Michael A. Sawyers
I am the luckiest deer hunter in the world.
I don’t say that because I have more big bucks on my wall than Jim Shockey. I say that because every deer I get makes me happy. Every deer I get is a trophy to me.
I guess you might say that every deer I get — as they say on the TV hunting shows — is a shooter to me.
In October, I saw a doe, determined it to be a black-powder shooter and right now as I write this column my newsroom coworkers are enjoying jerky made from that fine animal.
On the first two days of the West Virginia rifle season, I saw a shooter spike and a shooter 6-point. On the first day of the Maryland boom season I saw a shooter 8-point and, actually, it would probably be considered a shooter by most Western Maryland hunters.
In between deer hunts, I saw a few shooter squirrels and made pot pie out of them. Got 31 shooter doves in September.
Shooter, schmooter.
I sense that some of us are going gonzo about antlers, relating the size of those cranial growths to the success of hunting. Do what you want and if that sort of hunting makes you happy I think that is wonderful. In fact, there are properties on which I hunt that take that approach and I am happy and privileged to follow those rules.
I guess I’m just too old to take that singular view of deer hunting, an avocation into which I immerse myself from September through January.
This fall a 50-something hunter told me that he was talking with his 20-something son and together they recalled how not all that long ago they would gather around the pickup bed where a hunter toted a spike buck he had slain and how they would slap his back and tell him what a great buck he had gotten.
At that point the son said something to the effect of “I think we had more fun then.”
Personally, I don’t like unused deer tags in my wallet when the season comes to an end. My best hunting buddy kids me because I fill out everything on my tags before I go hunting. I put my name, my license number (and in West Virginia my address, phone number, etc.) That way in the field all I have to ink is the date, the place (and in West Virginia the time and the animal).
It is practical in that I have to write less in what is often stinky weather, but it is practical in a metaphysical sense as well. I expect success and prepare for it.
Ten or so years ago when I was granted access to some private land I asked the owner if there were any kind of deer he wanted me to pass up, such as small bucks.
“Naw,” he said. “We tried all that for years and it didn’t work.”
Let me be clear. I am not opposed to quality deer management for anybody who wants to practice it. I am also not opposed to anybody who takes any deer they want to under legal, fair-chase conditions.
In both of the states in which I hunt (one is on one side of the North Branch of the Potomac River and one is on the other), I trust the able wildlife biologists from West Virginia and Almost Maryland to gauge the state of the whitetail herds and to set the seasons accordingly.
No, there are not as many deer as there were in the 1990s, but there are a heck of a lot more than were running the hills in the 1960s. I know. I was there. If you are not as old as me you could, as Annie Savoy would say, look it up.
Not enough hunters
Recently I shared a story about a man who quit hunting on the Green Ridge State Forest because there were not enough hunters there to move the deer on that public land during the firearms season.
Will Elliott, who is an outdoor writer in New York and whose sister, Janet Lawson, lives in Cumberland, said he and his hunting companions have experienced the same thing in northern Pennsylvania. Will said it has even caused some of his nimrod cohorts to hang up their Vibram soles.
A golden sunset
On the second evening of the West Virginia rifle season, I watched a beautiful golden sun drop behind a dark Lewis County ridgeline. I watched the sunset through the window of a Comfort Inn motel room because my success with the shooter bucks I have already mentioned relegated me to a nonhunting status.
And, thanks to our friend from north of the border, Mr. Moulsen, the sunset was Golden in yet another way.
I’d earned a couple swigs, having skidded two bucks off those steep hills and I wasn’t going anywhere, not physically, anyway.
My trip, though, in that golden mellow hour was a mental and spiritual one.
I had just experienced two wonderful days of hunting in the county of my birth, where many of my Tucci relatives still live, play and procreate. My mother’s side of the family were not avid hunters. I got that from my dad.
The Tuccis, though, especially my grandmother Ermenia, could apply that Italian culinary skill to deer meat. Chew a mouthful and you could practically hear an aria by Luciano Pavarotti. Close your eyes and you were in Naples.
Nana (Ermenia) would often whip up some Venison Milanese and serve to Poppa (my grandfather A.A., which the locals found a lot easier to say than Antonio Angelo).
As the golden got lower, both in the sky and in the green bottle, I sensed that the first buck I killed was for my dad and the second for his best hunting friend.
Frank Sawyers and June Metz no longer hunt this planet, though they did into their 80s. Now the next generation carries on that Lewis County way of life, Frank’s one son, me, and June’s male offspring, Tommy, Tim and Sonny.
When Frank and June were young men, before they became part of the greatest generation, including WWII combat, deer were something killed in Canada, not in central West Virginia where to see even a deer track was to brag.
When their sons hunted this past autumn, they contributed to the harvest that gave Lewis the second highest buck kill in the state, 2,215 antlered animals.
Dad used to hunt with a Winchester Model 94 in the .32 Winchester Special caliber. No scope of course. One November he pretty much unloaded the magazine on a small buck that was trotting through the kill zone. His aim was good.
When he took the buck to a checking station, an astonished attendant took a look and exclaimed, “Holy #$&*. How many times did you shoot that thing?”
To which dad answered, “Until he stopped.”
Contact Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.
