Click, No Bang
After years of failure, this was my chance to walk out of the woods victorious. I had spotted some movement about sixty yards to my right, my eyes locked in, and then I saw him. He was slowly walking down a large pathway that encircled a dilapidated wire fence with several breaks and bends from time and falling trees. After leaping over a bend in the fence, he strolled across my field of vision — surprisingly calm for a deer in woods that had been ringing with the sound of gunfire. He was no trophy buck, but he was Pennsylvania legal: three points on his right side and a broken antler on his left. I had watched one just like him pass under my tree stand no more than forty-five minutes before.
But this one was coming home with me, or so I thought. I blindly grabbed my rifle as it leaned up against the back corner of my stand, keeping my eyes in his direction. Slowly, I raised the butt to my right cheek, peered through the scope, found an area behind his left shoulder, pulled the trigger, and heard the worst sound possible. Click, but no bang. I thought, “No. This cannot be happening.”
The other one I mentioned that ran under my tree stand got away, like most deer do. He didn’t stop to ask directions, and by the time I could get a beat on him, I was staring through a scope into the setting sun. No way I was taking that shot, no matter how disappointing it was once again, to watch a legal deer I wasn’t able to shoot move through my range. But that has been my experience.
No matter where I set up my place to hunt, no deer seems to ever put themselves in a spot that makes it easy to aim and shoot, regardless if I’m launching a bullet or an arrow. And they tend not to stop and display themselves, so making adjustments when they are sketchy and have massive eyes that detect motion and are constantly scanning for danger is tricky. The last buck I had in my field of view took off running when I moved my left index finger to adjust my scope. He spotted that movement from about seventy yards away, even though I was elevated and mostly hidden behind a burlap sack that surrounded my tree stand. Yeah, they are that good at times.
Deer Are Elusive
That’s one thing I really had to experience to understand. Without sitting in the woods for hours on end, facing freezing cold wind gusts in a tree, I never would have understood what it takes to find and kill a deer. Growing up in Los Angeles and never having experience with deer, much less animals in general, it can be easy to think that hunting is like it is in the movies and television. Some guys throw on flannels and orange vests, stroll out into the woods, randomly shoot at helpless animals, then pat each other on the back. Sometimes a hunter can get lucky and something like that happens, but most guys I see walking out of the woods on opening day of hunting season walk out holding nothing but a rifle and their gear.
After understanding deer movement, which you can never truly understand and always changes, you learn to look for “sign.” Sign can include deer droppings, small pathways through the woods where they trample through brush or leaves in the fall, scrapes where males use their hooves to scrape the ground and mark territory, or rubs where antlers have been routinely scraping the bark off of trees. Without a trained eye, these things are essentially invisible. A guy who grew up in a concrete jungle would see nothing but a forest. But once you learn to see these traces of activity, the forest transforms itself into a story. That story can tell you where it is you need to set up in order to watch that story play itself out in real-time.
A lot of guesswork and hope goes into the next steps. You make guesses on how that deer will move through your area and hope that the weather and especially the wind cooperate. The position of the sun can change how you see the deer and if it sees you first, especially if the wind is carrying your scent towards its incredibly sensitive nose. If it smells you, and believe me, we stink, it will be gone before you ever know it was around. At best, you may hear the crunching of leaves as it takes off through the forest.
And that is what I did. With the help of my father in-law, who has been hunting and working with wildlife his entire life, I found a spot that had all the signs of success: deer droppings, a scrape, and the wind generally pulled human scent away from the area of focus. The area surrounding this tree stand was teeming with activity. Deer were spending time there, and it would just be a matter of patience before I’d see a target.
And he was right. Seeing two bucks within an hour from the same location is not a common thing. So when I saw the second buck of the day stroll into range, there was no way I was going to let him go. He was little, but he was legal, and five years of sitting in the freezing cold going home empty handed was weighing heavy on my decision process. So to hear a click and no bang was devastating.
After I got over the initial shock of what happened, I opened up the chamber of my bolt action rifle, looking to be sure there was a bullet in there, and there it was, right exactly where it was supposed to be. So I pushed the bolt back into firing position, took aim again, and pulled the trigger. Click, but no bang, number two.
Buck Fever
By now, my heart is pounding out of my chest and I’m starting to shake. That’s one thing people who have never hunted may not realize. Hunters often get what they call “buck fever.”
Buck fever refers to the anxiety and anticipation hunters feel when they see a buck and start the process of shooting it. I’ve experienced this with any type of deer, doe or buck, that I’ve decided to shoot. My heart starts racing and beating so hard that it feels like a drum about to crack my sternum from the inside. And for me, that is what convinced me I needed to pursue hunting as at least a hobby. It was as if my physiology was calling to me through millions of years of evolution to tell me I was in the right place.
Never before had I experienced anything like this, and I have had some harrowing experiences, to put it lightly. My experience as a Navy Corpsman attached to a Hawaii based Marine Corps infantry unit took me to Afghanistan twice. Yet still, even after being in several firefights, disappearing in clouds of rock and dust from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and running through desert villages as RPGs downed our helicopters, I never once felt anything that compares to spotting deer in the wild.
