With five minutes before sundown, a whitetail doe stepped into the lane that separated hardwood forest from apple orchard. She stopped and bent her head, nosing through what was left of acorns fallen from the oak trees above her.
I immediately pulled the shotgun up. I focused on shooting fundamentals there in the ground blind; more or less a camouflaged tent with windows, I had been listening to snow and the last of the leaves fall around me for over seven hours that day. The walnut stock of the shotgun pressed cold against my cheek, and I closed my left eye to sight down the barrel, focusing on the front sight, the doe’s back shoulder in blurred distance. Slowly, I exhaled through my nose, blowing the steam away from my eyes, and squeezed the trigger.
Just over 120 yards away, the doe, maybe three years old, fell where she stood, dead before she hit the ground, the slug having gone through her front shoulder, both lungs and her heart.
When I reached her, I dropped to my knees. She was peaceful, asleep, and I pulled my gloves off so I could pet her, thank her for giving her life to feed my wife and me.
It was the first animal I’d ever harvested, and I didn’t feel remorse — I hadn’t had time to question whether I’d actually pull the trigger when the time came; I just did it — I simply felt thankful. Thankful for the deer, of course, but also that I’d done it justice by making the shot when it counted.
Because here’s the thing about most hunters I know: they’re like me. I’ve never understood the idea of hunting trophies. Sure, I’d like to have a set of antlers on the wall, if I could ever convince my wife Ann to let me hang them. But what I’ll never do is hunt expressly for a trophy. I hunt to honor the animal, and honoring the animal means using the entire animal.
I look at it as going to the farmer’s market. You’re going to get much better produce than you will at the supermarket. You’ll know where it comes from. You’ll know the people who put it the seed in the ground and harvested it. By the same token, I know that the deer I harvested lived a free-range life, eating acorns and apples and corn, and coming and going as it pleased. She never saw the inside of a pen, of a factory slaughterhouse. She lived the life an animal is supposed to live.
Maybe I ought to give you some background. This wasn’t my first time hunting. I’d spent a total of nearly two weeks at my friend’s ninety-four acre farm in Northwestern Ohio. The first time, I managed to bag the flu and a 103-degree temperature. The second trip, I saw nothing. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day of deer season that I actually found myself in range of the doe.
I grew up with a BB gun my dad bought for me when I was thirteen. When I was twenty-eight, Dad, long since divorced from my mom, severely alcoholic, and crushingly depressed, shot himself.
Though we’d been estranged for a while, it took me a couple months to come to after Dad died. When I did, I found myself needing a change of scenery. As much as I love Chicago, I remember reading at the Lincoln Park Zoo that nine percent of Illinois is paved. I had this urge to smell switchgrass and cornstalks and nettles and fallen leaves the way I did when I was a kid. And my friend Bob had just bought his farm—half cornfields that he leased to a farmer, half apple orchard that hadn’t been maintained in a quarter-century, with some patches of hardwoods thrown in for good measure.
It’s a Mecca for deer. And Ohio has a lot of them. As in too many. As in my in-laws, who live in the suburbs of Cleveland a half-mile from Interstate 90, see entire herds of whitetail deer in their and their neighbor’s yards.
The state Department of Natural Resources extrapolates how many deer are in the state—and how many will be allowed to be hunted—based on the number of deer hit by cars during the year; in 2009, it came out to about 600,000 deer in the state. During the three months of archery season, the weeklong gun season, and a muzzleloading firearm season, 261,314 deer were taken by hunters in the state.
I set out to take a doe instead of a trophy buck, and that was a calculated decision. After all, by taking a female, that’s one less doe for a buck to mate with. It’s population control. (The state DNR actually encourages this—if you harvest a doe, the state will pay to have a butcher process the meat and distribute it to area food banks, a program called Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry.)
And it’s not like just anybody can go out and start shooting animals. I had to jump through some serious hoops, including a two-day hunter education class that drilled us on ethics and safety (in Indiana last season, two hunters died, both from falling out of treestands, and one had a heart attack first, so as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t count). We learned that deer don’t die of old age; once their teeth are worn down, they starve to death, since they no longer have any natural predators. We learned about the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, landmark piece of legislation that helped to bring the whitetail back from near extinction—hunters during the Great Depression had wiped them out in some areas of the country. How? Anybody who buys a firearm or ammunition is paying an eleven percent excise tax that goes directly to a trust fund run by the federal Department of the Interior that goes toward conservation of wildlife and habitat. In fact, no single group contributes more money toward conservation than hunters. (Note that’s conservation, not preservation; conservation includes hunting as a population management technique, while preservation includes legislation like the Endangered Species Act.)
After my class was over, I could buy a license, and for each deer I planned on harvesting, I had to buy a tag. If you get caught poaching a deer in Ohio, which includes hunting without a license and/or tags, expect to pay severely—to the tune of around $13,000. During whitetail gun season, you can hear the DNR’s Cessnas flying overhead, looking for that all-important fluorescent orange clothing in the woods, and Wildlife Officers have full reign to enter private property to stop unlawful hunting.
The truth is, though, there’s a big difference for me between legal hunting and ethical hunting.
A few weeks ago, I was down at Bob’s farm again, watching the sunrise from a patch of weeds I’d nestled into that overlooked a soybean field, a crossbow on my lap. Just after it was light enough to see, two does walked into the field to my right. I peered at them through my binoculars; one was the biggest doe I’d ever seen, probably in the neighborhood of 230 pounds, and the other was much smaller. But I couldn’t get them to come closer, no matter how I blew my deer calls. When I tried mimicking a large buck grunt, they flicked their tails into the air, a warning to other deer that there’s a nearby threat.
Luckily, I didn’t move. A few minutes later, from my left, two fairly large bucks walked into the soybeans. I glassed them through the binoculars. Each had antlers with about eight points on them, though one was significantly bigger than the other. As they walked past me, oblivious to my presence, I clicked the safety to fire and pulled the buck into the scope of the crossbow. I squeezed the trigger, and he jumped straight up, then made a bee-line for the woods on the opposite side of the field. I made a mental note of where he disappeared; I could have sworn I heard him fall over. I sat still for a half hour, not wanting to scare him into running deeper into the woods.
I know I hit him. There was a small bit of blood on the ground where he was standing when I fired, but the arrow was bent and had no blood on it. Once I got to the edge of the trees, there was no blood trail. Nothing. I looked for four hours without finding a sign that he’d ever been there.
The only explanation I can come up with is that I nicked him. When I fired arrows at a target that afternoon, I figured out what I’d done wrong. The scope wasn’t zeroed. I must have fired over him, just nicking his skin; if I’d hit him in a vital area, I would have found more blood.
My heart sank. The last, absolutely last thing I ever want to do is wound an animal—a clean, ethical kill is what made me feel like I’d done last year’s doe justice, after all. But I know for sure that I didn’t hit the buck, and though scared and probably sore, he’s alive, and probably smarter for having already been hunted.
And I’m a better hunter for it, too.
Daniel Prazer got his MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2009. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Fictionary, Hair Trigger 30, Reservoir, Flashquake and New City. An excerpt of his novel-in-progress appeared in the anthology Open to Interpretation. He’s a member of Pheasants Forever, the Conservation Club of Kenosha County, Whitetails Unlimited, and just bought two Ohio deer tags.