I’ve spent hundreds of hours sitting, standing, walking, and climbing in pursuit of whitetail deer. Almost all those hours ticked past without my finding said deer. Even on a successful hunt, hunters might spend only a few seconds actually seeing and shooting a deer, the rest of the time being spent enjoying nature, or, phrased another way, watching squirrels and wishing they were deer. This is why when hunters mention their pastime, they often hear some version of this statement: “Oh, I don’t like to go hunting because you just sit out in the woods all day freezing to death and not seeing anything.”Much of that characterization is accurate. But life going too slowly is not typically a problem for us.
I don’t have to wait hours for things to do in my office. The emails drip into my inbox in a constant leak, threatening to flood me. On social media, I don’t have to wait. Plenty of chatter floods my mind as I scroll: Did you know, can you believe, here’s my hot take, read this, click that.
I suppose it’s always been hard for us to sit still. Our ancestors chipped away at flint to while away the long dark ice age evenings. In the steam age, while waiting for the train to come they pulled out a pocketknife and whittled a stick, their restless hands slicing away until the stick was gone. Today we have more options. If some catastrophe slows life down – if I get caught at a red light or somebody a mile ahead gets in a fender bender – I turn on the radio so that I can hear about things happening to other people. If a quiet moment threatens to intrude at home, I reach for the remote, my phone. When I jump out of that freeway frenzy into the woods, I can be a jittery bundle of expectations. I stand still, but my brain jogs in place.
Is something about to happen?
Will a deer come?
Am I having fun?
What will I do tonight when I get home?
How am I doing at this life thing?
Should I change careers?
Why are no deer here yet?
The first time I went hunting with my Dad, I was eager to see hunting in action, to have the thrill of seeing a real live deer walking out in front of us. Anything less would be a bit of a disappointment. And we got less.
We got up when it was still black out, except maybe for a sliver of a sinking moon, drank a cup of hot coffee, and drove toward our hunting spot, sharing the early morning road with truckers and people coming home from the night shift. When the pickup rolled to a stop along a back road and the headlights cut out, darkness snapped in around us, a deep black, offset higher up, above the jagged line of the treetops, by the lighter darkness of the night sky. We threaded our way into those dark trees, the harsh yellow light of our flashlights spotlighting a circle of pine needles, a flash of tree trunk, a branch here, a leaf there. We clicked off our flashlights and for a long time, it didn’t make much difference if we had our eyes open or closed. Then slowly, we saw shapes. A puzzling mass resolved into a twisted tree, a blob sharpened into an old stump. Black became gray became a warm brown, shot through with rays of sunlight. My breath curled up in front of me into sharp cold air.
All around us, the woods began making noise. My head was on a swivel as I heard deer coming first from one direction, then another. But each time the deer would hop into view as a disappointing red cardinal, or a brown and butternut wren. All morning the birds persecuted us with their incessant deer imitations, hopping within feet of us.
We didn’t see much that day, or so I would have said at the time.
Even after years of honing my patience, there comes a time late morning when the light is harsh and I know most of the deer are probably bedded down. Boredom deepens. I grow convinced there are probably no deer for miles, that the last time a living deer walked through this spot, Congress was in an uproar over Iran Contra. I start to do morose calculations about how many deer there are in the woods, how many acres there are for them to choose from, and what the odds are they’ll choose this particular acre anytime soon.
I’ve strained my nerves watching all morning and for nothing. Maybe I misread the sign. Maybe there’s better hunting somewhere else. I’m going to stand here freezing my ass off for - I check the time - eight more hours and nothing will happen. Maybe I should just go home and do nothing in a recliner, with a cup of hot coffee and a college football game on TV. I stand up, stretch, and sneak. The itch to walk, to find a place where the deer are, creeps up my calves. Five or twenty minutes later, the brush explodes into white tails and leaping deer, gone in seconds. They were hidden there all along in that empty woods, watching and listening like me.
Once, as a young hunter, I paused my climb up a mountain in Maine to rattle antlers and blow on my grunt call to see if I could lure in a territorial buck. Such were my sophisticated tactics, I even made a false scrape and added some sex appeal in the form of doe urine, as if dumping it out would bring a Northwoods buck running. I waited. Nothing. Rattled some more. Grunted. Nothing. Finally, convinced it was fruitless, I moved on up the mountain. On my way back down that afternoon, having traveled through much empty woods, I came across the scrape I had made that morning, the only difference being the large deer track pressed into the soil.
And then sometimes, after all that watching and listening, the crunch in the leaves is not a chipmunk. It happens differently every time. Sometimes I’m staring off at the treeline, eyes glazed, and I’ll catch the flicker of an ear. My eyes snap to the spot, and there’s a deer’s head and nose slipping out from behind a holly tree.
Often after a hunt, I arrive home after hours of watching squirrels and pileated woodpeckers, and tree shadows moving across the leaves. Sometimes I get a close-up look at a hawk, or a red fox.
“Did you see anything?” my wife asks.
“Nope.”
About the Author
Born and raised in southern Delaware, Andrew Sharp lives in Sussex County, Delaware with two sons, two dogs and two cats, on an acre of ground that is running out of spots to plant new trees.
