It’s November of 2005. As snow crunches underneath a pair of too-large boots, I trudge through the wind-swept woods of Marinette County. I’ve been brought along to experience my first taste of the annual gun deer season. While I won’t be holding a rifle just yet, I’m still excited to join my dad and Grandpa Joe as the next Roberts to partake in the tradition.
I don’t know why I thought we’d be surrounded by a throng of whitetails, but after a day of nothing, and then another, I was reminded that deer are tricky to come by in the frozen wilderness of northern Wisconsin. I told my dad I understood, but it still made it a bit hard to swallow when hearing stories from classmates at Sabish Middle School about bagging their first buck in Fond du Lac County’s Eldorado Marsh, where deer are more commonplace despite the constant cacophony of shotgun blasts.
Fast-forward two years later. As I clutch my trembling fingers around a 30-30 Winchester, I’m starting to regret committing to sitting alone in a flimsy metal tree stand while the wind whips around my exposed nose. But just as my patience reaches its limit, a sound not unlike a pair of horses galloping through the dirt starts to ramp up. I almost can’t believe my ears, but sure enough as I turn slowly to look over my shoulder, there stands a pair of deer.
It all happened so fast! I look at them, they look at me, they suddenly bolt off, I swing the gun around, click off the safety, heart pumping, body twitching, my finger wraps around the trigger AND…
Two shots, two misses…
Opening Day, 2010. We move from the woods to the Sheboygan County Marsh, and I’m once again treebound. I’ve elected to spend this season with my Grandpa Jim and his close friend Popp. I’m already feeling uneasy; I always saw my grandpa as a stern but fair, rule-following, “they don’t make ’em like they used to” kind of person. But he was someone I eagerly wanted to impress, and so even though he handed me a semi-automatic shotgun I had never shot before and sent me into a completely unchartered stretch of squishy moss and crunchy leaves, I was ready to have my moment.
Soon after I’ve finished the last drop of hot chocolate from my rusty Thermos, I hear the crunch of twigs and leaves dead ahead. I’ve lost count of the number of squirrels and bluejays that have come to heckle me from the peanut gallery, and so I don’t initially make much of it. But I was quickly reminded of why you should always be scanning the environment, as not more than 25 yards away I’m looking directly at what was, no hyperbole, the largest buck I’ve ever seen to this day. The spread on the antlers alone was probably half my height at the time, and three times the weight.
The familiar feeling is back again, that awful, stressful, heart-pumping, body-trembling feeling. But I’m done messing around. The muzzle is aimed perfectly, I’m sure of it, I THINK this thing’s loaded!?, wait, where’s the safety?, oh God, I can’t let this one get away!!!
With a violent ricochet, the gun fires a lone shot into the ground at the monster’s feet. The swamp buck stares back, unfazed, looks at me as if to say “…Pathetic…”, and saunters away.
It would take until 2018 before I would harvest that coveted first deer, a spike buck I nabbed with a particularly unbelievable shot from a bow (ask Vince Vitrano or Steve Scaffidi if you want to know how I pulled that one off). But if after nearly 20 years of “failed” gun hunts, why have I kept coming back, even as the number of people partaking in the hunt has been on a slow but steady decline for decades? Because like many have commented, there’s more to the hunt than scoring a deer or not. For me, and so many others, it’s about tradition, camaraderie, family, and memories.
For this piece, my dad and I recollected on our time together in the woods, while also coming to grips with the fact that it’s been five years since we’ve done a gun hunt together.
“We like to think ‘Oh, traditions never change’, but in fact traditions DO change.” he says to me as we reflect on how much our worlds have grown and developed just in the last few years. “To keep a tradition alive, you have to roll with the changes. As you and our other children moved away and started your lives, traditions didn’t go away they just changed.”
Therein lies what makes the gun deer season, and every tradition we hold close to our hearts in Wisconsin, so truly special: the fact that no two hunts are the same, no two deer camps are duplicates, no two ground blinds identical. Half the fun in reminiscing is trying to one-up friends and family with the craziest story, closest near-misses, and favorite chili recipes (for my money, I still think my La Crosse-famous Tenorman Chili would clean house at Milwaukee’s annual Rockabily Chili Cook-Off).
My dad has recently moved out of Fond du Lac for the first time in his life, making roost on the rural outskirts of Mishicot. And as the autumn wind howls again, and trucks growl their way down the fire lanes and gravel trails of the Badger State, I’m hopeful to return to the treestand once again soon.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll get round two with that 30-point swamp buck.
