DEC-A-4
“SHOT IN THE DARK”:
A SPECTACULAR CONCLUSION TO MY MARYLAND
DEER HUNTING SEASON,
WITH AN ASSORTMENT OF SPECIAL STORIES
FROM THE EASTERN SHORE HUNTS WITH BILL WEBSTER
December 5—7, 2002
What a wonderful series of deer hunting treks in MD and PA! The action was not so fast and furious as to make us think that it was too easy, and we had to work for what we got, but work we did, and it paid off in a single sentence. Of the few shots that I have fired from the .270 this season in the two familiar venues in MD and PA, and concluding with the just completed hunts with Bill Webster at his home and work place, the result are as follows: there are four deer in Jim Shoup’s Meat Packing Custom Cuttery, and of those, two are bucks going further over to Parker’s Taxidermy!
And it all resolves to a single shot I fired on Friday evening after arriving late to a deer stand for the “bewitching hour” and a last minute “Shot IN the Dark.” I had no idea then what had happened, since I could not see what followed the single careful shot at 5:17 PM in extremely obscure lighting conditions, and the stories that followed around the subsequent hunts are too specific and unusual to be possibly made up. I used the example of the unique experiences on Cumberland Island two years ago this coming January where a hog was shot, and a bobcat and a diamond back rattler wound up dead also—it is a bizarre series of natural events and many of those may be rather fleeting coincidental patterns. I not only had a few of those this weekend (in addition to the others you may read in the first Maryland hunt on Opening Day (Nov-B-19) and on PA’s Opening Day at Pine Creek Canyon (Dec-A-2), but saw trophy deer in each venue, and the prize opf each place is headed into taxidermy!
A SCRAMBLE TO GET OUT OF SNOWED IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY
AND OUT TO THE RELATIVELY CLEAR EASTERN SHORE
I tried to clear out the details of the listing of the Aurora Drive house, which I had tried to get to and clean, and got as far as the front door (no one had visited according to the foot of untrampled snow on the walks) but the handle of my snow broom broke, and the door key did not fit the new door that had just been installed. Dee Rosenberg, the Remax Realtor, was insistent that the place be cleaned—again—which was just as futile after the repairmen came in as the extensive and expensive landscaping job was just before the leaves fell on the lawn and then a foot of snow followed, obscuring that additional investment. So, there was not much I could do in Montgomery County after getting out of the driveway, so I cleared what I could at work, where people were coming back after having been snowed out for a day, and answered my emails. I then packed up to go out to Cambridge MD by prearrangement with Craig Schaefer who is on call all week since his partner went up to Wellsboro PA from which we had just returned for the “Dickens of a Christmas”—a parade under the gas lights of people in period costume caroling under their snow cover. So, I stopped briefly in the Bronco and coincidentally met Pam, Craig’s sister from Colorado, with her new boyfriend, and then drove to Salisbury to pick up David Schaefer to go out to Bill Webster’s home, which I had called and left a message. I got a call that he was waiting as I drove through Princess Anne into the Perry Hawkins Road farms where he is building a new garage almost as big as the house he has almost finished. He has 62 acres in soybean and corn production rented by his brother in Law Mike King, who has the adjacent farm as well as 1600 acres about two miles away, and Bill also has about 165 acres of uncleared woodlot. There is both cover and food for the deer population there which include one nine point big old buck who is the dominator of this area, whom Bill has spotted as he has wandered around during the year. They have been cagey, however, almost never being seen in the morning or by daylight, coming out usually only after dark. Just last night, Bill’s 14 year old nephew Chris had come over in about the first time any shooting had happened on the farm despite the excellent tree stand that Bill has built so that they would likely be even spookier, now that the first hunt and the first shooting had occurred. The big old bucks come out only after dark, and this is the new moon of Eid Fitir.
Bill went to a stand back in the woods, and he put David on the hottest spot, a pint in the midfield over clover and feedplots. He put me in the new treestand he had shown me last week, with roll down oilcloth blinds that can be strung up during the hunt. I walked to the edge of the field and climbed into the stand awaiting what is always a too brief period of action at the “bewitching ten minutes” when twilight fades out to complete darkness and when it is not possible to see or shoot.
