First Timer Buck

Teenage Angst Finds Home

Fifty years of hunting whitetails. And I’m no expert. Far from it. I’m a novice with a lot of good friends that have helped me learn. I started late in life. For a Vermonter, this means a teenager. Most real Vermonters have hunted deer before they learned to ride a bike. I was seventeen years old when I shot my first buck. I had fumbled through the woods for three years, not understanding much about the life and habitat of the whitetail. When I was fourteen my father took me to my first deer camp in Grampian, Pennsylvania. It was my initiation into manhood. The following year I left for boarding school at Vermont Academy and had my first experience of getting lost. I was in the southern Vermont mountains, where a teacher took a group of us to the foothills of a farm and gave us directions. I was to walk across the pasture and enter the woods at the bottom of a sloping hillside. It was very dark. There was no moon to look over me and comfort my imaginative mind. Only an old flashlight that liked to blink on and off at the most inopportune moments. Like just before stepping into a cow patty. As I began to climb the hill, leaves crunching underneath my leather-booted feet, a sudden loud snort caused me to gasp for breath. I was sure that a big old bull had wandered off the pasture and into the woods and was now waiting for me behind the next tree. He would come out of the darkness, nostrils flaring and gore me in the stomach, then throw my limp teenage body into a tree where the search party would find me hanging upside down the next morning. Darkness has a way of igniting one’s imagination.

But there was no bull in the eerily dark hardwoods. It had been my first interaction with a wily whitetail that wanted me to know that I was in his territory. Who was the interloper here? I didn’t know that it was highly uncommon for a buck to charge a human being. And then I remembered. I had a gun. I had purchased a brand-new Remington 760 Gamemaster in a 30.06 caliber. Oh, right. If it came down to a bullfight, I was going to win. My fear lessened enough for me to realize that I had to take a leak. Of course, if I were to make myself vulnerable enough by posturing to relieve myself, I would no longer be holding my rifle. So, I did what any scared teenage kid would do. I held my rifle in my right hand ready to defend myself against this raging cervid and used my left to accomplish the task “at hand,” so to speak.

I climbed the steep hill and by the time the sun rose I had no idea where I was. Again, for a kid from suburban Beaver, Pennsylvania, I really didn’t have any well-developed orientation skills much beyond what I’d learned in Webelos Boy Scouts before I got thrown out for defending myself in a fight with the Scoutmaster's evil son. So, I had to use my underdeveloped wits. I found a small stream and reasoned that if I followed it, it would join a few other streams and eventually become the river that would flow into a town. Any town. I didn’t care. I just needed to know that I could find my way back to civilization. Even if it was only a couple of miles away from the nearest shopping center. I was proud of myself. My teacher did not share my pride when he had to come to pick me up at a gas station in the next town, long after the rest of the group had returned to the appointed location.

Fast forward two years. I had convinced my parents that we needed to move to Vermont so that I could pursue my career as a World Cup freestyle skier. My brother and sisters were staunchly against this. I finished high school and was not popular because these kids had all grown up together. Again, I am the interloper. So, I failed miserably in my social skills and found myself back in the woods, seeking a feeling of belonging. Somewhere.

My father, an investment banker, was very passionate about his work and it wasn’t easy to get him to spend time “playing.” But in my seventeenth year, after graduating from high school, we decided to give this deer hunting thing another try. All my peers had been steeped in the local tradition of deer camp and Opening Weekend, which like in Pennsylvania, was a high holy day in Vermont. My father and I spent some real quality time together that fall. We lugged about 200 pounds of lumber up the side of Round Top just past the old dairy farm at the end of the dirt road with the deep tractor ruts. He found a stand of older pines where three had grown side by side about four feet apart. My father was in his mid-forties and he climbed up and nailed a dozen forty-eight-inch long 2x4’s to two of the trees as steps and then fashioned what may have been the only triangular tree stand platform in existence at the time. It was as grandiose as our dreams. My father was never one to follow convention. Our “tree stand” was about twenty feet up in the pines and looked over a large area of deadfalls.

On the Opening Weekend of the 1977 deer season, we walked up the long, steep trail to our stand with a backpack full of Oreo cookies, a large thermos of coffee and a couple of peanut butter and fluff sandwiches. Once again, it was pitch black. I was in great shape and he still had enough child left in him that as we were both sweating on the climb, he stopped and said, “Did you hear that?” in an excited tone. I listened carefully. Then a loud reverberating sound emanated from in front of me. I made the mistake of taking a big breath as I was a bit frightened. As I inhaled, the rank smell of last night’s chili dinner assaulted my nostrils. My father roared “That’s a buck snort!” and broke out laughing so hard that it was impossible not to join in.

As dawn began to creep over the Worcester Mountain range. We sat whispering to one another about how we had planned all this out so thoroughly. It was something that we did together and we were proud. We shared the coffee and Oreos and waited. Distant shots began to echo off the hills and throughout the valley. I leaned against the big old pine and soon fell asleep.

I awoke when he tapped me on the shoulder and whispered “Wake up! There’s gonna’ be a buck walking down the hill in any second!” He had heard shots close by and pointed to where he thought the buck would be jumping through the deadfalls. Sure enough, he pointed to a brown object running and jumping over the downed trees. The buck stopped suddenly, looking back over his shoulder from where he had run. “Take him, Brad!” he whispered. “No” I replied “You saw him. You take him.” Again, he whispered emphatically, “No. This is your deer.” I leveled my 30.06, peered through the old Redfield Widefield scope, and put the crosshairs on him. He dropped in one shot.

As we were climbing down from the tree, I noticed two of my school mates walking toward the downed buck. They stood over him and shot him point blank. My father rushed over and told them (they were bullies to me in school and now we faced them, armed) when they argued that this was their deer because they shot it. My father, who was a good-sized man, having come from hardy Pennsylvania coal mining stock, stood his ground. I said “Dad. Let them have it. It’s not worth getting shot.” “No” he said. “That’s our deer and we’re hauling it out of here. If you want to stop us, you’ll have to answer to me.” The two boys backed down. My father and I dressed the deer and dragged him down the snowy hill, following the stream that led to the river, which led to the barn. As we were dragging the forkhorn buck past the old barn we could hear the cows lowing as they fed. John Denver’s song “Back Home Again” was playing on the radio in the barn. We could hear the farmers talking to one another. Outside the snow was falling heavily and the lights of our home burned a warm amber welcome through the large flakes.