It has been so intense at times, that I experienced vision loss tracking a doe as it walked through the forest. That convinced me there is something deeply embedded in my humanity that pushes me towards seeking prey. That is what I am connecting with when I’m pursuing this goal.
And this was the physiological condition I was in as my second pull of the trigger produced another click with no bang. I couldn’t believe my bad but also good luck. After two sets of movement and trigger pulls he was still meandering across a somewhat open area. I decided to abandon the seven millimeter bullet in the chamber, pulled the action completely open, and let the bullet fall into my palm. I slowly chambered another round, keeping my eye shifting back towards the buck, and set my rifle back on the metal bar at the front of my stand. Fortunately, he was still there, slowly scanning the ground in front of him, but looking a little curious.
Closing the Deal
Maybe he smelled something funny and/or heard some of my movement as I fumbled through loading a new round without dropping the bad one, avoiding the clink of metal on metal. But for whatever reason, he was slowly turning the other direction and moving to my right.
He was now what hunters call “broadside” to me, which exposed his right flank to my crosshairs. I placed the point where the crosshairs meet on a section just behind his right shoulder blade, pulled the trigger slowly, and finally, a bang. He dropped immediately as if a light switch was tripped. No running, which can often happen depending on a myriad of variables to include bullet size, the individual deer, and where it was hit amongst other factors we may never know. But not this time. He dropped dead where he stood.
Finally, it was done. That day, I would be going home with my deer.
Connecting With My Kill
Often hunters will sit in their stand and allow the deer to bleed out and die, especially if they run. What you don’t want to do is mortally wound it, and spook it into running even further away. But that was not the case here. I could see his torso on the ground from where I sat, and his head started to convulse no more than a minute after he dropped. He was dead and nothing I could do would push him to run.
I decided to step down the ladder and go take a look. Because he had jumped a fence, I needed to find a hole in it and then walk over to him. It’s amazing how quickly you can become disoriented in the woods. Just walking thirty yards to my left, stepping through a hole in the fence, and then reorienting myself to the stand, he disappeared. It took me a few minutes to find him as objects that aren’t moving tend to vanish when they are the same color as your environment. But I found him in a couple minutes, just about sixty yards from where I was sitting.
I’ve always had a fear of dead animals, and knew that this might be a hurdle for me. There is just something about a lifeless body that frightens me, as if death is contagious. I told myself that maybe my hesitation was to make sure he was dead first, but I knew he was. I touched his antler first. It’s not warm or fuzzy and was easier for me to handle. Then I got a firm grip on it, and used it to move his head a bit. Then I talked to him.
I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to discuss with him what was going to happen next. That he would be consumed, becoming a permanent part of me. Not just a trophy, especially with that tiny little antler.
As I became more comfortable, I pet his torso, touched the hooves, and the fear quickly dissipated. And good thing, because before I could move him, I would need to field dress him which involves opening him up and removing all of his vital organs. That would be pretty intimate. But once I started, I surprised myself and had no trouble whatsoever. Well, no emotional trouble. Watching a deer processed on YouTube then trying it yourself involves a learning curve and several mistakes. But with some help, I got it done.
A Family Affair
Shortly after I came down to set eyes on my deer, I sent a message to my wife’s step-dad. I needed some guidance and muscle to help me gut the deer and drag it almost a mile out of the woods to my van. Not only did he quickly show up, but my mother-in-law lended a hand too. This is the best aspect of hunting to me, and a big reason why I pursued it in the first place: Family.
Moving from San Diego to Pennsylvania, to be close to my wife’s family, I planted myself in a brand new culture. Pennsylvania culture is deeply rooted in deer hunting, and I married into a family of hunters. And when in Rome, I decide to do as the Romans do. It was a great way to participate and build relationships with my in-laws. What started as me stumbling around the woods, watching and learning, turned into me buying hundred dollars of gear, weapons, and spending hours upon hours in the woods, often by myself.
Sharing your trial, tribulations, and conquests is part of the process. Even walking out of the woods, dragging along my deer that day, included several stops as other hunters had questions and comments. Always positive.
Finally getting over the initial hump and killing my first deer, then filling my freezer with meat to cook, I was curious if I would be satisfied. If I would feel the need to do it again or settle down and try something else. But even as I write this, I am thinking about what I can do better next time, and when I can finally share this experience with my children.
Hunting will continue to be a family affair for my family as much as it has been for billions of my ancestors with whom I connect every time my heart and mind react to finding prey in the wild.
Bringing Home My First Deer
Congratulations on your first deer. Are you going to eat the heart? I've enjoyed it from time to time. My favorite teaching about hunting is "Never pass up a animal the opening day that you will be happy to kill the last day. "
Deer are crazy animals. They know when hunting season is and change how they act during it.
Congratulations! As a Pennsylvania native, I am curious as to what you think about living in our natural environment vs. the completely different experience of nature and climate in Southern California? For me, it was almost horrifying to visit CA as a teen because of the difference--the general lack of clouds, the lack of trees, "rivers" that were concrete channels, hills that were brown instead of green. I was wondering if you had a similar reaction going west to east?