I admired the view from the stand and watched the light fade from my arrival at 4:19 PM to when the sun had set only a few minutes later and when twilight faded quickly to show only shadows and various shades of grey. At 4:17 PM, I pulled down the oilcloths and prepared to come down from the tree. I stopped, feeling, rather than seeing something moving from the woods on my left. I swung the light-gathering Zeiss binoculars in that direction and saw a large body moving like a deer, from left to right, but then it abruptly turned and walked away from me with only its rear and a faint white stripe where its down held tail would occasionally flick. I had already announced my intentions that I would not be shooting at a doe, unless it were close enough for me to try with the .44 Mag Ruger pistol, which I had carried only to be packed down to Cumberland Island at the end of this month for the hog hunt. There was no way I could shoot as far as the unidentified deer with the pistol, and there was not enough light to even see the deer let alone aim at it without optical magnification.
I brought the field glasses down and brought up the Browning .270 A-Bolt Rifle with a ten-power Leupold Scope—a nearly ideal deer rifle—and in my experience of just a few shots so far—a real tack-drive, since all the shots seem to have gone where they were aimed and drew blood—usually only one at a time per any hunt. I could see the retreating rump through the Leupold and held it on the deer steadily awaiting a turn to get it broadside standing shot if it turned out to be a buck. It never turned. It walked straight over to the woods at the far side, with only its rump visible and fading in the scope—an ignoble target. Then, his head came up. I caught a glint of white like a large halo over his head—this was the big buck Bill had seen earlier in the year and the sire of all the fawns in this “neck of the woods” to be born next June! I knew if this big buck made two more steps, he would be at the wide water filled ditch, and jump across, disappearing from even this shadowy light into the dense woods. There was no further point to waiting, since I had confirmed it was a buck, and this poor linear shot on a steady hold I had followed would be as good as I was going to get. I squeezed the trigger.
At the shot, I saw nothing happen. I presumed that that tiny target was missed, but that the whizzing sound of the fast round past the deer just launched his jump across the stream in a single quick bound and he had vanished into the woods—as seemed to be his plan. I got down out of the tree and walked over to where I thought he had been and looked over the ground with my light to see if there were any clumps of hair or drops of blood or even a track where he had stood in the muddy field where the snow had all melted away with the late afternoon sun on it. The only snow left was in the deep woods, and we walked forward to look in there as well seeing not only no blood, no hair, but not even any tracks. I shown the light to the left and right after I had got through the edge of the woods, and could see nothing—especially not a deer. The new moon darkness had enveloped us both, and the “Shot in the Dark,” was just that for David and Bill. Except for Bill, others whom I had told this story thought that I may have imagined this phantom, but Bill said “I have great faith in you, that when he fires a shot, it almost always goes where it was intended to go.” He looked a bit longer, but he gave it up after seeing nothing out of the ordinary, and called as I was casting around trying to find some trace of any deer-like evidence.
We made plans to meet at the gate of the VoTech School at 6:00 AM Saturday morning, and I would leave Cambridge around 4”15 AM to arrive at David Schaefer’s mother’s house about 5:15 AM and honk once, since he would be awaiting me, and would leave all of his hunting gear and rifle in the Bronco. He planned to go out starting about 9:00 PM and begin his usual party circuit, with a few beers and babes, and try to stay awake in the tree stand the next morning to which he was looking forward, since he said he felt lucky. I drove back to Cambridge, while the Schaefers were out with Pam and the senior Schaefers, since Craig’s mother will celebrate her 78th birthday tomorrow with both of her children in attendance. This has been one of the major reasons for the move up from Winter haven Florida—and this year here birthday even features a Maryland snowstorm
SATURDAY’S SURPRISES:
A FULL DAY OF HUNTING AND THE STRANGE
PHENOMENA
THAT CAN SOMETINES BE EXPERIENCED BY
WATCHING
IN THE WOODS
If you go out in the woods today, prepare for a big surprise—several of them in different ways and different places. I got several today, and my first one was not even out in the field. I drove out early, with Craig envious of my going out (this last week of our hunts was very much needed and came at just the right critical time for him) but he was answering emergency room and pain medicine calls at that unreasonable hour. When I drove out early, with extra time to allow for any unforeseen circumstances, I came upon a thick pea soup fog over the Nanticoke, in which I had to slow down to the point that I could see, which for a while, I thought might involve my stopping completely on the broad bridge. It was very cold and it had been said to be getting much warmer by day, and the interface of these differences over the Nanticoke River made for a long passage. So, it was good I had allowed for extra time. I tried to find my way to 1522 Woodland in the dark, using the usual landmark, the white van out in front. No such thing, so I passed a few times. I finally sat in the driveway and honked, then called David’s cell phone, hooked only to a message service. Finally I called the home phone number, and got a voice who said, “David? Well, I think so, let me check just a minute……..No, I believe he isn’t in yet!” OK, after twenty minutes from 5:10 to 5:30 AM, I took off knowing that David could find the VoTech School on 413 off 13 South.
