Whitetail365: The Deer Hunting Blog From Field & Stream

Father's Day Photo Contest

If you’d like an autographed copy of Bill Heavey’s book If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? to give your dad on Father’s Day, use the form below to send us a photo of him--or the two of you together--hunting, fishing, or just enjoying the outdoors. We’ll pick our five favorites and send one signed book to each of the winners.

When you fill out the form, please include your name, email address, and a short description of what's taking place in the photo. And note this deadline: we're only accepting entries until May 30th, to make sure you receive your copy by June 15th.

Thanks for participating, and good luck!

--The Editors

Name:
Email Address:
Home Town:
Choose your photo:
Tell us the story behind this photo:

Bill Heavey: Son of a Beech

I’ve nearly had about three heart attacks in the past weeks. The cause: beech leaves. The 3- to 6-inch long leaves of Fagus grandifolia, which grows in fertile woods in the eastern U.S., turn ivory-yellow when dry and have a maddening tendency to curl in tightly upon themselves. Such a leaf, standing perpendicular among the leaves of the forest floor, looks exactly like an antler tine. The guy treading the woods in search of antlers or any part of an antler is at the mercy of these nasty little guys.

This week’s tip: If you use a CamelBak or other backpack with a bladder, be extremely careful about how you stow sheds. Nature designed antlers to puncture. That’s really all I care to share at this time about that one.

I found two 5-pointers yesterday, both left sides, on the same hill where I found two 5-pointers last year. The bigger of the two was in the same exact spot – give or take 10 feet – of where I found a big one last year. I raced home, compared the two antlers, and confirmed to the extent that I can say they are both from the same deer. This year’s is just like last year’s, down to the wave in certain tines, only a little bigger around, with slightly longer tines, and the G4 that was part of a crab claw last year is now an independent tine.

The pleasure this find gave me, of confirming the survival and something of the habits of a buck I have yet to see, is enormous. And very hard to explain. 

Bill Heavey: Knife Giveaway Winner

The votes are in, the decision is final, and the winner of the shed hunting contest is Jack. He didn’t win because he came up with a good name, but because any guy who needs a Gerber folding knife bad enough to write poetry for it is embarrassingly desperate. (Also - and this is the painful part - it was actually a pretty good poem.) Jack, send your snail mail address to nate.matthews@bonniercorp.com and he'll forward to me. I’ll get you the knife - eventually.

Sore losers, repeat after me: "You get what you get and you don't get upset."

I have neglected every responsibility under the sun to go out four times this week. What I have to show for it is a single fresh shed, barely a 5-pointer, right side, that could belong to what will be a nice buck next fall.

In the same area, I came across a long-dead buck with antlers, four on one side and a single 10-inch spike on the other. This was significant because it indicated that either nobody was hunting antlers in the area or at least nobody was desperate enough to cut horns off a rotting carcass. The absence of competition made my heart soar.

I've been finding a disconcerting number of small buck skulls and sheds that are at least a year old: bleached white and porous by the sun, chewed ragged by rodents. It got me wondering if I simply can't see the new, darker antlers all around me or if better hunters are just leaving the old stuff.

On public land surrounding the Beltway in Maryland, I found three hang-on stands and a Moutltrie broadcast feeder (legal in Maryland). They must have been there for years, because the trees involved had all grown over the screw-in steps, effectively making them permanent. Talk about audacity.

Late yesterday afternoon, I was walking south-facing slopes and hilltops in a stream-valley park near mega-mansions in Potomac, Maryland. There were trails so highly used I expected to find "HOV Only" signs along the route. And there wasn't a shed to be found. As the afternoon wore on, I neared the crest of a rise and heard a sound like fast applause. Turned out to be dozens of hooves tearing through very dry leaves. I sprinted to the top and saw the host of white flags departing. Being unpressured suburban deer, the herd stopped after 60 yards. And there, real as an envelope from the IRS in your mailbox, was a big, fat buck. I could tell it was a buck because of his large body. The other giveaway was antlers firmly affixed to his skull. He was a tall-and-outside-the-ears 7-pointer. I watched him for five minutes before he ambled out of sight. This was at 5:32 P.M. on March 2.

