THE STORY TELLERS

 After letting Cheeky out, making coffee and taking a leak I check my watch. 3:15 am.What? That's what happens when you forget to change your alarm clock from Daylight Savings Time on Nov. 7th. Having to pee, I'd checked the time and read 4:00 am. Close enough to the alarm going off.  Then I realized I'd gotten up an hour and 15 minutes early. Fuck! This is my false start this morning: getting up four hours before daylight. It's going to be a long day.

   Yesterday I'd hunted the cemetery hoping to cut off Clocker. No luck. Later, after watching closing arguments in the Arbery trial, I decided to hunt from the ground above Gilkey's in the notch.  Before going in the woods I'd run into Zara on the road. She needed firewood. I supplied my connect as her dog barked and snarled in my face. Dogs somehow know that strangers with guns are the enemy. The next car up the hill also pulled over to chat. This is life in the sticks, socializing on the fly. It was Mr. and Mrs. Charlie. They are serious deer hunters, loyal blog readers and part time neighbors. We caught up after a long year between the seasons. They'd had a great season so far - three bucks between them with the bow. Pleasantries completed, I finally got in the woods. Once again, no  bucks. No luck.

   After dark, as I sat spinning on the exer-cycle, phone to my ear, I got the report from Savage. Now that gun season has started, every evening involves calls to Bird and Savage. Bird still has a job. I know, that's crazy. I keep  telling him to quit and get serious about deer hunting.  So, lacking his own story, he provided strategies for me for the next day's hunt. Savage (like me) has his priorities straight. Hunting is number one.  He spent the  day in Cragsmoor hunting his favorite spot. Before noon he spotted a buck. He could just make out a rack above the blueberry bushes. He decided it was a shooter. Picking an opening he settled the crosshairs on the buck's shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The buck had been with a doe and only one deer ran up the mountain after the shot. Savage noted a tall white pine near where the buck had disappeared, climbed down out of the stand and went to look for the deer. When he got to  that tree he looked around for a body. Nothing.

    This is what each of us hunters face after pulling the trigger or releasing an arrow, the uncertainty of the kill. Was the shot good? Did you miss? Was the deer wounded? Was he laying dead close by? Where's the blood? As I noted before, Savage has one good eye. Going almost blind in his shooting eye he taught himself to shoot left handed and can still shoot better than any of us. He looked for blood (with his left eye) and found nothing but red and yellow leaves, no scuffs, no tracks in the mud. Had he missed? Then, after widening the circle, he found a drop of blood......then a few drops more where the buck had stopped. Then nothing. An hour into the search, Savage was sweating and the disappointment was beginning to sink in. The sun was melting the frost and just as he was about to give up he spotted brown. The buck was laying there dead. He told me the story like this. Like you, I didn't know if he got the deer until the end of his story. 

    The euphoria one feels when finding a dead deer after thinking you had botched a shot is indescribable. Now the task was to get that deer down the mountain. We are all solitary (old) hunters. Even with a quad, Savage struggled to get the deer up on the machine. Ropes, pulleys, tree branch rigging and a lot of levers and fulcrums were involved in the process. As I peddled away on my exer-cycle Savage laid out his long day in the woods. He was a bit disappointed in the "ground shrinkage" of the rack he felt was better at 200 yards. But, this 71 year old man had killed a good buck, gutted it, got it down the mountain, in the truck and back to his house by late afternoon.... all by himself.  I told him how impressive that was. He should be proud. How many big racks does he need? The fact is Savage Lynch, the mighty deer hunting guru, still is the shitz, an inspiration to the rest of us lesser hunters. I have only one thing to say: I am not worthy. Respect.