Just as I pulled in at 6:00 AM David called saying he was sorry he was late, and I told him to get down to the Vo Tech and the gate would be open and the Bronco unlocked for his gear which would be there while we headed out to the usual stands. I thought this would mean that David would come later and take his place on the Treatment Plant with the broad field in front of him. I never saw him, though I kept scanning the Bronco with my Zeiss binoculars. (David later said he had come down and found the gate locked, walked in and couldn’t find our vehicles (the only two there) waited four hours and left. That would mean he was there an hour beyond when we left!)
Bill saw a big buck at a distance sneaking around the treatment plant where he thought David might have been or he thought I might see him and take one of my patented very long range pokes at him. I was busy scanning the corners of the fields/woods junctions and saw no deer, although I heard scores of turkeys and a low flying big flock of geese that looked like they were going to pitch in right in front of me.
We paced off some areas of the field looking for the wire-rimmed glasses Bill had lost the previous night when he had killed a buck out here. We drove on over to Buck’s, the very, very local establishment of farmers and hunters where deer are checked in and breakfast is served. We had breakfast and talked with a couple of the down home locals, and drove out Dublin Road on the way over to Bill’s place where I mentioned again that I was keen to go find out what had hap ended in the corner of the field the night before when I was rather sure I had poked at a big buck. It was cold enough that it would certainly keep in the refrigerated “cold room” provided for us. We tuned the corner in Bills Blazer and stopped. There was a bizarre sight in front of us on the road. A man had stopped his black Camaro, and was standing near an eight point buck, which was walking along the ditch near the road, stopping frequently to drink from the water. He had said and his wife confirmed that he had just been wrestling with the buck, having held it by his horns, but he had no gun or knife to kill it. Something was very strange here. The buck was a pretty one, but was acting very bizarre. He pranced on near me, and showed no fear as I snapped pictures of him. He seemed thirsty, and it showed he had signs of shock, but then he would look alert, check around him, and bound through the ditches and stop again to drink. He tried to get around me, and climbed up on the fertile fields of Bill Miller a farmer neighbor of Bill Webster. The fellow who was eager to get the deer asked again if we had a gun, and Bill got out his rifle, but said he would not shoot a deer in another man’s field. Bill Miller came out in his pickup truck, and Bill Webster asked him if he cared that he shot the deer just to put h imp down. The deer was in the ditch, and I said to Bill “Let him get up out of there on his own power, then we do not have to carry him up here” The deer seemed to hear this and climbed up the opposite bank and stood again in Bill Miller’s field.
Bill Webster said “OK, I will shoot him.” And he aimed at ten feet from the deer and pulled the trigger to a loud “Click” that I could have told him, since he was so fascinated by what was going on that he had forgot that he had emptied the chamber. He cranked one in, and aimed. At the sound of the snot, the deer bounded away magnificently, only about sixty yards out, starting to drag his backquarters as he tumbled over dead.
We dragged him back to the road across the ditch, and looked up to see if the fellow that had wanted the deer so much was ready to help us carry him over---he had disappeared. Now what? Bill said “Do you want this deer?” I answered: “I think I already got one, and it may be even bigger than this buck!” Oh, that again!
