Freepik
A lone hunter in the woods.
Sharon owned a small store in Rockbridge. For a few decades her store served as a deer registration station during the nine-day gun deer season, which begins again on Saturday.
When you shot a deer in her neck of the woods you had to bring it to Sharon’s where she filled out some paper work for the DNR and replaced your paper tag with a metal one. In later years she or her son would also dig into the animal’s neck and remove glands used for Chronic Wasting Disease testing.
But when I drove by a couple of weeks ago on my way to do some bow hunting I noticed that Sharon’s was closed. There was a sign that read “CWD Testing Only.” No registration because that’s done online now. No store because there’s no in-person registration required.
Sharon’s was once the communal center of a mostly solitary pursuit. Hunters sit in their blinds for hours on end with only their own thoughts, their own Thermos of coffee, their own sandwiches and, in some years, their own shivering in the cold.
But then, if they were successful, they were required by law to show up within a day or two at Sharon’s. The policy and legal reason for this was to prevent poaching. You had to produce the deer carcass and, by displaying your license so that Sharon could copy down the information, essentially prove that you had taken this deer legally.
The unofficial reason to show up at Sharon's was that you got to share stories with strangers. “Oh, that’s a nice one,” would be the typical conversation starter. “How’d you get it?” And then ensued what could sometimes be a lengthy story of the hunter’s entire day in the woods. “And then, just as I was getting ready to walk out, I seen him out of the corner of my eye. Coming right at me!”
On opening weekend, and especially on that Saturday evening, Sharon’s small parking lot would be packed with pickups, most rusty and muddy, but a few nicer and newer. And there would be trailers hitched to station wagons and a few cars with deer heads sticking out of the trunk. Guys would mill around in the fading light, casually taking inventory on the day’s “harvest.”
I prefer to think of it as the day’s “kill.” Deer are not mushrooms. A deer is a living, breathing, sentient being about the size of a human and a hunter hits it with a piece of lead (or, better for the environment and the venison consumer’s health, copper) moving at 2,800 feet per second which then expands upon impact creating, if placed correctly, a hole through the heart. This kills the deer. I assure you the deer did not feel harvested. By pointing this out I am not arguing against hunting. I’m just saying that we should be honest about what we're actually doing out there.
But I digress. All that milling around waiting for Sharon to get to their deer formed a sort of community. And — this was not lost on Sharon — while we were milling we also bought stuff at her store. We purchased essentials, like chips, dip, beer, bourbon and maybe toilet paper.
So, the registration station — and there were hundreds if not thousands like Sharon’s around the state — served to teach us all something important: that deer hunting is about a lot more than killing deer. The anticipation of it and then the remembering of it are more important than the doing of it. You can kill nothing and still be a hunter. In fact, I’m sure there were guys who made it a point to show up at Sharon’s on Saturday evening to buy brandy or toilet paper just to see who got what and hear how it happened.
Several years ago the DNR phased out the registration stations. You could still go to Sharon’s to register your deer if you wanted, but you were strongly encouraged to take care of business online right from your stand. That was convenient and over the years more hunters took advantage of it until now most of the Sharon’s of the state have pretty much dried up and gone away.
In some cases this may have contributed to the loss of a person’s livelihood, but in all cases it meant deer hunting became more of a cold transaction as opposed to a near sacred ritual. Dispatch your deer, gut it, register it online, get it to the processor. Go home. The loss of the registration ritual — and the community it forced into existence — has sterilized the thing. Deer hunting is not supposed to be efficient. There’s supposed to be an element of difficulty to it. I mean if all bets were off, well, let’s get the drones out and call in air strikes, why don’t we?
I’m lucky. For three decades I’ve been a member in good standing of a classic Wisconsin deer camp. We didn’t really need Sharon’s, but it did expand our circle. Still, a lot of hunters don’t have this. When they lost Sharon’s, they lost a big part of what made deer hunting worthwhile.
I also do some hunting in the Upper Peninsula and I’ve been getting notices from the Michigan DNR encouraging hunters to bring their deer into a handful of DNR offices around the state. They’re offering refreshments and a nice patch that you can sew on to your jacket and they’ll age your deer for you. But it’s not legally required (Michigan has the same sort of online registration) and there doesn’t seem to be much point to it, except to try to recreate the camaraderie that we in Wisconsin once had naturally as an unintended consequence of legal requirements. I credit Michigan for trying, but I don’t see any reason to believe that it will work.
Most guys — and let’s face it, the vast majority of deer hunters are still men — don’t actively seek out communities to join. In fact, that’s been identified as a growing problem leading to all kinds of personal and social maladies. Assassins and mass murderers are almost always loners. I’m not aware of one who was a member of a deer camp. A high-powered rifle is only one ingredient in an act of senseless violence. The other ingredient is the kind of thing that places like deer camps immunize against.
We’re lucky to be born or invited into one. Otherwise, a lot of guys need to be legally required to have a conversation. And through places like Sharon’s we once were.
The DNR is saving some money with virtual registration. And it seems to me that the cost is much too high.
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.