At least now I've got an excuse for why I'm not finding more.

The First Rule of Shed Club ...

To paraphrase from the movie “Fight Club,” the first rule of Shed Club is – you do not talk about Shed Club.

Shed hunters are even more secretive about their haunts than deer hunters. (Incidentally, I think we need to coin a noun by which shed hunters describe those who pursue the whole animal. Neither “live deer hunters," "whole deer hunters," or "regular hunters" quite cuts it. Let the competition begin. First prize, to be judged by an independent panel of me, wins a Gerber Freeman Folder knife in nearly new condition, my sole freebie from the recent SHOT Show.)

My shed hunting pal, Paula, has to be prodded to divulge even the name of the state where she has found her latest. The reason, of course, is that there is no upside to revealing your honey hole. In fact, it’s even less advantageous with sheds than “regular” hunting (see what I mean about the need for a better word?) because access is so much easier. A “No Hunting” sign will keep most deer hunters out. It will not deter a shed man, who, after all, is not hunting in the traditional sense. Since shed hunters usually carry no weapon more significant than a knife and/or a pruning shears, they can go pretty much anywhere. (Small pruning shears, incidentally, are much more effective for getting through briers than a machete). 

I’ve found a grand total of zip antlers in the past week. I take some comfort in the fact that bucks still wearing their antlers have been seen within the past few days. Meanwhile, Paula has found several singles and two sets in the same time. “Good ones but not trophies. Jeez, I’m startin’ to feel sorry for you,” she said. I asked where she’d found hers.  She erupted into her smoker’s hacking laugh, finally managing to croak, “Not that sorry, honey,” and hung up on me.

Bad Juju Among the Shed Heads

If you look closely at the expression of my child, you may find yourself asking the same question I did, namely: Does she look crazy all by herself or because her Daddy is making her that way with his deer and shed obsessions ?

I knew I was in trouble this year when I got lucky shed hunting in the first two hours of my first day.  I was walking an old fence line – dating from the days that cows grazed inside the Beltway -  in a steep area of a public park along the river. I looked down and there it was: just a three-pointer, but heavy (18 ounces on my office postal scale) and palmated. It was right where it was supposed to be, at a place where jumping the fence had dislodged it. A feeling of elation swept over me, quickly followed by an intuition of bad juju to come. I’ve never felt comfortable when I got lucky right off the bat, whether it was in hunting, fishing, athletics, or with women of the opposite sex. In my experience, easy initial  success is an indicator that disaster is in the immediate area and will descend just as soon as it finds a place to park.

And so it has been. I have been out at least part of each of the last six days, from two to four hours a day. I’ve walked public land and private, seen deer that would bolt at the first shuffle of my feet in the leaves and others that approached so boldly it was clear that somebody has been hand feeding them. I have seen sticks on the ground that initially stopped my heart, Pope & Young-caliber sticks. Sticks that looked so much like antlers I nearly kept them with the intention of posting photos of them here and starting a contest devoted entirely to antler-like sticks. That’s when I decided my preoccupation was getting a little out of hand.

My plan is to stay out of the woods today. It’s now 9:11 a.m. So far, so good.

Bill Heavey: An Old Joke I Love

There is an old joke I love for how economically it conveys the reality of deer hunting.

A city guy wanders into the only bar in a small town and asks, “Can any of you guys tell me a good spot to put up a tree stand and shoot a deer? I’ve never done it before.”

The guys in the bar roll their eyes at one another and one decides to have a little fun with him. “Sure thing,” he says. “It’s simple. You know those big yellow highway signs you see with a deer on’em?”

“Sure,” the dude says.

“Well, we put those out just to help guys like you. Drive around until you see one, park, go into the woods right there, and set up in the first tree you find.” 

The guy thanks him and leaves, whereupon everybody in the bar pounds the trickster on the back and laughs until beer sprays out their noses.

Two hours later, the hunter comes back. “Could any of you guys show me how to clean this thing?” 

Bill Heavey: Stink Free in Las Vegas

I've just returned from Las Vegas and the SHOT show, the hunting industry's annual beer-and-gear-fest, where a new scent-elimination product caught my eye. It will probably turn out to be another gimmick. On the other hand, it could mean the end of ScentLok, Scent Shield, and all the other companies that seek to muffle odor with burnt coconut carbon, silver ions, and the secretions of the Eastern Spadefoot Toad.

