Memories of Deer Seasons Past

It was raining last night when Mama drove me home from an Environmental Conservation Board meeting at Carmel’s Town Hall. It’s still raining this morning and it would have been a good one to sleep a little late. But I’m up early, the Southern New York deer gunning season opening in just 24. At this time tomorrow, November 21, I’ll be ready and waiting at my chosen deer stand, alert, listening for sounds in the woods around me, watching for any sign of movement as first light breaks on the familiar forest floor.

Luckily, at my age, my hearing is still sharp, as the whistling wings of early rising ducks approach and pass in erratic flight overhead, followed by honking geese heading for feeding grounds, too high, too far away to see. Somewhere on the high hill above me, I can hear the wings of wild turkeys as they take flight and glide down to the ground to start their tour of feeding grounds, scratching and searching for acorns buried under the leaves of fall.

Gray squirrels are all about, each movement a part of their search for nuts and acorns to add to the winter food pantry in their nests high in the trees. All of the birds of the forest are on the move now too, and flights of crows can be heard cawing in the distance. Deer hunting—which I’ve been doing since I was old enough at 16—involves waiting patiently, trying not to move to catch the eyes of the always wary whitetail deer that might be quietly approaching, and always turning in the direction of a branch cracking or the sound of footsteps in dry leaves. There are few idle moments for a deer hunter on his stand—especially on opening day.

The 55 opening days of deer seasons past all run together in my mind now, but the memory of my first buck back in the fall of 1957, on that year’s first day of the season, is still fresh in my mind. I was hunting that day with my father-inlaw, the late Clayton Outhouse, and two friends, and after seeing no deer at an early morning spot, we went to a heavily wooded area that dropped down to a swamp, in an area where Clayton had got a 6-point buck the previous fall. We split up, going in different directions, and I ended up standing on a huge boulder, down in the edge of the swamp. As I waited, I thought of the first big buck I had missed several times, on a hill overlooking the old race track here in the Hamlet of Carmel. My Grandfather, Rob Barrett, had taken me, and had placed me on a hillside stand looking down into the racetrack swamp. It was an afternoon hunt, and as the sun went down and light started to fade, I spotted movement in the thick rushes of the edge of the swamp and a magnificent buck with a huge rack emerged about 60 yards below me. Suddenly I had my first case of buck fever, as I raised the old 16-gauge double-barrel shotgun that my older stepbrother, Delysle Smith, and my father had used before me for hunting rabbits.

The old paper-clad slugs I was using might have been older than I was, as I pulled the trigger twice after leveling the front bead sight on the chest of the huge deer. The gun roared twice, the deer stood still, looking all around. I reloaded and fired two more slugs; still the deer did not move. I reloaded two more slugs, fired one, pulled the trigger again and there was only a loud click, and at this point the buck was off and running full speed up the hill and out of sight. My Grandfather eased up the hill to me, asked what I was shooting at. I told him it was a big buck and pointed to the spot where it came out and I shot at it—5 times, one dud. He said, “Lenny, you should have killed that deer!” These were the moments I was thinking about a couple of years later, standing on that big boulder, when a shot rang out from the distance out in the swamp. A minute or so later a big deer came out of the swamp at a quick pace. I had just bought a new pump, 12-gauge shotgun, but hadn’t even had a chance to shoot a few slugs in practice.

A tree had grown up through a crevice in the boulder I was standing on, and I leaned the barrel against the tree, lining up the sights on the deer as it stopped by the edge of a running brook, looking up the hill ahead of him. This time, when I pulled the trigger and the gun roared, the buck fell face-first into the brook. I had harvested my first deer, a nine-pointer, with a huge rack, and the only deer head I ever had mounted, a 50-hard-earneddollar investment at the time. It took the four of us forever to drag the buck up to our cars, and I took it to the Grand Union in Pawling where I worked at the time and we slid it down the conveyor belt and weighed I on a meat scale: 187 pounds dressed. At this late point in my life, that was the best buck I ever harvested, and the mounted head still hangs over the fireplace here.

Mama and I were living on Fowler Avenue here in Carmel at the time, and we hung the buck in a willow tree out in the front yard. A reporter from the old Reporter Dispatch came to our house, had Mama climb up on a ladder with cookbook and a carving knife in hand and the reporter snapped a picture that appeared in that week’s edition. The cost of mounting the head was a little less than I was making at the time, but looking back, although it was painful on our budget with Mama turning out kids like machine gun bullets, it was a wise investment. After all of these years, I have yet to get a better buck, though I have many less significant racks of horns hanging on the walls here, including son Carl’s first buck, a fivepointer taken Thanksgiving Day way back when, on a trip with all 3 sons, that made Mama’s day when we pulled in the driveway here, with smells of baking turkey in the air and a nice buck in the back of the pick-up.

That was many, many moons ago, but hopefully when this edition hits the newsstands, I’ll have a buck, maybe a doe or two. I have a wallet full of deer tags that will keep me on the deer stand trough December’s muzzle-loading season. Mama has a career cooking venison dishes as long as her deer-hunting venison provider, and we’re a tag team when it comes to grinding deer, grinding it with pork meat and making breakfast and Italian sausage.

I gave my oldest friend, Mike Mc- Bride, 5 rolls of venison breakfast sausage to enjoy for breakfast at their camp in Hancock, NY, before heading out on the mountain deer hunting this weekend. To all those who follow this trail of the “Putnam Sportsman” each week: Have a Happy Thanksgiving, with Family and Friends!