What does a deer look like?By JEFF LUND
December 01, 2014
My students know I hunt and love showing me photos of huge bucks they killed. I ask them casually where they went, not demanding or expecting much, and I get stone-walled.
The last deer I saw was behind a small grove a trees which separated two streaks of muskeg. It was just after sunrise. I stood for what seemed like half an hour, which was really more like five minutes, then crept out to cross. The deer darted out from behind the cover and took off in front of me, disappearing into a wall of trees and brush. If it was a buck, the rack wasn’t huge because all I saw was a set of ears. It had a good body, and was a shooter not only for meat by also my self-confidence. But I lost it. I followed the tracks as best I could in the thick frost, but eventually was left marching down the flank of a larger muskeg. The week prior I’d jumped a doe but my hunting has otherwise been painfully uneventful. So it really feels that my main weekend event is taking long quiet walks in the forest. That sounds like something my buddy Single Steve would put on one of his dating website profiles. Of course there are no forests in San Diego, so maybe that’s his problem. Anyway, the rifle hanging in my hand is just to keep up the illusion that I am a hunter, hoping at some point I’ll be in the right place to call myself one again. At this point, I don’t know what I’d do if I saw a deer. Chances are I’d be okay, because after all those years in California seeing more people hold beer bottles than deer, I did fine last fall and in this August. But those in-between times can be rough. You spend all that time thinking about hunting, then it happens, and in a moment, it’s over. All that lead up to a, “There he is” moment, slowed breathing, a squeeze, euphoria, then bloody work. The day after I spooked that maybe buck, I watched some hunting shows when I woke up too late to be anywhere for sun-up, and tried to remember that moment. Even though the shows are pretty packaged, as long as the dude isn’t in one of those executive blinds sipping coffee while waiting for the home-grown buck to walk into a predetermined shooting zone, it’s hard to be nonchalant about taking an animal. The excitement is pretty real. That’s probably why I’m going to appreciate my next episode and I know everyone says that. It’s like when your friends are catching kings and you aren’t. When you do get one it’s almost as awesome as you thought it would be, but the focus then goes to getting another one, rather than taking a moment to soak in the fact that what you longed to happen, actually did. I figured hunting around Ketchikan was just a matter of putting forth a lot of effort, and I have, but have not yet tasted the fruits of my labor. I guess if there is a plus side, I’ve been stimulating the local economy by eating out more because after walking around muskegs and brush for seven hours I don’t feel like doing anything except order a burger. Unless of course I had a deer to process.
Jeff Lund is a Teacher, Freelance Writer, living in Ketchikan, Alaska E-mail your news &
photos to editor@sitnews.us
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