It's called the MOXY Generation Unit, and looks decidedly un-sexy, rather like a portable vacuum cleaner with a hose that hooks up to a garment bag like you use when forced to buy a new suit. My grasp of science is slim, but here's what little I understand of it. An oxygen molecule -- O2 --is nothing more than two oxygen atoms stuck together. Okay, pay attention. More oxygen atoms can be added to the existing molecule. Ozone, for example, is O3. "Oxidizing" cleaners, which include chloride and Oxi-Clean (the one with the bearded guy yelling at you on TV), are quite popular these days. The more oxygen atoms you add, the more "powerful" the oxidizing molecule. Problem is, the more oxygen atoms you add, the more they repel each other. They're about as stable as Britney Spears.

Anyway, MOXY claims to have found a "super oxidizing" metal ion which they've somehow kidnapped, imprisoned in the vacuum cleaner, and made go to work for them cranking out molecules with up to 14 oxygen atoms stuck to them. The machine, as I understand it, sucks in O2 and spits out the super-charged oxygen molecules, which get blown into the garment bag. The bag holds 4-to-6 hunting garments AND up to two pairs of boots you can stick in the bottom.

These are some badass molecules. The company says that in less than 20 minutes, these suckers not only neutralize odors on your stuff, they STAY in there for hours. This means your duds continue to pull odor away from your body and nuke it.

The unit can plug into any wall outlet, or even the 12-volt connection in your car. It will be available next spring and retail for $399. See moxyproducts.com if you want to get even more confused.

It's easy to knock this idea, even (or especially) if you don't understand it. On the other hand, if it works, it would certainly rock my world.

Change is a flighty creature. Sometimes she moves like a glacier. Sometimes she strikes like lightning. The only thing for certain is that she's always in motion.

Bill Heavey: Fried Alabama

I've just returned from a hunting trip to Alabama, which has greatly reduced my life expectancy, mostly because of what I ate. At home, I stick to a balanced diet of pizza, cheeseburgers, beer, Doritos, chocolate bars, and one dessert a day: a single serving of ice cream consisting of however much is left in the carton.

Alabama hunters consider this a vegan diet. We rolled out of our bags each morning and immediately nuked two or three Jimmy Dean sausage-egg-cheese-and-more-sausage biscuits apiece. We washed this down with Dr. Thunder, an off-brand carbonated beverage that lives up to its name. As sitting in a shooting house burns untold calories, we loaded our pockets with more Dr. Thunder and peanut butter crackers before heading out.

Lunch began with grilled homemade sausages (plain, jalapeno, or jalapeno-and-cheese) made by Jimmy, who excels at fixing trucks, reloading bullets, and cooking. We ate these hot and dripping fat with our fingers while he deep-fried bass filets, deer medallions, and breaded chicken bits. Halfway through the meal, which we ate standing around a fire in a 55-gallon drum, someone produced a loaf of white bread. The slices served as plates for food too hot to touch, as napkins when you tired of wiping your hands on your pants leg, and had the added benefit that you could eat them.

Dinner was at a restaurant that served fried dill pickle slices as an appetizer. Most of us went for the 17-oz. ribeye with hush puppies and, for the vegetable, french fries. We washed this down with beer. Then, because it is impossible to eat while you are asleep, we had slivers of cheesecake with a molecular density similar to that of uranium to tide us over until dawn.

The guys invited me to come back next year for the annual barbecue on the last weekend of the season. "We get serious about it then," one said. "Damn near stop your heart up like a rusty watch."

If I'm alive, I'll be there.

Bill Heavey: Allies in Strange Places

I got a letter from a Mr. R. L. Fischer of Pittsburgh the other day, passing on the transcript of an interview in which the subject delivered  “the best justification for hunting” that Fischer had ever heard. The person being interviewed was a non-hunter, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Food Column editor of the L.A. Weekly, Jonathan Gold. And it aired on every hunter’s favorite radio outlet, National Public Radio. 