We stopped at several farmers; including one from whom Bill Webster was hoping to buy some deer feed corn. They all admired the pretty symmetric buck, but when each was asked if he wanted the deer, they answered the same way: “I have got six hanging in my barn; there are two in the back of the truck now, and I have got all I can handle; my girlfriend shot two this morning and I am picking them up now.” Among the farmers present, not one had fewer than three deer already, most untagged, almost all does, and no one wanted a buck with a story like the one we just gave our t, saying it could b e sick, or injured in an accident—it had not been evidently shot. Bit, we have it on the back end of the cab and need to have a tag on it to carry it. So, back to Bucks we went and weighed it in at 138 pounds. Now who should be tagged with it? I suggested David Schaefer, since he got a bigger buck from bed than any of us got while hunting!
So David Schafer got an eight point buck—and I got 24 pictures of him in this unusual scenario. I then asked if we were going out to look for the deer near where I had shot last night. First I called David, and left messages on both phones, and then got Craig and told them together first stories and let Bill tell him album the eight point buck David had tagged. Bill set to work calling friends, who for one reason or another could not hunt but wanted deer. A fellow named Glenn, who rant the packet boat out to Smith Island, needed a deer, but was not allowed to carry firearms (Bill and I decided that for either of us, that would be a lethal condition) and we drove an hour to deliver this deer to Crisfield, on the Bay, looking out toward Smith Island.
We came back to Bill’s house, and along the way looked at the new 1600 acres his brother-in-;law Mike has, and they showed me a big farm that they said I could buy for about the proceeds of the Aurora Drive house. Bill and I got to talking about horses and bird dogs, and we went back to his house and drank Cokes out of interesting beer mugs, and sat awaiting the three o’clock rendezvous with his brother-in-law Mike, so that we would all go together to the VoTech, and see if we could find that big buck alleged to be out there, or perhaps pop a doe for the larder—not for me. I said “Could I look to see if we could find that buck from last night?” Bill said, “Well I have great faith in you when you touch off a shot, but we did have a pretty good look last night under the light5s of the truck when the ground was frozen and we could drive out there, and we didn’t see anything, but we’ll look again and then get ready to go out at 3:00 PM.”
I was still fidgeting, but at last we went out to look. We walked out since the ground had softened with tht heat of the day after having lost its snow cover the day before, it was now unfreezing. I showed where I thought the buck had stood, and under the broad light of day, we saw no hair or blood or track where I thought he had been when I shot. He would have jumped straight forward, so Bill crossed the ditch and started to comb that area. I said to myself “Bill knows this farm of his, so he should find whatever it is to be seen there, so I will make myself useful by making wide circles around the place I had last seen the deer.”
Bill plunged in and walked all around the woods in the back of the area where I had searched last night. He called out that there were no tracks let alone blood and nothing had been there. He was still looking, so, so did I. I had gone in the woods on the left, about the area from which he may have emerged, and started casting back and forth. I saw a few old deer tracks in the snow that had not melted, but none new, and certainly not his size. I went in about fifty yards—about the distance a well-hit deer can travel without heart or lungs, and saw no signs, I tried again at 100 and 150 yards in. Nothing. I saw a little stream, so I meandered with the stream, and could not get back the way I had gone in. I jumped across and plunged forward in a little clear space and ran over to a patch where the snow and leaves had been cleared away in a circle. I stumbled right over him. “Billlll!” I yelled, and kept yelling until he heard.
There he was: a beautiful mature buck head and hit in exactly the place I had aimed. The bullet entered the left paraspinous flank from the rear, and never exited. There was no blood track, no hair---and even here, there was no apparent track leading in. He had probably died on his feet nearly instantly with that .270 hitting him in an even more lethal hit than Bill’s point blank Ballistic Tip bullet had done to the eight point buck in front of us today—and that deer, ran eighty yards before falling. This big buck had made three times that distance and in the dense woods, leaving the edge of the field with such suddenness and coordination that no sound had betrayed his passage. He had lunged this far into the woods where I had found him by lucky accident, and kicked a few times, accounting for the patch of snowless leafless woods floor, and lay in this refrigerated ground overnight. This was the farm’s big buck that Bill had talked about. I saw him briefly and dimly, and fired a precise shot at him. The lucky part is not so much that I hit him, but that I ever found him.
