Initials in a Tree Stand and a Notch in the Stock...

     The first year I went deer hunting with my stepfather, he parked me under the drooping boughs of an evergreen that sat at the edge of the soybean field on the farm we hunted. The only deer I was going to see from there was some straggler crossing the massive soy rows between the tree lines. I was probably seventy-five yards from the action and given that we could only use shotguns and slugs or buckshot, I was essentially just a placeholder.

     The old man only brought me along so that my mother would permit him to go hunting. So, the right placement of my stand wasn’t a concern to him. But I was out there, deer hunting like I’d always wanted, and that was all I cared about at first. As I got older, I wanted a real stand. Up in a tree. With at least a passing shot at a deer.

     After a couple of years of hiding under this evergreen, (where deer were apparently bedding down at night, given the amount of scat and hairs I found under there) I built my first stand about twelve feet up in a pine at the edge of the scrub trees on the south end of the tree line. I use the term “stand” very loosely here. Essentially, I nailed two boards across some branches and made a seat. I scampered up the limbs without a ladder, and parked myself there, under the canopy of pine needles and cones. It was basic, it was sturdy, and I was sixteen and didn’t care, so long as I had a real stand.

     I actually saw some deer that year. I watched a small buck and three does run, flags up, toward the center of the woods. A minute later I heard two shots and our friend Hank, had dropped the nice little five pointer I had just seen scurry away. Deer aren’t as populous or as big in Delaware as they are in other places, so taking a young five pointer was nothing to snicker at. In Delaware, you aren’t trophy hunting like you are elsewhere. In Delaware, you either get a deer or you don’t. The dimensions are just bragging.

     The following year, I found an old stand on the opposite side of the soy fields. It was about fifteen feet up in a split-trunked maple tree. Whoever built it made the steps out of limbs they’d cut and nailed to the main trunks. It seemed sturdy enough and I made my way up into the stand. I laid my shotgun on the floor of the stand and stepped onto the last step and snap…the step broke in the middle. I had an arm around each side of the trunk and I broke through the next step, then the next one, then the next one. I rode this thing down to the forest floor, like a primitive elevator. I was safe but shaken. I looked at the steps to the stand, all broken in perfect “V”’s and the inside arms of my jacket worn through from the bark on the tree as I held on and slid down. One or two long seconds to count fingers and toes and make sure I was okay, and I laughed at the whole thing. Until I realized my gun was still up there. Thankfully I unloaded before climbing the tree. I found a long branch and knocked my shotgun down to my waiting arms.

     The next year, I went to the farm by myself in September. I found the spot were a buck had been rutting for several seasons prior and laid claim to a nice, wide, multi-trunked maple in which to build my stand. I came back a couple of weekends later with lumber for the build. Using all my tree-fort design abilities, this was not a big deal for me. I come from a time when boys built tree forts every weekend. I was a master at this.

     It was big enough for me (by this time I was 6’1) it was comfortable, covered, concealed, and safe. I bought a dozen forty-penny spikes and hammered them into the tree for steps, and I was all set.

     I took my first -and so-far, my only—buck from that stand later that fall. He was a beautiful, symmetrical eight-pointer, about three and a half years old. One Brenneke rifled slug from my beloved Glenfield 778 (30” full choke, pump) and he fell where he stood. The next morning, after we’d dressed him and hung him in a tree to cool, I walked back out to my stand. I climbed up and took out my pocket knife and carved my initials, and the year (1981) and “8 PT” in the trunk of the tree. From then on, until that tree falls one day, that spot is memorialized in my heart. I climbed down from my stand and walked back to our camp. In Delaware you only get one deer per year, so I stayed and hunted again that day, with the sole intention of just helping with the drive later in the afternoon. I wasn’t there to kill another deer.

     That evening we loaded my buck into Hank’s van and took him home. We checked him at the station and I was congratulated by other hunters admiring the beauty I’d dropped. The next day I laid him out in our front yard, posed dutifully with my shotgun situated in his rack, and then took him for processing.

     Later that same day, I broke down my shotgun for a general cleaning, and while I had it out, I took out my pocketknife again, and carved a small notch at the top of the buttstock, right below where it joins the receiver. Just a small line carved into the walnut. I loved the way that gun looked, so I didn’t want to gouge anything big and garish into the wood. Just one line. Just enough to remind myself that I had joined the club and dropped a buck.

     That one line was like the threshold to manhood. One line…just an inch long. But the story it represented was wide, and deep and immeasurable. I could look at that notch and hear the crunch of that soybean stalk that he’d stepped on, that alerted me to his approach. I could see him again, walking carelessly toward his rut, unaware of my presence in that tree, twenty feet above his line of sight. I felt my finger squeeze the trigger. Felt the kick to my shoulder. Saw him rear back. I could hear myself cycle that pump action so quickly, it could have been a semi-auto.

     I can see him down that vent-rib. I can hear my voice, whispering to him as he lay there, took one deep breath, and kicked out his hind legs…and then stopped moving; “Stay down, big boy. Don’t get back up!” I had chambered another round, but I was hoping I didn’t have to use it. I wanted this to be quick and clean and hopefully, painless.

     I can feel my body relax when I realized he was gone. I feel the exultation building as I called to Hank, “Hank! I got a buck!” Feel the steps beneath my feet as I climbed down, the slight tension as I approached my prey, the momentary sadness as I realized I’d taken him, followed quickly by the sheer joy of accomplishing this lifelong goal.

     All this… all those memories live in one groove cut into the Walnut stock of a cheap shotgun I’d gotten for my sixteenth birthday. One line scratched into the wood with a ten-dollar pocket knife, the day after I’d taken my first deer. A gun I don’t even own anymore and haven’t for almost thirty years. A gun I would trade any gun I have for right about now.