That’s right, a food writer from La-La Land on the liberal elite’s favorite radio. Gold, an adventuresome eater, described both his extreme discomfort and a kind of epiphany he had while eating a live prawn in a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles.

“...it was not dead, this prawn, it was extremely alive and it was wiggling its legs and it was wiggling is antennae. And its eyes were like swiveling madly in its eye sockets, and it was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the creature that was going to eat it.

“It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with our teeth...(but) the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it, was extraordinary. It was sweet, it was like there was life pushing through it.”

The interviewer then asks the million dollar question. Was Gold of the opinion that it mattered, that it was morally better to eat an animal if the eater was more awake to the fact of the animal’s life and that it had had to be killed to end up on his dinner plate?

He responded: “I think it matters a great deal. I mean, one of the greatest metaphors in western civilization was that of Christ who gave his life so that others might live. And I don’t want to be sacrilegious and I don’t want to belittle that myth in any way, but a pig is giving his life so that we might eat, a chicken is giving its life so that we might eat. And I think the least we can do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf we are eating. Not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of it being that what it was, that it wasn’t just this bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way onto our plates.”

I was thinking about this all day yesterday while butchering my deer, which took me and a friend about five hours. It was something I hadn’t done in a long time. It brought home to me once again the strange miracle of our lives: of the fleeting now-ness of them, of the violence of existence, of the vividness of any given moment as it flies. And of how all living things are part of a mystery far beyond our ability to comprehend.

Bill Heavey Actually Kills a Buck

Hunting success and I meet up so seldom that I hardly know what to do when he stops to shake my hand.

The fact is, there was nothing particularly dramatic about the encounter in which I killed my buck. (Incidentally, I cannot abide the word “harvest.” A whitetail is not a tomato. Taking the life of a game animal is no small thing, and I fail to see the merit in glossing over that fact.)

I was 22 feet up in a tree and looking down a ridge at about 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning. It was mid-December, a notoriously difficult time to see bucks, and I had no higher hope than a shot at a doe. Then came the shuffling in the leaves behind me. I turned to see, 20 yards out and closing, a buck: big shoulders and curved tines.

There was no time for counting points or guessing his spread. The binary switch in my head just flipped to “shoot” and I clipped release to string. I’d never seen him before, but he was obviously familiar with the area and knew exactly where he wanted to go. And his path would take him right behind me. Five seconds later, he passed within 10 feet of my tree. Five seconds more and he was quartering away at 15 yards. I drew, let him make it to an opening in the brush, and gave him my best bleat.

You should understand that my best bleat sounds like a goat choking to death on a fan belt. But it did the trick. He stopped. I shot. The divot from his leap was a shovel’s worth of black dirt lying atop the wet leaves. The blood trail was continuous, six inches wide, and a full 120 yards long. I have no idea how he made it that far missing that much blood, but he did. I am incapable of aging deer once they appear to have reached the age of 3 1/2, but he looked every bit of that and maybe more. That’s a trophy in my book.

Now that I’ve tagged a good buck, I feel entitled to offer my expert advice on hunting wily old bucks:

1. Spend more hours on stand than you can possibly justify; and
2. Hope that he offers a clean shot before you have time to fully realize exactly what’s going on.

Bill Heavey: Suburban Winter Blues

The season runs through January 31st around here, and right now the deer are up and moving about as often as David E. Petzal writes a check to Save the Children. This has always been the toughest time of the year to see whitetails, at least in my woods.  As Leonard Lee Rue III writes in The Deer of North America,  “...where the deer’s endocrine system has had a chance to adapt to the cold, the animals are geared to be sedentary. They key to their survival is their inactivity.”

And they can really afford to be sedentary these days, what with temperatures 20 degrees and more above normal. It was 67 degrees yesterday. It’s supposed to hit 70 today. This kind of winter hunting calls for special precautions. Such as sunblock.

Bill Heavey's Book Reviewed

Tepid, non-committal reviews of Bill Heavey’s new book, “If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing and the Wilds of Suburbia,” continue to trickle in, proof that a lot of critics have not read it all that closely.

“Best Book Title” of 2007 – Entertainment Weekly. Nothing abut the author or subject, of course, just the title. (Hey, it’s a start.)

