Two men set out for the ultimate extreme hunting experience in the mountains, but their experience wasn't quite the Ernest Hemmingway story they hoped for.
In my youth, the author Ernest Hemingway had convinced a generation of us to be cold and hard. Hunting glory only rained on the strong. Wilderness beckoned the worthy. Success came to those who suffered quietly.
So when deer season approached, my buddy and I drove as far into the wild mountains as our car would take us. We walked miles before we began to scout. We found abusive terrain to climb, then we looked for impenetrable cover. There we built our deer stands.
With any luck, our deer season would be blessed by miserable weather. Sleet would be nice, though a cold drizzle would be more painful, especially if mixed with a northeast wind that hadn’t warmed since it left Newfoundland.
That year, when we built our stands in such a place and the weather blew in almost as prescribed, it coincided with the last week of deer season.
The drizzle began before first light. Walking in by flashlight, it felt like threading our way through ominous gargoyles as the trees loomed with their waving arms overhead. The mountain was so steep, goats would have used a handrail.
We split up near the end of the trail to go to our stands. Mine overlooked a sharp drop with a white oak grove at the bottom where acorns might entice a buck to step out for lunch. My buddy’s stand poked out from a rhododendron thicket with branches interwoven tighter than Grandma’s knitting.
Once in my stand, the drizzle searched for the dry spot behind my neck the way water swirls before finding the drain. A shift in the wind helped it, so I spent the rest of the day cold and shivering. Hemingway would have approved.
Late in the day, a rifle shot cracked once from where only my buddy could have fired.
At dark, I moved to the trail where we split up, expecting to find him dragging a deer. Instead, he was standing there waiting.
“Miss?” I asked in typical Hemingway dialogue, wasting no words.
“No, dressed him and hung him for the night. A four-pointer.” I thought I heard teeth chattering. “Thought that given the terrain we’d pack him out tomorrow in quarters.”
“Fine,” I agreed, handling my end of the entire conversation in just two words.
Once we started out, the drizzle stopped, partly because the clouds dropped. We were in them or the fog equivalent to them. It was now night and the darkness seemed to absorb our flashlights. Unable to see the trail, we followed the contour instead.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped to look around and hide the fact that I was sucking wind. My heart thumped like a drum in a St. Patrick’s Day parade. My buddy’s shiver was almost imperceptible, like hand signals under the table at a poker game.
I leaned against an old chestnut oak as casually as I knew how. “Shouldn’t we be on the main trail by now?” I asked, forgetting my word count.
“It should be just ahead,” he replied, with only a crack of doubt.
Thirty minutes later, I found myself leaning against the same tree. Seeing that tree again was like picking up yesterday’s newspaper.
I asked the obvious question. “You sure this is the way out?”
He noticed my tree, the same one from earlier.
“This has to be the right ridge and it has to be the right direction.”
“So why did we circle?” I asked.
“Must be a mountain top.”
I grunted, having used up my words.
After a night’s sleep so short you wouldn’t have wasted a sleeping pill on it, we started in at first light to retrieve the deer. Finding our way in proved considerably easier than finding our way out. Sunlight has its advantages. But for me, spotting the hanging deer proved more difficult than finding Waldo. I couldn’t until my buddy pointed it out. That’s because it wore camo.
Suspended in the trees, well out of reach of stray dogs or coyotes, hung a four-point buck, wearing my buddy’s knee-length camo raincoat with the hood up. Two forked prongs stuck out of the hood, visible along with its black nose.
Looking at his sheepish expression, I again asked the obvious.
“Why is the deer wearing your raincoat?”
His answer was simply, “It was raining. I didn’t want him to get wet.”
In some world, that made sense. But here, having walked out in hypothermia weather, meandering lost in the fog, while your deer wore your raincoat, it struck me as odd. But then I realized the cold, hard truth.
Hemingway would have approved.
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