×

No Butt-Hunting For This Monday Muncher

This week, a half-million of us will hunt. Most will do so on our butts.

Not me.

They can have that type of “hunting.”

Get up at 0h-dark-thirty. Chomp a grease-laden breakfast. Pile on layers of clothing. Drive, or ride a four-wheeler, almost up to a tree stand. Tote a rifle, a suitcase-sized pack of snacks, another suitcase-sized pack of knife, latex gloves and “tools” up into the tree stand, or lay some below the stand. Huff and puff up into the stand, making sure to break a sweat beneath those layers of clothes.

Then sit there. Look around. Maybe a deer will come past. In an hour or so, that predawn sweat will produce an early morning chill.

That is hunting?

Bah.

Sitting is for watching television, or playing on a computer.

In manly fashion, I hunt on my feet. I stalk.

At least, I tell myself that I “stalk.”

The Native Americans and early settlers in this area really did stalk. They crept, and sometimes crawled, through the briars and the brambles. They joined together and put on drives to flush out deer, bear, turkeys and other game. They could slip silently through crunchy forest floor leaves and make nary a splash or squoosh while crossing streams or swampy areas.

Me? The crunching sound of my feet stomping on frost-stiffened leaves is drowned out by the crinkle of unwrapping peener butter cups, one after the other.

The rifle held in such readiness by our stalking forebears is slung across my shoulder or cradled in the crook of an elbow, requiring precious seconds and too much telltale motion to elevate to firing position without alarming a deer.

Oh. Those briars and brambles? Nope.

I stick to the old logging trails. I might venture into “the woods” to push through a stick-thick growth of sumac, but deer can hide from me with impunity within anything that grows thorns.

I don’t butt-hunt for hours on end.

Sure, I sit. At dawn, it makes sense to sit, because even sitting still, it takes concentration and double-take stares to coax the outline of a deer’s ear, or the prongs of a buck’s antlers, into distinct relief against the gloomy background of black tree bark and upthrust shrubbery. Besides, deer move of their own volition at dawn. Then, I’ll sit.

But by full daylight, I grow restless.

I heed the urge to prowl through the woods and get the bedded deer up and moving.

I have kicked at least two bucks to a neighbor ensconced in a tree stand in recent years.

That’s fine. I like my neighbors. I am happy to help out.

Every so often, I actually see the deer that I kick out. Sometimes, they obligingly stop and look back to see what darn fool is tramping around. Or maybe they smell the delicious peener butter cups whose wrappings now make bulges in the pockets of my orange hunting vest.

I can hit standing deer with a rifle if they aren’t too far away. “Too far” used to be 300 yards or further. In a half century of hunting, my longest successful shot was 275 yards. My unbelieving hunting companions paced it off.

That was 30 years ago. Though the eyeglasses I now wear produce something close to 20/20 vision in the eye doctor’s office, my slowly growing cataracts turn sharp outlines into blurs. And I no longer hold a rifle rock-steady while standing in a field.

Unless I can lean against a tree, or drop to a knee and wrap the sling around my arm for steadiness, I can’t hit faraway deer. I pass up those shots.

So I walk along, munching, sometimes humming. I am not especially pious, but I do talk with God as I amble. When I pause to sit for 20 minutes, I even use my fingertips for beads and tell the decades of a rosary. To me, Nature and God are two faces of the same coin.

If an especially dimwitted deer presents a near-certain target, I’ll shoot. In recent years, those have regularly been does.

No matter. You can’t eat the horns. My wife and I both love venison.

The butt-hunters have more success than I do. They take more deer. They take big-antlered bucks.

But, good Lord! They sit there, hour after hour, when our mini-marvels of God’s woodlots and fields are just waiting to be seen.

Oh. Pay no attention to those friends and family members who chortle that the reason I stay on the ground is that I get the shakes, and perhaps a nosebleed, whenever I must climb to above stepladder height.

I am a fearless nimrod, not a roly-poly butt hunter!

Now, pass another package of peener butter cups, and excuse me while I fish my bottle of apple juice out of my game bag.

Deer?

Plenty of time to look for them after this next snack.

ı ı ı

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *
   

COMMENTS

[vivafbcomment]

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today