“In Heavey's often off-kilter humor, he is the unwashed sporting public. He frequently places himself (as a witless klutz) at the crux of a story and isn't hesitant to provide a refreshing laugh at his own expense.” – Gary Garth, Louisville Courier-Journal. (Hey, unwashed and witless. Beat that, Ernest Hemingway.)

“Sure to bring a smile to even the grumpiest person in the land.” – Gene Mueller, The Washington Times. (The guy has obviously never met David E. Petzal.)

“Bill Heavey's humor columns make dandy bookmarks.That's a compliment.” - Candus Thomson, Baltimore Sun. (Makes you wonder what she'd say for an insult).

“When you read his stories, many of them are about you, and most are the stories you were too ashamed to tell anyone about.” – Tom Remington, Black Bear Blog. (In certain contexts, “shameless” could be, you know, a good thing.)

Order your copy today and treat yourself to that warm feeling of superiority you get when reading about somebody even unluckier than you.

Bill Heavey: Why I Don't Use Trail Cameras

I have never owned nor operated a trail camera. Three reasons: One is philosophic: The use of digital technology has always seemed antithetical to the deeper pleasures of hunting – to the act of immersing yourself in the landscape to the point that, in writer Barry Lopez’s wonderful description, you “have the land around you like clothing.” One is practical: I hunt almost exclusively in places where a trail camera would likely be stolen within hours of being placed. One is technical: I have a greater chance of being named president-for-life of Uzbekistan than I do in figuring out the damn things. Anything involving the words “download” or “user-friendly computer interface,” I have decided, is code for “everybody can do it but you.”

What I do have is a rake, or sometimes the edge of my shoe. Any time I’m particularly interested in the deer traffic on a given trail, I simply rake or scrape away the leaves down to the dirt along a short section. When I next return, I’ll inspect that section for prints. No batteries, and both the rake and the human foot are widely available.

Okay, this is where it gets complicated. Small prints, I have reason to believe, indicate small deer. Larger prints, by the same token (see previous sentence) indicate larger deer, which may or may not include bucks. Really big prints mean what passed was almost certainly a buck. I know this is going out on a limb, especially since I have no digital images to document my theory. But I shall hold to it until proven wrong.

If you have trail cam images of large bucks attempting to pass their prints off as tiny ones by wearing special footgear, please post them here.

Bill Heavey: Blowin' in the Wind

I check the weather on the Web about eight times a day, usually www.weather.com, sometimes www.weatherunderground.com, although it has a more cluttered layout. I do this whether I’m able to hunt that day or not. I like to know what I’m missing. First I check wind direction, then speed. I can hunt almost any wind (if you detect the defensive smugness of a guy who owns no hunting land but compensates by rubbing his extreme mobility in your face, you’re reading me perfectly). Like most of us, I like some wind - say, 2-6 m.p.h. - better than none to keep scent from “pooling.” And I know the local deer don’t move much when it blows more than 10 m.p.h.

But the winds are so screwy where I hunt that I wonder why I check the forecast at all. My grounds are incised by steep ravines between narrow ridges, and I often set up in a saddle downwind of a crossing trail. (Incidentally, from the tracks I’ve seen in snow and wet leaves, the “expert” advice about deer being just like us and preferring the easiest route between points is just plain wrong. I see lots of evidence of deer taking the steepest route from one ridge to another. Maybe they read the magazines, too.)

Yesterday morning I set up 30 yards from a house. Although the forecast was for northwest wind, the air wafting steadily by my stand was from the southeast. Then, about 8 a.m., white smoke from a just-lit fire in the house’s woodstove began sluggishly puffing from the chimney. Obedient to the contrary rules of the universe, it came straight at me, swept along by the called-for northwest wind. There I sat, at nearly the same elevation at the chimney and just 90 feet away, watching my Wind Checker powder drifting in one direction and smoke going in the other.

I sat there until I realized the smoke was making me sick and then climbed down. I know that the forces at play in the atmosphere of this planet are unconcerned with indidivual humans, neither rewarding nor punishing us. But for just a second there, I wondered if I’d done something that really ticked them off.

