One of the things I like about deer hunting is the combination of solitude and community. For four glorious days in November I start my day before sunrise absolutely alone, sitting as quietly as I can all by myself in the woods. And I stay there as long as I can, sometimes until the sun goes down.
But in the evening the guys gather back at the farmhouse, tell stories about what they saw, eat snacks and prepare dinner. Beer is often involved. Sometimes I mix up a batch of manhattans. Sometimes we play Sheepshead.
These private tribal aspects of the deer hunting ritual won’t go away with new state regulations from the Department of Natural Resources, but the things that linked each deer hunting camp to the broader community of state hunters have been all but obliterated, and that’s not good.
For the uninitiated, this requires a little explanation. Until a few years ago, here’s how it had worked for a couple of generations or more: Hunters needed to wear a large back tag on their coats. This identified them as having registered and purchased a license. It made it easy for wardens to identify legitimate hunters and, more importantly, become immediately suspicious of anyone in the woods with a gun and no back tag. (We call these people poachers.)
Then, when a deer was shot (the polite word is “harvested,” as if we were picking tomatoes instead of killing an animal), the carcass was tagged with a weatherproof strip that came off the back tag. This proved to any warden who checked that the deer had been taken according to regulations, even if the hunter wasn’t present when the deer was found in the field.
At some point in the next 24 hours it was required that the carcass be presented at a registration station, where the deer was registered and, in later years, a sample could be taken to test the animal for chronic wasting disease. These registration stations were sometimes official DNR offices, but they were more often local bars, filling stations or convenience stores. Where I hunt it was the Natural Bridge Store owned and operated by Sharon.
You’d drive into the small parking lot and there would be guys in hunting garb hanging around waiting for Sharon to come along and register their deer. Antlers would be held up. Guys who otherwise didn’t know each other would start a conversation with, “Nice buck.” Or “Where’d you get that one?” And stories would be told.
Hunters would also buy stuff at the Natural Bridge Store. Chips, beer, milk, juice, newspapers, lottery tickets, whiskey, lightbulbs, cheese, crackers, duct tape, toilet paper, salsa, etc. They actually needed approximately 25 percent of what they purchased there. This was a shot in the arm to the local economy.
A few years ago the DNR ended all that, more or less. Now you can use your smartphone to register your deer right in the field. No need to haul it to a registration station. No need to tell stories, share experiences or buy whiskey and duct tape. No cervid habeas corpus.
And this year the DNR joined virtually every other state in eliminating back tags. It was supposed to be some sort of cost-saving measure.
Now, it’s true that producing the deer body at the registration station could be a bit of a hassle, and from a purely rational standpoint back tags aren’t absolutely necessary to prevent poaching. But these things had important symbolic value because they identified us and linked us to one another as a deer hunting community. They were almost worth it for that purpose, even if they weren’t technically required to get the job done.
And, in truth, I do have a concern that poaching will increase. When we move deer hunting to a completely private experience that can take place entirely without leaving private land, what’s to prevent a slide into irresponsibility to the broader community? A certain attitude of “who’s going to know if I take an extra deer” can develop over time among some folks prone to that point of view anyway.
Hunting can be an exercise in independence and rapturous solitude. But deer and all wildlife don’t belong to individuals. They are a public resource. Hunters are answerable to the broader society when they kill a deer, answerable to the extent that they must prove that they’ve acted within the rules. And they’re accountable to one another. We owe each other the stories behind the racks on our walls and even before they become that, stories about the dead animals in the backs of our pickups.
Technology and new regulations are making it easier for us to see Wisconsin’s sacred deer hunting ritual as a completely private affair. And that’s sacrificing more than half of the entire thing.
