It was 1998 and my wife’s uncle had received exclusive permission from a farmer’s widow to hunt a hundred or more acres of farmland bordered by swamp and hardwood forest in Duplin County, North Carolina. He’d hunted the land since opening day, and for most of that time he had been working to get a shot at an old gray 8-pointed ghost who would tease the shadowed edges of the swamp near the end of legal shooting time.
Uncle Don had offered to take me hunting early in the season, but I was fresh out of seminary in my very first church as pastor and my wife and I had welcomed our first baby girl into the world about the time deer season opened. Time and sleep were scarce, but I hadn’t hunted since moving away from my hunting buddies and the public lands we had frequented north of Raleigh-Durham. I had missed most of two hunting seasons and I was itching to get into the woods again. I had told Uncle Don that I wasn’t sure when I’d get the chance to go hunting, but if he’d give me a day’s notice when it was a good time for him to take me along, I’d do my best to take him up on the opportunity to sit in a treestand. That opportunity came on a cold, drizzly Monday in November, and I made good on my promise.
That afternoon we piled into Uncle Don’s old Chevy to make the half hour trip out to the hunting property. On the way, he told me all about the gray buck he’d seen repeatedly but that had not yet presented a shot. Uncle Don talked with equal amounts of boyish excitement and manly frustration about the old ghost. He knew every detail—a big bodied, short-tined 8-point with darker antlers than most deer he’d seen and a distinctive scar on his back.
Having seen him coming from the swamp, his plan that day was to sneak beyond the swamp’s edge in hopes of getting a shot on the old boy. Uncle Don suggested I put my climbing stand in the finger of woods between two fields where he’d watched the ghost tease him all season. Not knowing when or if I might have another chance to go hunting and, since it wasn’t a doe day, I asked Uncle Don if it would be okay for me to take a less than trophy buck for the freezer if that was all that presented itself. He gladly obliged me.
When we arrived, he pointed out a good spot for my climbing stand as he continued further to where he hoped to rendezvous with the old 8-pointer. I climbed twenty feet up the tree and set up my umbrella roof to help with the drizzle. I quickly realized that my shooting lane was a 3-foot arc between a dead pine tree trunk and another small tree that were just a few feet out from my extended rifle barrel. If I was to have a shot that day, it was going to have to be in a workable but narrow window.
Now settled in, I paused for a short prayer: “Lord, thank you for letting me get out here today. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out here again. Lord, I don’t even care if I take a deer today. But would you give me a good day in the stand and just let me see something? Thank you again, Lord. Amen.”
As I lifted my head and scanned the edges of the field, something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over to see something trotting into the field. I suppose I expected it to be someone’s errant hunting dog because I certainly didn’t expect God to break form and answer my prayer immediately. After all, the Lord knew how much I needed patience and he had always seemed to teach it rather than give it up to this point. So I glanced over and turned away quickly, but did a double take when I realized that dog had antlers!
With Uncle Don’s permission to take a meat deer, I didn’t bother to examine the antlers further. I began working my grunt call to slow the trotting deer, but his nose had never left the ground. He was hot on the trail of his next paramour. Then it dawned on me that he was going to blast right across my narrow shooting lane if I couldn’t slow him down and I’d never get a quality shot on him.
As he entered the window between the dead pine and the sapling, he put on the brakes and slowed from a trot to a walk, still without lifting his nose from the ground. This was it—now or never—175 yards away and nearly perfectly broadside! I put the crosshairs a little forward to account for his movement, took a breath and let it half out, then squeezed the trigger on my 270.
With the report of the rifle, I blinked but opened my eyes to see that the shot had slapped him into a barrel roll and that he had landed on his side with his back to me. He kicked once and then lay still. My eyes, drawn to his legs by his final movement, scanned through the scope to his head to see the beautiful curved beam. This was a nice buck…unless I’d shot off the other side of his rack! Fortunately for me, buck fever had not started before the shot, but now it was in full pitch. I slid that climber down the tree like a fireman down a pole when the five-alarm bells ring! So excited was I that I’d have to climb the tree again later to retrieve my umbrella roof I’d left hanging twenty feet up.
I walked quickly out to inspect the deer. Well, let’s be honest. I ran. As I drew near, I could see that the other side of his antlers was intact but nestled into the soft tilled under dirt of the farm field he’d been trotting through moments ago. I lifted his head and found eight points. I couldn’t believe it. And as I looked him over, my elation moved to nervous laughter with the discovery of a scar on his dark gray back! I had just taken Uncle Don’s old Gray Ghost!
I walked to the old Chevy not far away and retrieved the deer with the help of Uncle Don’s homemade deer hauler cart, then retrieved my umbrella and stand before piling into the cab of the to wait for Uncle Don and rehearse what I’d say when I saw him. After dark, I saw his flashlight across the field, so I signaled with my own and walked out to meet him.
He greeted me with a big smile. “I heard a shot pretty early. Did you get one?”
I scratched my chin and answered, “Well, I did take a shot soon after I got settled in. And I’ve got good news and bad news”
“Well, what’s the good news?” he asked.
“I got the deer I shot at,” I told him.
“That’s great!” Uncle Don responded, “So what’s the bad news then?”
Scratching my chin some more, “Unless there’s two deer out here with eight points and a scar on his back, I got the Gray Ghost”
“Well that’s great, boy! Let’s go see him!” he replied with a genuinely congratulatory slap on the back.
As we made our way back to the old Chevy in the drizzling rain, I couldn’t help but thank the Lord for answered prayers–and for Uncle Don.
