The Deer Becomes Eternal

Back then, in the fall of 1961, we lived in a drafty two story log cabin with bats living in the rafters and mice under the floorboards. The only thing that made it bearable … I was on the high school football team, and that meant that I got daily hot showers. The rest of the family had to heat water in a copper container that covered half of the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The hot water would get dumped into an aluminum water trough, then the water would be cooled to a more comfortable temperature. Whoever’s turn was up would get undressed behind a standing screen, then into pajamas and an early bedtime so that they could take advantage of the warmth in their bones.

I usually slept in on Saturdays and Sundays, but one particular fall Sunday morning in October, my dad woke me up shortly after daylight and shhh’d me to stay quiet until we were in the kitchen and could talk quietly without waking the entire family. He had spotted three deer from the house. They were in the large flat field, no more than half a mile from the house.

There is nothing unusual about that, except that the two of us had gotten our first hunting licenses. I didn’t really think it through, but the hunting license had seemed nothing more than a formality. I had recently turned sixteen, and the family had just moved to a rural area in the Colorado mountains. I had learned to use a rifle at YMCA camp a couple of years earlier, and had achieved a marksman certification by consistently putting nine out of 10 shots in the bullseye from a prone position. Heck, I probably even had an NRA membership, since they were the ones who did the certifying. I certainly don’t remember.

In late October there was snow on the ground in crusty frozen patches. We dressed warmly, topped off our jackets with bright orange vests, and carried a few extra rounds of ammunition for our 30.06 hunting rifles. We headed across the flat, silently stalking the small family of deer my dad had seen earlier. I never saw them, so had to take his word. We got to the bottom of the hill my mom had named Murray Hill, a name borrowed from her early American ancestors in New York City.  Murray Hill rose 300-400 feet above the large open space we just called “The Flat.”

At the bottom of the hill, we agreed to split up. My dad went left around the hill, and I went to the right, following up a steep wash that cut down a narrow gulley between Murray Hill and another as-yet-unnamed hill. Murray Hill and the neighboring hills were thick with scrub oak bushes, service berry bushes, and sage brush. In retrospect, it was a bad decision. Either one of us could have accidentally shot the other as we beat the bush coming over a ridge. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

I remember thinking that if I did happen to see a deer in the scrub oak, it would just be a fleeting glance. That, coupled with the adrenalin rush, the exertion in the thin mountain air, the cold morning that was pinking my cheeks … there was no way I was going to get anything besides a welcome breakfast when we returned to stove-warmed cabin. Toward the top of the gulley, in the saddle between the two hills the lay of the land flattened enough that walking was easier. I reached a small knoll, stopped, and scanned the slopes of Murray Hill.

Nothing at first other than sage and scrub oak, but then a flicker of movement. My eyes went back, and there he was … a young two-pronged buck standing broadside no more than 200 feet from me. I jacked a round into the chamber and lifted the rifle, nesting the butt against my right shoulder and looking through my right eye, using the peep sight the way I remembered from YMCA camp. What I hadn’t bargained for was my worsening eyesight. I had a lazy eye, and as a result my visual acuity in the right eye had dropped to somewhere in the range of 20/450. I could barely see the far end of the peep sight, and beyond that was a total blur. There could have been a herd of elephants standing 200 feet in front of me, and I still would have been none-the-wiser. So I did what I had to.

I shifted the rifle to my left shoulder, sighted with my left eye, aimed for the deer’s neck, and squeezed off a shot. It was a clean miss, but got the buck’s attention. I jacked another round into the chamber, aimed, and fired. I thought the first one was high, so I aimed lower. Another clean miss. I loaded another round. Why didn’t the deer just run away? It was nearly frozen in place. It shuffled forward two or three steps, moved up-hill a few steps, but then stood still, giving me another complete broadside view. The third shot caught the buck with his foot in the air, just ready to bound off through the brush. He collapsed instantly … alive one moment, and then stone cold dead before he hit the ground.

I worked my way around the scrub oak and through the sage until I reached the spot where he had fallen. One shot, though the spine just below the head.

The rest of the morning is a blur. I think my dad did most of the field dressing. Somehow, we ended up with a plastic toboggan to load the deer and haul it down to the house. The blur ends when we reach the house, after we had hung the deer outside the old bunk house that we used as a tack room and tool shed.

My mom greeted us with a big cooked breakfast. When I came in the door, before I even got my jacket off, she said in a voice that I suppose could be called victorious, “Lo, the mighty hunter.”

Those words, so innocently and thoughtlessly uttered, stung me to the core, although I didn’t have any response at the time. But it must have shown on my face. It had to. My soul had changed between the time I had been awakened and the time I heard those words. When the deer started to put his foot down, when he collapsed and hit the earth with his face instead of with his foot, at that precise moment, the universe changed. Part of my soul, part of my spirit being collapsed and soaked into the ground, vital energy seeping out of me just as if someone had ripped out my guts alongside the pile of deer guts up there on the hillside.

The deer became a sacred totem in my heart … a part of the web of animal spirits that animate my world. When my dad stored the rifle I had used, I was glad to see it go. I was sixteen years old, and that October morning nearly 60 years ago was the last time I would ever handle a gun. Ever. Part of me had died for eternity.

Copyright Don Child 2020