Alan Liere: The Skeleton in the Woods

Once again, on the last day of the late buck season, I trudged back to my house in the dark from my sitting place across the creek. There was no blood on my hands. I had been hunkered there against a stump since noon, and the walk back was considerably colder than the walk in.

A light in my living room window would have been welcomed as I plowed through the tall wheat grass, up the hill to my front porch, but I hadn’t turned one on when I left the house and I was more concerned about the fire in my stove. My hands needed a good thawing, but the last log I put on was nothing but ash and it was almost as cold inside as out.

Living in the country has its advantages when deer season rolls around. How many men can walk only a few hundred yards from the front door and see deer? I counted my blessings, but my hands were still cold as I struggled with kindling and matches.

There won’t be fresh venison in my freezer this year. That won’t be a terrible hardship because there are still several pounds of ground meat and a couple of steaks from the buck I shot last year. If I don’t eat it soon, it will freezer burn despite the double wrapping, and I do not like to waste game.

I knew from the start I would not shoot a deer this year. The discovery I made last spring made that a certainty – the skeleton of a beautiful whitetail buck only a few hundred yards from my deer stand. His rack was identical to the buck I had convinced myself I had missed on opening morning, 2015.

That deer had been walking away from me – an opportunity with little margin for error, but close. It bucked slightly at the shot, broke into a trot and quickly disappeared into the trees. I got out of my stand and searched for it thoroughly. No hair, no blood, no deer. When I walked home an hour later, I was confident I had missed.

I quit hunting for a week and left the rifle with a gunsmith in town. The gunsmith tightened some screws on the scope and seated the barrel in fiberglass to prevent any wobble. He sighted it in, and when I picked it up he pronounced it “dead on” at a hundred yards.

The buck I shot the day after getting my rifle back dropped in its tracks. The previous buck had been missed because of a rifle defect, and I felt relief in that conviction until I found the skeleton in the woods.

Sure, it could have been a coincidence, but he sported a set of distinctive antlers I remembered, and he was found in the direction he had been headed when I lost track of him. I’m pretty sure, then, I killed two bucks last year. One of them suffered. That thought causes tightness in my gut; it makes me feel dirty.

Not shooting a deer this year was my small recompense for the skeleton in the woods. But the hunting instinct is so strong within me, I went to my blind each day during the late season, sat in the cold, sucked in the late autumn smells, listened to the geese fly over … and watched the deer.

I had to. It’s what I do.

Hunting season without a deer I could live with. Hunting season without hunting, I couldn’t.