If you know something I don't, please tell me.

Give Them Heavey for Christmas

Are you still short a couple of Christmas presents but afraid that if you go back to the mall you’ll lose it, put your head through a plate glass window, and start singing “Grandpa Got Run Over By A Reindeer” until the cops come? Relax, we’ve got you covered.

Bill Heavey’s “If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?” a selection of his less-offensive writing for Field & Stream, is proving so successful that some book stores are now ordering two copies at a time!  Thing is, they still might be sold out. Even Amazon’s running behind.

Not to worry! You can give the book without having the book. Just order it from your favorite book store or online seller, and present the person with the printable certificate below. And let the cops arrest somebody else for a change.

Bill Heavey: A Sticky Question

Unless you own your hunting grounds, you are probably using a portable stand, either a climber or a hang-on. I’m a climber guy. While I certainly haven’t tried them all, I have tried a bunch. Mine’s a Lone Wolf hand climber. (My intent here, incidentally, is not to start a whose-treestand-is-the-best debate. We  bowhunters seem particularly prone to silly equipment arguments. How else to explain that in virtually every archery chat room the majority of posters deem it necessary to list the make and model of their bows, arrows, and broadheads? If your identity as a hunter depends on whose name is on your stuff, you’ve got problems hunting can’t fix.)

I like a climber because you can go as high as you want (or as high as the tree will let you), and it’s a fairly simple arrangement. I confess, however, that even after years of using one, it usually takes me a fair amount of time to get both parts on and adjusted to the taper of the tree, to get my harness attached, and to inch-worm my way up to hunting height. Is there a better way?

Bill Heavey's Book Reaches Two-Box Sales Mark

The runaway bestselling collection by editor-at-large Bill Heavey continues to amaze even its publisher. "I think we already sold, like, two boxes of them," according to the intern at Grove/Atlantic Press who answered the phone. "Way beyond what anybody here projected, I can tell you that. I know his mom bought a bunch."

"If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?" brings together some of Heavey's least-offensive material from the last decade. In an imperfect world, it may be the perfect Christmas gift. In addition to memorable misadventures from Cuba to Mongolia, Northern Virginia to the Bahamas, the baldest man ever to write for Field & Stream offers valuable tips on the following:

*How to convince your stepdaughter that you're not a mental patient in training.
*How to call in sick so that nobody questions you. (Hint: Diarrhea is a magical word.)
*Why, when heading out before dawn for an all-day hunt in the mountains with a group of guys you just met, you should remember to wear your pants.

Available wherever inferior books are sold, including online.

Bill Heavey: Caught with My Camo Pants Down

We got our first snow the  other day, so I knocked off work early. Real early, shortly after brushing my  teeth. I figured they’d be moving mid-day and was, for once, right. There I  was, trudging through the still-falling flakes towards the side of a hill  where trails converge when I practically bumped into a doe and offspring  coming the other way. For once, I saw the deer first. But only by about three  seconds. They were 15 yards off and bopping along as casual as can be. Then  they caught sight of me. No telling what I looked like to them through the  mini-blizzard (an especially furious little storm cell was passing through at  the moment). Mama snorkeled her head all around and took a few steps closer.  She was more curious rather than frightened, and I wondered if my reputation had preceded me.

Had  I approached my stand as all the magazines tell you to: hunting from the  moment the car door shuts, an arrow nocked and ready?

Was I  already scoping out shooting lanes and picking a spot on the animal to aim at? 

You bet I was. And the really surprising thing was that the special friends I had brought along on this hunt--the Pope, Jessica Alba, and the head of the CIA--all had the good sense to remain absolutely still.

Of course I wasn’t prepared. My arrows were all  safe in their quiver. My release was carefully secured around a limb of the  bow. I was more prepared to compete on American Idol than I was to arrow a  deer. Somewhere, I thought I heard the sound of Chuck Adams laughing. 

They stood for about 10 seconds--curiosity itself. A whiff was  all they needed to answer their questions. They swapped ends and vanished into  the brush.

I thought over my options, climbed the nearest tree,  and sat still as a Buddha for three hours. During that time I caught sight of  another doe group, five of them, who must have been watching the whole time from  their beds on a hilltop, which I ranged at 219 yards through the woods. 

