November was the most special of all months when I was growing up. First of all, my birthday was in November; that was celebration enough. Then, when I reached my teens, November meant deer season.
In the neck of the woods where I grew up, gun season opened the third Monday of November. There were no compound bows; the very few guys who hunted during the month-long archery season were mostly packing recurves. Tink Nathan was just a guy with a funny moustache selling deer scents out of his basement while working at the post office in the town up the road. Tink’s 69 wasn’t No. 1.
Yes, it was a long time ago.
My dad started looking in the classifieds for a place to hunt when I was 14 — almost 40 years ago. We made a couple of trips to visit different places before he found one that had everything he was looking for: it was within an hour-and-a-half drive from home, in a county with a pretty good annual deer harvest (for those days); it adjoined the national forest, giving us access to all that public land; and the owner was building a house and needed an infusion of cash.
We traveled there on a Sunday afternoon, if I remember correctly, met the owner and walked all over the side of the mountain, even climbing to the top of the property where it bordered the national forest. The thing I remember the most was picking and eating wild blueberries. One night the next week, my dad told me he’d bought the land.
I was on the high-school wrestling team at that time, and I wasn’t eating much anyway, so the 55 cents a day my mom gave me for cafeteria food went home in my pocket and into my deer-rifle fund. Cleaning up the church building on Saturday mornings after basketball practice filled out the fund, and I plunked down $100 for a deer rifle and another $35 for a scope that spring. The .308 rifle is banged up and in dire need of a new stock, but it still drives tacks. The scope is atop my muzzleloader.
There was a slight bump in the road before that first deer season, in the fall of my sophomore year in high school. Some big guy slid hard into my dad at second base in a church softball game, breaking his leg. An older friend helped me sight-in my rifle and helped me find the place I sat on my first day in the deer woods — driven there in a stick-shift VW bug by my dad, now wearing a cast but able to get around on crutches. I saw some deer that first year, but we only went two or three times, and one of them was in a big snowstorm.
The next season, that’s when November really became special. I got to skip school for opening day. That was enough to make it special, but the last morning of the season, the only day we could shoot does, I was sitting at the base of a big evergreen tree when two does came by. They saw me before I saw them, and away they went. I don’t know why I didn’t cry out in anguish, but two or three minutes later, I saw something moving in the bushes where the does had come from. I made out the shape of a deer and got my rifle to my shoulder about the time the deer saw me. The safety came off, and I can remember seeing antlers as the deer bounced away — about the time I got the crosshairs on some brown fur and pulled the trigger.
I went out and found a chunk of hair and some blood. I walked to my dad’s stand, and he came back and helped me look. Ninety-four yards from that first chunk of hair lay a 6-point buck.
Now you know why I’ve always loved November.
Be the first to comment