     Next Saturday I’ll be back in the woods, deer hunting for the first time since that November morning in 1981. I have a Remington 783 / .308. It’s a wonderful gun, especially for the price. (I found it at a pawn shop with a Nikon Pro Staff 3x9 for under $350) I’ve put sixty rounds through it, acclimating myself to it and sighting it in. yesterday, after (finally) figuring out how to properly adjust the scope, I shot two groups of six, all within about a two-inch area. I also broke a six-inch-round steel plate at 100 yards. The gun is ready. The man is ready. The hunting land is ready. But…something is different.

     I’ve been to the land I’m hunting three times in preparation for the hunt. I had to machete my way in, because it is so dense. Part of the area was timbered-out several years ago and all that remains is a cedar / pine / coniferous forest and the densest thicket and bramble I have ever walked through. Stickers, briars, vines, and scrub-tree saplings made locating a good tree for a stand really hard work.

     My intention was to build a stand, like when I was a kid. But with full-time jobs and a daughter who at least needs to see my face occasionally, (I’m a single dad and she lives with me. She’s twenty, so she’s not a child, but she still likes to at least know I’m there), the opportunity to buy $150 worth of treated lumber and haul it down there and build a tree fort…I mean a stand, yeah a stand… just didn’t present itself. So, I bought a sixteen-foot ladder stand on sale at Dick’s. I assembled it in my living room, loaded the sections in my Yukon, and took it down out to the land I hunt in Appomattox County Va.

     I leaned it against a nice, tall, straight cedar, with a good view all around, climbed up and ratcheted it tight and that was that. I put a camo skirt around it, piled some brush against the ladder so it looks more natural, and left it until next weekend. And just like that…I had a deer stand.

     What the heck kind of fun was that? I assembled a metal stand in my living room. It has a seat and a footrest and a safety bar that doubles as a shooting rest. They included a safety harness system. A what? When I was a kid, I just fell out of the tree stand. I got the wind knocked out of me, got up and checked to make sure nobody saw me fall, and went on about my day, embarrassed but more careful next time.

     We didn’t wear camo back then either. We wore brown. All except for the blaze orange we were required to wear. We wore brown. We used doe urine as an attractant and we waited in the trees. No grunt calls. No “The Can” no face masks or gun covers. No camo anything. We tried to hold our pee for as long as we could, but the watered-down Maxwell House coffee from the Townsend Volunteer Fire Company’s annual Deer Hunter’s Breakfast would win every time. That coffee lease ran out around 9AM. Nobody thought about bringing empty Gatorade bottles up in the stand with them. We just let it fly off the side of the stand we didn’t have to climb down.

     Now I wear camo, (actually I prefer a ghillie suit) I have a “Can” a rattle bag, and a grunt call. I bottle my own urine, like Howard Hughes, and God forbid I eat something up there and the scent run off a buck. (What buck could resist the smell of PBJ?) I sit in a too-safe and too-comfortable steel tree stand. And my gun has a composite stock.

     Where am I supposed to carve my initials and the year, and the number of points in my steel stand? How do I notch a composite butt stock? If my fifty-five-year-old heart gives out, they’ll never find me in my ghillie suit. I’ll look like a big brush pile sitting up in a metal chair, like a tennis judge at Wimbledon. Some guy will find me up there by accident, and pry my Remington from my hardened fingers, like Robert Redford taking Hatchet Jack’s “Barr Rifle” from his frozen fingers in “Jeremiah Johnson.”

     I kid, of course. I’m not quite Walt Kowalski yet, snarling from my clenched teeth and telling the whole world to get off my lawn. The steel stand is taller than what I’ve built by hand and doubtless it’s safer. But I didn’t build it. I didn’t find a nice tree with several split trunks and design my own perch. I didn’t drag the lumber down there and cut it with a handsaw and nail it with a hammer. It’s not permanent. If it’s not productive, I can unbuckle the ratchet straps and move it. Move it? A tree stand was a badge of honor in my time. It remained in its location, like a shrine. Carl Ramsey, one of the guys who hunted with us when I was a kid, had a tree stand that was as high as a crow’s nest on a pirate ship. It swayed in the breeze and we all thought he was nuts to go up there. But it was situated in a tall oak that straddled the convergence of about four deer trails. We nicknamed his stand “Death Alley” because Carl got a deer every single year we hunted there.

     I’m doubtful as to whether metal stands that I buy at sporting goods stores and assemble in my living room with wrenches, can ever have that sort of character. What nickname do I give it… “Chief Ironsides?”  I love my Remington, but I don’t admire it. Not like I did that old wooden-stock Glenfield. The one-piece composite doesn’t have the feel that some craftsman somewhere hand-shaped it. It doesn’t look like someone might have hand-carved the checkering. It’s not hand-rubbed and oil-finished. It looks serviceable, and durable, and imposing in its dark, plastic, cold way. But it doesn’t look like art. Like it ought to be in a display case when not in the field.

     I’m discounting the new and romanticizing the old right now. I know this. But we hunt for more than deer (or bear, or rabbit, or ducks, etc.) when we’re out there. We harvest the stuff that make our lifetime memories. Right now, one week before my return to the woods, I’m wondering if I’ll make memories in my steel stand, with my composite-stock rifle, wearing my polyethylene ghillie suit, with a bottle of my own pee hanging by my head, making more artificial deer sounds than the “See-and-Say” my daughter had as a child. And if I do, will those memories hold up like the ones I made from a hand-built tree stand, and a hundred-dollar shotgun with a notch in the stock.

     Next week at this time…we’ll have our answer.