It's the weekend before Thanksgiving, and in Wisconsin, that means the opening of Gun Deer Hunting.
The Saturday-to-following-Sunday season is as ingrained into the culture of the state as beer, the Packers & cheese curds. Witness the change of the crowd color at any home game in Lambeau during this time period from green and gold to Hunter Orange, and you get the idea.
I come from a long line of deer hunters. My father has hunted since he was a young man, my grandfather hunted his entire life, as have most of my uncles and cousins. Deer Camp has always been a special time of the year, a manly, testosterone-fueled time of year when the everyday courtesy bans on farting, belching and swearing are temporarily lifted, drinking can be to a bit of an excess, and food is plentiful and often off of the beaten path (pickled deer heart, anyone?). Stories abound, most of them have a grain of truth to them but have been embellished and honed to make a better story with each retelling.
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For many years, our deer camp was held at my parents' home near Wautoma, WI, and we hunted on land leased from a friend of the family. The group consisted of my grandfather, my second cousin aka Uncle Tom, my father, several of my cousins, my uncle and one of my dad's friends. It was predictable, comfortable and timeless. We had rituals and repetition, a very important element in any deer camp. I never gave much thought about the hunt itself, it was more about the camraderie and the event of deer hunting that about what I was actually doing out there in a tree with a loaded gun, sitting in snow and sleet and rain and wind in 34 degree weather from 6 am til 4:30 pm.
But as all things must pass, so was it with our deer camp. My grandpa passed away in 1991, leaving the first gaping hole in our group. It was never the same afterwards, the familiar orange hat and lawn chair wasn't on that ridge any more, no cigarette could be seen glowing faintly in the early morning darkness and no one was there to greet me with a nip off of the bottle of blackberry brandy when I got cold and took a walk. Cousin Tony moved far away, so the comedic relief of the sibling rivalry of the Brothers Kohn was lost. Uncle Mike was making infrequent appearances, after moving to Minnesota, where it honestly didn't pay for him to hunt over here...for what it cost, he probably could have went to Jamaica. Then Uncle Tom passed, leaving another huge vacancy. His scraggly, haphazard ramshackle tree stand was empty, and never again would an S-10 Chevy drive thru the whole woods at 9:30 in the morning with it's horn blaring in celebration of a big buck, despite screwing everyone else's hunting up. After Tom's passing, the family friend who my father leased the land from decided to sell the land, so the Deer Camp As We Knew It was no more.
We made a try of having Deer Camp up at our land near Prentice, WI in Price County for the last couple of years with much of what was left of the original crew, but it wasn't quite the same--you can never 'go back', as they say. Thus, thru attrition and the passing of time, Deer Camp is down to just my father, myself and my neighbor and long time friend Roy and his buddy. Roy and I have invited our wives this year, so it won't seem quite as empty, and because they're good sports and a lot of fun and can handle the offenses of Deer Camp.
With the loss of All That Used To Be, it's given me more time to reflect on deer hunting itself and how it's changed over the years, and why I'm less enthusiastic about it each year. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (aka the DNR - Do Nothing Right) has monkeyed around with their deer management nonsense, based on herd numbers that they must have pulled out of thin air, to the point of taking what existing sport was left in hunting deer with a gun. It's become akin to shooting fish in a barrel, where there's not as many fish in the barrel as the DNR thinks and about 650,000 hunters pointing guns in the barrel. Such assinine programs as "Earn A Buck" and areas where a hunter can take both a buck and a doe are based on numbers that some beaurocrat in Madison pulls out of their ass -- if there's more deer in Price County now than there were 5 years ago, I'm not seeing them! Add the added hunting pressure of an ever-growing population, and the average rural road or woods looks less like people are hunting and more like there's a manhunt going on and the whole community has joined in. Just the number of trucks parked along the roads to our cabin last weekend, of people who were just *preparing* for deer hunting season, was unnerving. And hunting on opening weekend is like drinking on New Years Eve...it's amateur hour. People who haven't held a gun all year are suddenly racing out of the big cities via the interstates, headed North..
Why do we even have a deer season, you might ask? Well, we (as in mankind) have eliminated the deer's natural predators (including harsh winters thanks to global warming) and have created an environment, particularly in the agricultural part of the state, where food is plentiful. So deer herd numbers are unnaturally inflated...hugely unnaturally inflated, but nowhere near where the DNR seems to think that they are. My fear is that one of these years, there just won't be any deer around anywhere, while the DNR scratches their ass and wonders what happened. And to me it just seems wrong to manage the animals in such a way where their average life expectency is 1.5 years. 1.5 years!
I don't know where I'm going with all of this but it feels good to get it off of my chest. Tonight Carol and I will load up the truck, drive out to the cabin, eat well, have fun with our friends and my father, and tomorrow I'll go sit in a tree for a while and watch the squirrels and birds, and in all likelyhood will not see a deer, let alone shoot one. I'm just not that committed to bagging a deer. I'm more committed to staying warm and spending time with people who are important to me. I guess that's why I still do it. I suppose I could outsource this to Sanjiv...
If you're going hunting, good luck to you and your crew. If you're not, be careful out there...there's a lot of nuts in the woods and bullets flying around.
