I have hunted deer since I was eight years old, which means I have hunted through every kind of season a man can have. Wet ones, dry ones, broke ones, lucky ones. But I had never hunted through a season like this one, and I almost quit over it.
My wife, Dana, died last April. She was my hunting partner for twenty-two years. Not the kind of partner who comes along and reads a book in the truck, either. She shot her own deer. She butchered it herself and she did a cleaner job of it than I ever have. She could pick a blood trail out of wet leaves better than any dog I have owned.
So when October came around and the acorns were dropping, I did what I have always done. I got my bow out. I put the stand up where I always put it. And I sat there like a man doing math he already knows the answer to.
The Doe I Could Not Send It On
October 2nd, first sit of the year. Right at last light a mature doe came down the old logging road, alone, and she stopped broadside at nineteen yards. Textbook. I have killed forty deer in my life and I know the sound a string makes when everything is right.
I was at full draw with the pin on her shoulder and I did not shoot. I could not do it. My fingers just would not let go, and after a while she turned her head, walked off, and that was that. I sat in the dark for another twenty minutes with the bow still in my lap like an idiot, and I drove home telling myself the light was bad.
The light was not bad. I was.
I thought about hanging it up. I mean really thought about it, listed the bow for sale in my head a dozen times. Every time I pictured the season, I pictured her coffee cup on the tailgate and the way she would say “well, that’s a deer” when a buck walked and half the time she was wrong and it was a stump. Then I pictured going out there alone and something in my chest closed up.
Then the Deer I Bumped
A week later I finally went back. Warm afternoon, high pressure, nothing moving. I took my time walking in, two steps and stop, two steps and stop, the way she taught me. And I still managed to walk up on a whole bedding pocket I had never found in twenty years of hunting that ridge. Four deer blew up out of the briars fifteen yards to my right and crashed off through the timber like they had a grudge.
I stood there and felt my whole hunt die. Here it is, I thought. Even the deer are telling me to go home.
Here is the part where I was an idiot, and I want to own it. I had hunted that country my whole life and I still believed that bumping deer meant the day was over. I got it in my head that I had “ruined” the spot. I almost turned around and walked back to the truck to drink coffee and feel sorry for myself, which is a thing I have gotten good at this year.
I stayed. Not because I am wise. Because I was too tired and too sad to walk back out. So I climbed into the stand and I sat there and I did absolutely nothing, which turned out to be the whole lesson.
Forty minutes later, one of those same does came walking back down the same trail like nothing had ever happened. She had a fawn with her. She fed along the edge of the thicket, stepped into my shooting lane at twenty-four yards, and I still did not shoot. I just watched her. And for the first time all fall I was not thinking about Dana in a way that hurt. I was thinking about her in a way that felt like she was standing right behind me, leaning on a tree, watching me not shoot a deer.
She used to say the kill is a very small part of this. I never really heard it when she said it.
What I Actually Learned About Bumping Deer
Here is the practical piece, because I know some of you are here for the practical piece and not for the sad middle-aged guy.
A lot of hunters treat a bumped deer like a blown hunt. It usually is not. Deer are creatures of habit, and habit is stronger than the memory of a man walking through the timber. If you jump a deer early and quietly, the odds are decent that deer or another one will come back through on the same pattern because that pattern is where the food and the cover are. It does not care that a human walked by once. It cares that the groceries are still there at dusk.
What actually ruins it is the second mistake hunters make: bumping the deer and then walking around the rest of the property looking for “a better spot,” which just keeps the woods stirred up all evening. If you jump deer on the way in, the move is to get to where you meant to go and sit still. Do not wander. Let the timber settle. Keep your ears open and let the evening come back to its natural rhythm.
The other thing it taught me is that I bump a lot more deer than I ever knew. Twenty years of hunting and I just discovered a bedding area two hundred yards from my own stand. That is not a failure, that is information. Bedding areas do not move because you found them. Hunt the trail between the bed and the food and stop crying about a deer that saw your hat.
Why I’m Still Out There
I finally killed a deer in November, a small eight point that came in behind me on the last afternoon of gun season. I made a clean shot and I sat with him and I said thank you. I thought about selling the bow all fall and I still have it. I am not done. I just had to remember what I was actually doing out there, and it was never about the pile of bone on my wall.
Dana would have wanted me to keep hunting. She would also have made fun of me for sitting there moping in a tree for a month. Both of those things are true and I am keeping both of them.
If you are carrying something out there this season and it is making it hard to even want to go, sit in the woods anyway. You do not have to kill anything. You do not have to take the shot. The hunt will still be there under the tree with you, and eventually you will remember why you came.