A short hunting story

My son and I went deer hunting opening weekend. Packed up and drove to south-central WA to camp out and chase mule deer for a couple of days. Weather was fine, dry and clear, getting lower 40s overnight and a high in the 60s in the afternoon. He’s old enough now to be a hunting partner in the sense of “I’ll post up here, you sneak around that-a-way and circle around over there” or “you hang out here and watch those openings, I’ll tromp through that side of things and see what I can flush out,” not just “follow me around and let’s see what we can find together.”  We have shot together before, at the range and at Boomershoot, so I know he is capable of shooting reasonably well under controlled conditions.

But hunting ain’t targets. Decisions and unknowns are involved.

Saturday (opening day) at dusk, after we’ve both seen numerous does and a couple of spike bucks, in the failing light, he was posted out by himself with a 30-06 and a view parallel to an access road across a draw, a nearly 400 yards across top-to-top. He was on a patch of broken volcanic rock with clear field of view and fire, but rather uncomfortable. He saw coming out of the trees (heavy thickets of oak) a herd of does, and one large buck. But with the fading light with only a 9-power scope, at about 300 yards distance he couldn’t tell if the buck had the 3-pt minimum needed to legally shoot. After watching them for about ten minutes, he told me what he saw over the radio, he sounded like he was pretty sure he could make the shot count (no wind, good positioning and rest, comfortable estimate of the range, etc.) if he chose to take it, and the best advice I could give amounted to “light’s not getting any better. Use your best judgement and make your call, then pull the trigger or put the rifle on SAFE.”

Against his desire to get his first deer and put venison in the freezer, with time to think, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He didn’t shoot.

Sunday I was stomping through a particularly dense patch of woods and brush and I jumped a deer. It took off about five yards away from me on the far side of a bunch of trees. I managed to catch a glimpse of the hind end of a LARGE buck. It raced downhill and across the scattered bunch-grass of the open stretch to the road and into the bushes and groves at the far side, making a lot of noise.

The son was posted up in a similar position as before, and got a full and good broad daylight view of him, with some warning because of all the racket as he tore through the brush getting away from me. Big buck, big with VERY legal antlers. But also at a flat-out sprint at about 200 yards distance from him. He managed to get the gun up, and get him in his scope, but he had to make the snap-judgement of “can I gage the lead right at an estimated range on a target moving at an unknown speed, with a gun very similar to one used on the range but never against a moving target, and have a reasonable chance of not just a hit but a clean kill that we won’t have to track blood-trails though dense scrub to find?” Again, his judgement was “nope,” and he didn’t shoot.

So, on the one hand, it was an unsuccessful hunt at getting meat in the freezer. On the other hand, it was character building. We can never know with certainty if those were the best possible choices, but I think he chose wisely.

After we headed home from visiting one of the neighbors for a while after nightfall, he said “women go to a therapist and spend a lot of money to talk about whatever. Guys go hunting and swap stories around a campfire.”

Yeah. It’s like that. He’s growing up.

God is good.

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