Neither they nor I moved there till dark, at which point I  climbed down. I count no day afield a defeat. I was honing one of the skills  essential to our kind: Treading that fine line between hunting really hard and making a complete idiot of yourself. 

Bill Heavey: Heidi Klum Loves Your Forkhorn

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in two spots this year: the woods and our nation’s airports. I’ve seen a good many deer and many more people. There are two things that must of us fixate upon that I’ve hardly seen at all: super bucks and super models.

There’s a reason for this, of course. Both are scarce as hen’s teeth, freaks of nature. But if you look at the covers of magazines pitched at hunters, or at women interested in fashion, you’re going to see one or the other. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with this picture.

A Deer Scouting Holiday

A recent school holiday too warm for deer movement, which meant that I had Emma until noon, when she was due to go over to her mother’s.

My daughter would have been happy as a cockroach stuck inside a Twinkie to watch videos all day. Sometimes, however, a parent’s duty is to provoke the storm to get to the sunshine on the other side. When I turned off the TV, the hysteria called to mind Britney Spears being cut off at a bar. “I don’t wanna go to the woods!” she wailed. “It’s boring!” I nodded, then gave her a choice: She could put on her clothes herself or I would put them on her. Well, her socks hurt her feet, and her shoes hurt her feet, and her pants had a seam in the wrong place that might have been drawing blood by the howls she emitted. When she ran out of clothes, she switched to general health, claiming she was sick and that her “hair hurt.” By the time I bundled her into the car, her face was splotchy with a 7-year-old’s rage.

The good thing about my daughter is that her anger often subsides as quickly as it arrives. Driving along, we were soon tallying the reddest fall maple foliage in the history of the world. A small hawk buzzed us as we exited the car to look for deer sign in a nearby park. “Whoa!” Emma breathed. “Awesome!” Thirty yards into the brush, Emma exclaimed “Daddy, poop!” over a pile of fresh droppings. Suddenly she was on board. “Let me go first,” she said, whacking a way through the prickers with her stick. Being the same size as a deer, she was soon leaving me in her leave duff as she rocketed down deer tunnels.

Before long, she had found prints, rubs, and a couple of fresh scrapes. She insisted on leading the entire time, except when she ran out of gas 200 yards from the car. I put her on my shoulders and told her she’d done great. “Does this mean I can have the M&Ms in your office drawer?” she asked.

“How’d you know about those?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said distractedly. “Can I?”

“You can have some of them,” I said.

We drove home singing a geography song she’s learning in school.

You may be wondering: Does taking a day in season to go scouting with your daughter in a park where weapons are prohibited count as “hunting”?

The answer is “Yes.” It also counts as something far more important.

Bill Heavey's Deer Diary: Success in the Upper Peninsula

Two months into the season, hunting more days than I care to divulge, I finally have a buck on the ground. He came in about 8:30 a.m. to some doe urine and the small amount of bait Michigan allows hunters to use. When I saw him he was already staring at the little pop-up blind I was sitting in. But I froze, tried to ignore my pounding heart, waited him out, and fi nally got my rifle up when he passed behind a big hemlock. He stopped quartering away at 50 yards, and I double-lunged him. He was big and buff, with brow tines that carried a film of sticky alder bark and sap.

Yes, it was over bait. Yes, the blind had been placed there for some time. Yes, as the guest of some guys with a big lease in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, all I had to do was sit there and pull the trigger.

And yet, I cannot deny that  it feels awfully good finally to have my tag on a buck.

Don't be deceived by Colby Lysne's photo. The guy shoots with antler-shrinking lenses. He's huge.

Please Buy This Book

Christmas, the season of obligation, will shortly be upon us. This year, give the people you love If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? (Atlantic Monthly Press), a best-of collection of stories by me, Bill Heavey, probably the baldest man ever to write for Field & Stream. My range is astounding, from fishing all the way to hunting. Plus I offer foolproof strategies for calling in sick to work. As a semi-gainfully-employed writer spending way too much money on scent-reducing soaps, sprays, and lotions, I’m begging you to buy a few copies. $23; available wherever books are sold/ -- Bill Heavey

Hi, I'm Bill, and I'll Be Your Hunter This Season

On Wednesday, the deer that will make or break my year were formally introduced. Both he and the doe he was dogging appeared under my stand without so much as a crunched leaf, the kind of physical impossibility at which whitetails excel. They came, of course, from behind me and downwind. So either I was well and truly scent-proofed or they were just too focused on each other to care.

