a steep ridge covered in maple trees overlooking a deer trail interchange.
That stand has been moved three times. At the end of each season the dozen guys who hunt at the farm have long discussions about where we saw deer. Then over the summer we move the stands there. Nobody ever suggests that maybe the deer will also move to avoid the stands. Never mind. Moving stands is half the fun of deer hunting.
I’ll settle into the stand (which is 30 yards from where it really should be), load my rifle, and pour some coffee. We hang our hunting clothes outdoors for days so that they absorb the ambient scents of the woods. We shower in scent-killing soap. Then the first thing we do when we get out there is open up a thermos of hot coffee. Never mind. Deer seem to like the smell of coffee.
If tradition holds, I should be hearing, if not seeing, my first deer sometime between official shooting time of 6:30 and the time the sun finally makes its way above my ridge at about 10 a.m.
Maybe I’ll shoot. Maybe I won’t. It depends on how sure I am of a clean shot and it depends on the deer. Under the farm’s informal earn-a-buck rule I should pass on bucks until I take a doe as I shot a buck last year. The idea is to balance bucks with does in order to control the population, which the DNR now estimates to be at a record just shy of 2 million statewide.
Whether I get a deer in the morning or not, I’ll stay out all day. I’ll eat lunch in my stand — hot creamy tomato soup from a thermos and a sandwich. At some point in the afternoon I’ll need to stretch my legs. So, I’ll still hunt up and down the old grass road behind my stand, walking slowly and quietly hoping to rouse a deer that is bedded down.
As the afternoon fades, I’ll finish the last of my coffee and bear down back in my stand because dawn and dusk are when deer are most active. If I’ve taken care of my responsibility to dispatch a doe, I’ll be looking for a nice buck.
A word here about killing a deer. Nobody in this camp takes it lightly. Every harvested deer is tested for CWD (adding to the DNR’s data set) and every deer is consumed or donated. Deer rarely need to be tracked because all of us work hard to get off a clean, sure shot. For people who are against hunting in all its forms there’s nothing I can write that will change their minds. But for those of us who eat meat, coming face to face with the reality of what that means is a worthwhile thing to do. And, of course, in a state with a burgeoning deer population, the 200,000 to 300,000 animals that are taken in a given season mean less crop damage, fewer car-deer crashes, and fewer deer starving over winter.
Whether or not I’ve been able to shoot any deer, at about 4:30 p.m. I’ll climb down from my stand and walk back out the way I came in. I will not have seen or spoken to a soul since I left the farmhouse before dawn.
When I arrive, some of the other guys will be back at the hunting shed changing their clothes and having a beer while they tell stories about what they saw and heard. The others will straggle in over the course of the next half hour. Then we’ll hop into a utility vehicle and collect the deer of those who were successful.
Later we’ll have a cocktail around the woodstove in the farmhouse and then the traditional opening evening steak dinner. I always grill and I can usually offer steaks that run from charred to raw. Why I keep getting this assignment is a mystery to me, but when a tradition is first assigned in deer camp it’s hard to shake, even amid demonstrated incompetence.
More stories will be told, and we’ll toast the camp founders, Bud, Marilyn and Donnie Jordahl who are no longer with us but whose traditions we carry on.
Every year the same exact things happen at almost exactly the same times on the same Saturday in November among a cast of hunters that rarely changes. For people like me who have taken our leave from organized religion, this is the closest thing to a religious ritual in our lives.
John Madson was a Midwestern naturalist, journalist and writer, who is credited with starting the modern prairie restoration movement. In an essay titled “Why Men Hunt,” he wrote, “As long as men have hunted they have banded into special hunting packs with their own taboos, traditions, and rituals. And sometimes the companionship and the rituals become more important than the hunt itself, and sometimes the greatest pleasure is in the anticipation and the recollection, with the hunt only serving to bond the two.”
Madson knew what he was talking about. For most of us the hunting itself encompasses all of about 20 hours over two days out of 365, but we start planning for it in the summer and we talk about it all year long.
And the actual taking of deer is only ostensibly the point. I can only speak for myself, but I believe that for pretty much all of us in this old deer camp, the traditions and rituals really have become more important than the hunt itself and that becomes even more true for the elders of the tribe of which I find myself now second in age.
It’s two days that bond anticipation and recollection and bond a lot of other things at the same time. In an uncertain world it’s nice to know exactly where you’ll be just before sunrise on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.