I am NOT a Deer Geek

From Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine Forum

I was in the process of trying to come up with a few quips that would get y'all laughing, and I finally stopped myself. It just wasn't going anywhere. It's not for lack of involvement. It's not for lack of attachment to this place. It's not that I'm not wholly immersed. It's just that something has changed in me, and being a D&DH Geek isn't quite where I'm at anymore.

For one thing, a Geek act was from way back to Elizabethan times. The term "Geek" was used to describe a fellow who bit the heads off chickens for the amusement of the crowd. I will do just about anything for a laugh, but Ozzy Osborne, I'm not. Don't get me wrong. There was a time when I would come out of the woods and sit re-reading articles over lunch, trying to compare my morning's experience with something that I'd read. It was a magazine ( probably not D&DH ) that finally led me to believe that what I was hearing in the morning was deer snorting. Before that, I did not know if it came from a bird or badger. What did I know from deer snorts? That's when I started my journey away from woolen hunting clothes that stank of mothballs and gave up my Jon-ee Handwarmer and started paying attention to how badly I stunk up the place. But that was somewhere in Reagan's first term. Along the way I started reading D&DH and I distinctly remember an article on sodium bicarbonate that changed my life.

I can remember waiting for the Fall Deer Gear issues to come out and thinking that the new Thunderhead 125s and XX75's were going to get me that extra edge I needed, even though my real problem at the time was I too stuck on the idea of getting a buck and I'd passed on so many doe I'd lost count. It didn't matter what I was flinging at them if I wasn't going to fling.

So what changed? I was mulling over this yesterday morning. I probably should have been trying to concentrate more on turkey. I was out scouting for them; I should have been thinking about the birds. However, I was thinking about being a Deer Geek, about going on a hunting trip and hitting that last convenience store and my buddy and I hit the magazine rack. He went for the porn, and I went for the deer mags.

I can remember how our minister included an anecdote about bowhunting into my first marriage ceremony:

" '. . .So her first shot was six inches high, her second shot was six inches low and the third shot creased the bullseye.' He says, 'That's when I knew this was the girl for me!'"

But that was over twenty years ago.

There's the collection of old hunting mags that #2 wife carefully sorted and filed for me about 10 years ago. I stopped using them as serious reference material shortly after that. It wasn't that I was losing interest, but it was that I was now in possession of my own deer property and I was now out and about with my own herd and I was making my own observations. Something happened along the way, and I was sitting beside a tree I found last Fall that I had determined would make a nice turkey blind, and it hit me why I wasn't able to live in that world anymore. It had gotten easy.

I am not trying to say that deer hunting itself is easy, especially if you are coming from a standing start with no experience and no help as I did. I look back now and realize I have rearranged my whole life around deer. It's just that, having done all that, the process of killing a deer becomes a fairly easy task. My sons have been born into a world where they can pretty well kill at will. In a few seasons they will start getting bored with bagging doe on the opener and start thinking about building more challenge into it. I started at a time when deer were not so plentiful, and I considered just seeing a tail a success.

So there I am cogitating over this whole Deer Geek thing, and patting myself on the back over my new turkey blind, and I look over my right shoulder and see four doe out in the field behind me munching clover, not quite in bow range. A quarter century ago, I would have been quivering. Probably I would have been quivering so much that the deer would not have come anywhere near. I guess part of growing into this whole deer thing was that slow process of quieting myself down to the point where I was seeing more than white flags in the Fall and hearing more than Putts in the Spring. I'd like to think that it was discipline and spirituality, but it was probably just middle-age setting in. 25 years ago, I might have been reading a magazine and missed the whole thing.

I miss being a Deer Geek. I'd like to still think some new gadget ordered from the "198x NEW GEAR REVIEW" will improve my hunting success. I'd love to go back again and buy my first bottle of Tink's 69 and make a special trip out into the woods to see the deer come running. They didn't, but I still believed. I still want to argue about red fox urine over grey fox urine on my boots and I really want to lose sleep over whether acorn scent on my hat will work better than grape or apple. However, I had deer coming to the scent of goose liver and crackers last Fall. I can't go back.