Twilight of the Hunter

I stepped out onto the muddy parking area and donned my blaze-orange hoodie. Another deer hunting season had come. I readied my predatory gear — utility belt, small backpack, rifle — and headed into the wilderness. It was warmish, 36 degrees, for an early November morning in central Minnesota.

After killing my first deer seven years earlier (detailed *here), I succeeded again the next year and, boy, I thought I must be pretty good at this. My luck ran out, however, and the next four years were busts. One year, the only deer I saw pranced across the road as I was driving away from the hunting grounds. I was sure it was mocking me.

This time would be different. A buddy who was into bow hunting scouted out the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge and thought it was pretty ideal. A couple of weeks earlier, I came to look for myself and agreed. The wooded and winding St. Francis River flowed through this section of the refuge, but the dense woods were broken by large patches of grassland. That’s what Sherburne is known for — an area where the ecologies of big woods, marsh and prairie meet. It creates “edge country” and that’s what deer like best. Deer sightings and signs were plentiful on my scouting trip. This was a good spot.

The 30,000-acre refuge near the town of Zimmerman was established in 1967 and is maintained by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. It has a reputation as a birder’s paradise. There’s a 7-mile circuit through the refuge’s marshlands and every time I’ve made the drive, the bird watching has been wonderful. Moving slowly, the car acts as a blind and often you can get quite close. My favorite experience was stopping to watch a kingfisher swooping and snatching small fish from a pond. I was close enough that its sleek blue, white and gray body filled the field of vision of my binoculars. Other birds I’ve seen there include cormorants, grebes, mergansers, wood ducks, swans, sandhill cranes and bald eagles.

If it’s a wildlife refuge, why allow deer hunting?

Having no natural predators in the vicinity (namely wolves), deer populations can get overly large, which leads to them overgrazing the vegetation and depriving other animals of habitat. Allowing human hunting is probably not ideal, especially since the culling is concentrated during a short period of the year. It would be better ecologically if the hunting was more spread out over time.

On this morning, I was a couple miles north of the bird-infested marsh in an area of drier ground. I headed toward the river and into the trees that lined the banks. I used a method called still-hunting: walking slowly for a few yards, then stopping (maybe a deer will flush, thinking it’s been spotted), then scanning for any shape that might be a deer in hiding (in the woods, my imagination conjures lots of deer-like shapes), then moving again a few more yards and repeating the process. The method is taxing and challenging but I lack the patience to hunker down in a deer stand for hours at a time. I’m a walker, a pacer. I need to move.

Something seemed to shift. I raised the rifle. The something resolved itself into a tangle of deadwood and ground plants moving with the breeze. I lowered the rifle.

“Rifle” is a glamorous word for the weapon I carried. It was actually a slug gun. The Sherburne refuge is located below what in Minnesota is called the “shotgun line.” North of it, high-powered rifles like a .30-06 are allowed for big-game hunting. Below it, you have to use a shotgun. The rationale is that a shotgun has a shorter range and the projectile is less likely to carry for miles into someone’s house or workplace. But the rule is antiquated. Slug guns aren’t really shotguns like you would use for pheasant hunting. They now have rifled barrels and use special shells with bullets that are jacketed with a sabot — a polymer thingamajig that separates from the bullet as soon as it leaves the barrel. It helps accelerate the bullet to a much higher velocity than you’d get from a heavy slug in a regular shotgun. It makes the potentially lethal range nearly as long as a typical hunting rifle.

In fact my slug gun was more powerful than the pistol-caliber carbine I’d used on previous hunts above the shotgun line. Called the H&R Tracker II, it was twenty gauge and single-shot, meaning you had to reload by hand after every shot. The gun wasn’t pretty but I kind of liked it for its rugged simplicity.

I continued my advance through the brush near the river. Even though it was slow — tiptoeing through the ground clutter, stepping over dead wood — it was fatiguing. I was beginning to feel my high-side-of-50 age. Yet the toil was part of the reason I’d taken up deer hunting. I had this strong, capable body. An instinct nagged me use it, use it before using it was no longer an option.

By late morning, my meanderings had resulted in no deer sign. The sun was up and the air had warmed to the point I was sweating. I doubted I would have any luck today. Then I heard splashing near the river. Slowly I approached, rifle ready. Not a deer but two animals playing in the water near a sharp u-bend in the river. At first I thought they were otters but, not having that eel-like quality, I realized they were muskrats. The pair didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular — diving, circling, climbing onto the bank to hunch for a while, then plunging back into the water.

I set the rifle against a tree, sat down on a fallen trunk and just watched. The muskrats continued their pattern of play for a few minutes, then decided on a change of venue and swam up river out of sight. I decided it was a good time for lunch and ate my ham-and-cheese sandwich, apple and potato chips. In that setting — overlooking the little gully where the muskrats had played — the mundane fare was acutely tasty. I realized that without even having seen a deer, this morning’s hunt was a successful one.

I decided to head home. I cut a northwesterly course toward the trail that would take me back to the car-park. After a 100 yards or so of woods, I emerged onto a heavily grazed field and walked toward a line of trees where I knew the trail was. My mind drifted into reveries as it tends to do. The opening of the senses that comes from hunting, when sights and sounds have an enhanced distinctiveness, had by that time faded. Naturally, that’s when the buck appeared.

It trotted in an unhurried way across the field, nearly perpendicular to my path, maybe 75 yards away. The sun was at my back, the wind blew toward me, and the deer didn’t know I was there. My reverie snapped; my heart surged into my throat. I raised the rifle and pulled back the hammer. It was definitely a buck with a good-sized set of antlers. I put a bead on it and led it a little, following it with the iron sights.

I didn’t take the shot.

The buck disappeared into a thicket of tall reeds. I made a half-hearted attempt to follow but soon gave up and headed back toward the trail.

Why didn’t I take the shot?

The proximate answer is that the deer was a moving target on the edge of the range I was confident I could hit with any precision. I’m pretty sure if I’d pulled the trigger, I would have hit it. I just didn’t know where. Hitting a game animal in the wrong spot is bad for a number of reasons, but the main one is that you’d wound it in such a way that it would run off and die a slow death.

Afterward my brother said I should have shouted. The deer likely would have stopped and then I would have had a clean broadside shot. That’s probably true. But would I have taken the shot even then?

I think now the answer is no. Something had changed in the course of the morning. I had answered the call of my predatory instincts. Hunting had been a revealing experience and I have no regrets, but the time had come to set it aside.