A Deer Hunter is Born
I was only 14 in the fall of 1956, but I was already a passionate pheasant hunter. Once the hunting season opened, while the other guys were at football practice or shooting pool and playing the pinball machines a Mel’s Grill, you could usually find me walking the countryside with my trusty Model 12 shotgun in hand.
Our family lived on the outskirts of Brookings, a college town in the heart of eastern South Dakota’s farm country. I knew every landowner within a three-mile radius of town and had their permission to hunt whenever I wanted. I also knew intimately the location of every woodlot and shelterbelt, slough, roadside ditch an other patches of cover that held birds.
On weekdays after school and on the weekends, hunting on foot, always alone and without a dog, I would hit as many coverts as I could, shoot a bird or two or three and then head home, sometimes arriving after dark. My parents had come to accept my passion for hunting, and while they were no doubt concerned about my going out alone and getting back late, they never expressed that to me. Times were different then.
In those years, our county had a healthy population of ringnecks, but white-tailed deer were scarce. Indeed, despite all the time I spent in the outdoors, I had never seen a whitetail in the wild, until…
It was a cold, blustery Saturday morning and I had just shot my second long-tailed rooster. The next closest piece of cover was a circular stand of tall willows and bluestem grasses about a half-mile away on the far side of a cut cornfield. Adjusting my approach into the gusty wind, I headed toward the spot where I figured there had to be one or more roosters hunkered down out of the cold.
After easing ever-so-quietly across the corn stubble, I arrived at the edge of the willows. There, only 20 feet from where I stood, an enormous whitetail buck suddenly arose from his bed, then turned to stare right at me. For what seemed like minutes he just looked at me, his breath coming in thin, wispy clouds, his huge body tense and poised to explode like some kind of living missile. But what really amazed me was the size and spread of his antlers—two sets of five nearly identical tines, each long, dark and heavy.
Just as suddenly, the buck gathered his sinewy muscles, then erupted from the willows and raced away across the stubble, his long white flag waving back and forth in what seemed to be a syncopated rhythm. The field was wide open for a good mile and, as I watched, the buck’s ground-eating run gradually slowed to an almost princely canter across the frozen ground until he reached a distant shelterbelt where he stopped and looked back in my direction before disappearing in the trees. I would never see him again.
The encounter was so unexpected, so breathtakingly exciting, that right then and there I decided to start back for home, eager to relate my experience to mom and dad.
Although I didn’t think about it at the time, a deer hunter was born that day. Since then, I’ve hunted whitetails in at least a dozen states and provinces, from Michigan to Texas, from Alberta to the Carolinas. But after all my wanderings, that remarkable encounter still stands as the most unforgettable memory in my sporting life.
This excerpt, “A Deer Hunter is Born”, is the re-titled preface to Sporting Classics’ publication of The Greatest Deer Hunting Book Ever.
There’s something about the deer-hunting experience, indefinable yet undeniable, which lends itself to the telling of exciting tales. This book offers abundant examples of the manner in which the quest for whitetails extends beyond the field to the comfort of the fireside. It includes more than 40 sagas which stir the soul, tickle the funny bone, or transport the reader to scenes of grandeur and moments of glory.
On these pages is a stellar lineup featuring some of the greatest names in American sporting letters. There’s Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning William Faulkner, the incomparable Robert Ruark in company with his “Old Man,” Archibald Rutledge, perhaps our most prolific teller of whitetail tales, genial Gene Hill, legendary Jack O’Connor, Gordon MacQuarrie and many others. Buy Now
