For ten years I told people I was a hunter. I owned a rifle. I owned camo. I owned opinions about bullet weight that I repeated from a podcast I didn’t remember listening to. The only thing I had never done was sit in an actual deer camp with men who knew what they were doing. So when my buddy Dale invited me to his family’s November camp up in the thumb of Michigan, I said yes faster than I should have.
What I did not understand, driving six hours north with a cab full of brand new gear, was that deer camp is not a hunting trip. Deer camp is a trial. It’s forty years of inside jokes you weren’t there for, a wood stove that will smoke you out if you feed it wrong, and three or four old men who can smell a man pretending to be a hunter the way you smell a gut shot. I was walking into all of it with a new blaze orange coat that was still creased from the plastic bag.
Dale’s camp was a one room cabin with a tin roof, a plywood poker table, and a sign above the door that said “NO CRYERS.” I laughed when I saw it. Nobody else did. That should have told me everything.
First Light, First Mistake
The first morning I woke up at four to make sure I was up before everybody else. I wanted to look eager, respectful, like one of the guys who lives for this. I made a full pot of coffee, black, no sugar, because that’s what hunters drink. I handed Dale’s dad, Big Ron, a mug and said, “Nothing better than coffee in the blind, huh?”
Big Ron looked at the mug, looked at me, and said, “We don’t drink coffee in the blind. You’ll be pissing in a bottle by seven thirty.”
Then he drank the coffee anyway, out of pity, and a man who has been hunting these woods longer than I’ve been alive drank my coffee just to be polite. That’s the kind of man he is. That’s also the exact moment I realized I had brought every piece of gear except humility.
Sitting in the blind that morning, I did not see a single deer. I saw a squirrel, which I whispered about like it was a Boone and Crockett buck, and Dale reached over and put his hand on my arm like a man calming a frightened horse. It turned out I was breathing so loud the two of them could hear me over the wind. “You sound like a man hauling a fridge up a ladder,” Dale said. “Deer don’t like that.”
The Decoy I Built With My Own Two Hands
By the second afternoon, I was desperate to redeem myself. I’d been quiet too long, and quiet is fine, except quiet with nothing to show for it makes you the guy who just showed up to eat. So I did the thing every idiot does when he wants to prove he belongs. I overcorrected.
I had seen a video about how a decoy can pull a buck in. I didn’t have a decoy. I had a buddy’s kid’s plastic deer target, the kind with the vitals circle printed on it, and a pair of old wire stakes from the truck. I hauled that thing out past the south fence line, jammed it in the ground, and propped it up at an angle so it looked, from a certain distance, in certain light, if you squinted, and if you had never seen a deer, vaguely like a deer.
When I got back to camp, I told Dale’s uncle Frank what I’d done, chest out, waiting for the “attaboy.” Frank just nodded slow and said, “You put a plastic deer in the middle of a cut bean field at two in the afternoon and painted a bullseye on it.”
“So nobody shoots it?” I said.
“So everybody shoots it,” Frank said. “Including your blind. Which faces the bean field.”
I had forgotten my own blind was twenty yards left of the thing. The opening morning of the third day, Dale’s cousin Gary squeezed off a shot at first light, convinced my decoy was the buck he’d been after all week. The bullet took the plastic deer right through the vitals circle, which is either the perfect shot or the funniest shot in camp history, depending on who’s telling it. Gary has been telling it every November for four years now, and it gets louder each time. I’m the punchline. I built the punchline.
The Lesson That Took Forty Years to Teach Me
Here’s the thing about that trip. I went up there trying to prove I was a hunter, and instead the camp proved I was just a guy who liked the idea of hunting. There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole point of deer camp. You can’t buy your way past it with a new coat. You can’t watch your way past it. You can only sit in it, be quiet, take the ribbing, and come back next year.
On the last night, Big Ron and Frank let me deal the cards. They didn’t say anything about it. They just slid the deck across the plywood table and went back to arguing about whether a certain rifle rounds up or down in the wind. That was it. That was the whole ceremony. Nobody pinned a badge on me. Nobody said a word. But I’ve never been more proud of a hand of euchre I lost in my life.
Deer camp will not care how good your gear is. It will not care what you shot or didn’t shoot. It will care whether you showed up, whether you laughed when you were the joke, and whether you were still there in the morning to make the coffee, even after you learned nobody drinks the coffee. Everything else is just noise from a man who is still trying too hard. I know, because I was that man. I might still be that man some mornings. But I keep driving north, and I keep showing up, and every year the plastic deer gets a little more bullet holes and a little more love.
The buck I still haven’t killed doesn’t bother me half as much as the idea of missing another euchre game with those two old men. That’s what I didn’t know when I drove up there with the creased coat and the empty head. The hunt was never the point of camp. The people were. And the coffee was terrible, and I still make it the same way, every single year.
