Saturday afternoon I saw something I had only ever heard about. For my white tail deer hunters out there, the rut is on here in South Alabama. The bucks are looking to procreate. For four hours, all around me, bucks chased does. They’d abandoned their normally skittish nature and were walking and running everywhere, looking for females. I had heard about this but had never seen it. I didn’t even need to sit still in my stand. The bucks didn’t care. It was a sight to behold. It reminded me of me in college.
The bucks were young. Their antlers were mostly small and thin. They had small bodies. Glorious as they were, they weren’t what the hunters at my camp call “shooter bucks.” I never raised my rifle. They weren’t what I was after.
To be honest, I truly can’t remember the last time I shot a deer. I bet it’s been ten years or more. I hunt quite a few times every fall and winter and now that my boys are hunting, I’m going even more. When my hunter friends and I sit around and talk hunting, they admit to the same thing. I’m not sure any if my friends who hunt regularly have pulled the trigger in a long time. We all go a good bit, but we seldom shoot. To shoot, it has to be perfect circumstances, we say. A big big deer in a place that is easy go get him. And the temperature outside must be just right. If it’s too cold, none of us want to freezing while field dressing a deer. And these are exactly what they sound like – heaps of flimsy excuses. I can’t explain it. If our kids have some luck, we’ll celebrate with them. And we’ll step right up to field dress that deer. But for us, well, as the old timers say, we’re just not mad at em anymore.
About five o’clock, I was still watching deer come and go. Two does were feeding nearby and I knew they’d draw in another buck. I had already seen ten bucks, more than I’d ever seen on a hunt like this before. And when he showed up, he was different. He was big. His belly sagged – a sign of a mature deer. His antlers were big and heavy and perfectly symmetrical. His brow tines weren’t as tall as I wanted but, in my rifle scope, he was beautiful. I took aim several times and never shot. I thought that I might could soon be standing over that beautiful deer’s lifeless body and wondered if I was getting more joy by watching him than I would by standing over him with his body at my feet. Years ago, as a younger man, I would never have hesitated.
I shook my head at myself, lowered my gun, and for thirty minutes I watched that big proud boy chase does all around my stand. It was, by far, the greatest deer hunt of my life.
I’m Cam Marston and I’m just trying to Keep It Real.