I would have felt horrible if this trophy buck had been found by dogs sniffing around skeletons in the spring. So, I felt good about insisting we take another tour around the woods, and also making a wide excursion where he should have no reason to be. Amazing!
Bill was out of earshot. I walked back through the woods, leaving my coat and hat and Zeiss near the deer, and fighting my way out to the edge of the woods to call to Bill. He came to me, but still did not know why I had been calling. “I wanted to show you something!” I said. He followed me along, mainly because he saw that I had stripped off my blaze orange and had left them somewhere, but he never expected to see what he found. “Well, I’ll be---you lucky son-of-a-gun! You got my ten-pointer!”
I stayed with the buck and dressed him out while Bill returned to get the diesel tractor (the Blazer would not have made it through the softer mud this afternoon.) He had called on his cell phone to Mike and the word went out. “Glenn found that big buck he shot at last night!” Pickup trucks started arriving, with Mark and John piling out to have a look at the buck, and I shot a roll of film of the buck with his neighbor owners.
Now, how do we register this? I have turned in a buck and a doe on opening day, and Bill tagged a buck the previous night in order to turn him in at the Jim’s Custom Cuttery. We decided Cindy, Bill’s lady, who has probably never held a gun in her life, was the killer, and returned to Bucks to tag it, but first “We have to hurry to get out t VoTech!” Craig called as I was going out, and I could tell him yet another story as the saga of the strange and fascinating ways of the wild unfolded. I said I was now going out to VoTech to take pictures if either Bill or Mike popped that big old buck that David might have had if he had been up and about and on the Treatment Plant this morning. I carried the pistol if a big doe came within very close range, since I knew that Craig had gone out and bought a freezer for the venison that will be returning soon. I also carried the .270—as Bill said: "If that rifle of yours is down at the far end of the field, we know that big old buck is as good as had if he shows his snout!” I will take that as quite a compliment from Bill, and Craig had called in his congratulations as he was on his way through the Cambridge Christmas parade and then to dinner to celebrate his mother’s 79th birthday.
As the bewitching hour approached, I saw does running all over the field—a long, but most likely quite likely shot for the flat-shooting .270. But, my season was over in Maryland, and it has been a very good season indeed, with just the right pace of action and the final flourish of the trophy. Bill and I went to Jims’ where I am getting to be a very regular visitor, and put the venison through the meat cutting and the cape and horns will be sent to Parker’s Taxidermy. When it comes back, I believe I would like to see it hanging on Bill Webster’s wall, and I would be happy to see that come about, even though he insists that the Big Buck of Perry Hawkins Road is my buck.
I dropped all of my hunting gear in Cambridge, for Craig and David to carry down to Cumberland, since they are going by Craig’s truck and I am flying to Jacksonville, enroute to Gainesville first. I hope to have Bill Webster join us in Cumberland next year, as his first hunt after December 31, 2002 retirement. That will be after our last MD hunting season at the VoTech, and the start of Bill’s next house to be built in the Bay area, as he finishes the house and garage that would have been the projects of his current pre-occupation, but for the intervention of the deer hunting season. We think a lot alike with primal priorities!
I was invited to stay the night in
Cambridge, but I have to return to Derwood to make an early morning
rendezvous. The Rockville 10K that had
been scheduled in October for the 27th running of Montgomery County’s oldest
race was cancelled by a sniper on the loose.
This was also my chance to see the King Farm Village—the development
that I had driven through daily when it was bucolic pasture, now “improved” by
up market shops and boutiques. How do we
improve on this natural world with all the fine adaptation as that are balanced
within it? I arrived up the long and
snowy drive in Derwood, unpacking the Bronco at 1:30 AM, walking back and forth
over a myriad of deer tracks between the vehicle and my front door---habitats,
everywhere!