A Deer Camp sign with the word "Deer" crossed out and replaced with "Dave."
This has always been a week I look forward to all year. It’s the week before the gun deer season opener on Saturday.
But this year is different. For only the second time since 1992 I’m going to miss the season. The other time was in 2020 because of the pandemic. I’ll miss it this year because I’m traveling with some friends to Europe. Said friends still have day jobs and so, for various reasons, this was the only week they could travel.
This was no small sacrifice on my part, but given that they’re all still paying into Social Security, it seems like accommodating their schedules is the right and patriotic thing to do.
But I’m going to miss it. My hunting buddies are making their plans. Assignments are being made for dinner prep, cocktail hours, breakfasts. Most are planning lunch in their stands, which traditionally includes hot Campbell’s tomato soup from a Thermos. Preparation of an item this delicate and special must be assigned to the most skilled of chefs. It has been. Saturday night dinner will feature venison steaks from a buck dispatched last season. That will follow old fashioneds which, in a recent addition to tradition, are created through an elaborate process involving smoking them by lighting a piece of cedar above the glass. When it comes to cocktail hour at camp details matter.
In the last few weeks the hunters have visited the Jordahl farm in Richland County to go out to their stands, put a chair in their blind, trim back brush from their shooting lanes and look for signs of deer, like buck rubs, which look like bark freshly ground off a tree trunk. It’s where a buck has rubbed his antlers in anticipation of the rut, which is the deer hunter word for mating season.
According to the forecasts, which I watch closely starting a week and a half out, it looks to be a relatively warm year. Usually we want cold, “deery” weather. The best days, in my view, are classic November days — cloudy, cold, blustery. I’m not sure if that’s the best weather for seeing deer — strong opinions are held on this topic — it’s just the aesthetics of the thing, the kind of day that feels right for hunting.
But I actually would have welcomed a warm year for a change. We’ve had several chilly ones in a row and last year was downright arctic with temperatures barely in the 20s and a howling wind out of the northwest. A comfortable day in the stand would have been a nice break.
I compensated myself for the loss of deer camp this year by having my own Dave Camp in the north woods. I put up a stand across the road from our cabin in the Upper Peninsula and I went bow hunting out there in the Ottawa National Forest for nine days straight, always in the hours before dusk. I saw deer almost every day and I played hide and seek with an eight-point buck. He showed up on four of those days and I kept trying to anticipate where and when I might see him again and to think about how I might get a shot off.
It never happened. I shot at nothing but a target. But killing a deer was, at most, a secondary goal. The main thing was to be out there in the woods, 18 feet up in a big maple tree, watching and listening. I took a book in my backpack — Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — because I thought a deer stand would be a good place to contemplate my place in the universe, but I only opened it once. I found what was happening in the woods plenty entertaining.
On my last day of Dave Camp, before I headed out to my stand, I left a can of beer in the garage, where I keep my hunting stuff. I came back in the growing darkness, shed my gear, switched on a space heater and drank my beer. It’s what my friends and I do after a day in the woods. The beer tasted good but it wasn’t the same without all the stories from my fellow hunters about what we saw or heard. I listened to All Things Considered instead. Eh…
I would say that, at most, the actual hunting part of deer hunting is maybe 50% of the whole experience and killing a deer is far less than that. I haven’t taken a deer since 2018 and I don’t care much.
Hunting alone is fine. You still get the solitude part. You still get the chance to try to puzzle out the ways of deer. If a guy felt in the mood he could still get in some reading or take a nap. But there’s no way to replace the camaraderie of deer camp.
On Friday evening, as the guys gather for the hunt and eat chili and talk about their plans for the next morning, I’ll be someplace over the North Atlantic. I’ll be with good friends and it promises to be a great trip. I know I’m lucky. I don’t want to be a whiner. This is your classic First World problem.
But I suppose I can be forgiven for a little wistfulness. I’ll wish them a good and safe hunt and make plans to join them next year.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