He was probably a big eight. I knew he was just outside the ears and heavy, but it was over too fast to count points. I remember the instant of contact and my brain registering "Shooter." I remember his body, which either was or seemed huge. Above all else, I remember the way he moved. Like a linebacker. Big yet compressed. A swollen neck and an abundance of muscle not meant for show. Every ounce of his form focused and available to his will. Facts of which he was fully aware. He was, in short, the Man.

I tried to swing on him and found, as in a bad dream, that I couldn't. It was my harness tether. I'd had to guess which side of the tree when turning to set up, and I'd guessed wrong. Hog-tied by my own hand, I froze and hoped for a miracle. That he'd either change direction and come back to my operative side or look elsewhere long enough to let me duck the tether.

It was not to be.

He stopped, looked straight up at me, and disapproved of what he saw. He bounded just 30 yards off to reassess, screened by brush. Then he took off after the doe again. I stood there, flooded, knowing I'd blown as close an encounter as you can have from 18 feet up.

I'm hoping it was Round One and not End of Story. The happy couple cavorted by two hours later, still flirting and well out of range.

At least I know who I'm hunting now.

Bill Heavey's Deer Diary: Come Hell or Home Improvement

You don't want to move into a new old house in November. The furnace fan comes on, but the burner doesn't. You deal. Last night, in a room with unsteady towers of cardboard boxes, I tucked Emma inside my sleeping bag. We'd had hot dogs and lima beans for dinner, passing the single spoon back and forth to cut the dogs.

The vinyl window guys showed up at dawn, beating the walls from within and without. By 3 p.m., I'll have 14 new windows: solid vinyl, double-glazed, and argon-filled. That sucking sound is $8,400 leaving my Visa card account at the speed of light.

Meanwhile, my fishing buddy, Greg, is rebuilding the porch. He's a carpenter, quieter than the window guys but with a greater potential for danger. Every so often he calls me out to show another example of mind-bogglingly shoddy work by whoever built the thing 50 years ago. "They ran untreated posts right into the dirt," he says incredulously, shaking his head and exhaling cigarette smoke. "The whole thing's so rotten you could pull it down with your bare hands!" He has special ordered hemlock from a lumber yard 100 miles away.

I nod. I know nothing of carpentry, of vinyl windows and solar heat gain coefficients, or of furnace heat returns.

Here's what I do know. Right now, my Scent-Lok is tumbling around the dryer on high. My bow, boots, and climber are safe in the car trunk. I have just showered and dried my body using a bed sheet, the only clean fabric within reach.

Greg pops his head in the house. "I'm gonna need your help in about 10 minutes, okay?" he calls. "Some of this takes two men."

"You got it," I call back.

Five minutes later, I slip out the kitchen door. I release the parking break and let her roll 50 yards down the street before hitting the ignition. And then, at a high rate of speed, I proceed to the woods.

It's November, Jack.

Bill Heavey's Deer Diary: Excitable Boy

I went hunting in Kansas a few weeks ago and whiffed. On a big one. I was 17 feet up a ladder stand attached to a flimsy tree in 25 mile-an-hour wind, when the buck appeared 33 yards away in a nearby hedgerow, the one place no shooting lanes had been cleared. Between the obstructions, the swaying stand, and my swaying legs, I couldn’t keep it together. I thought I had a tiny window, but I really don’t know if my arrow deflected or just missed without any external help.

Here’s the weird thing. Missing didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would. Sure, it hurt. Sure, I was bummed. But it was mostly because I knew the guys back at the magazine would be giggling and high-fiving one another at the news of yet another botched encounter by yours truly.

In the place it really matters, there was no sense of failure. It was almost the opposite. I’d felt the rush of being inside a big buck’s bubble of awareness undetected, that indescribable explosion of adrenaline and heart rate and the presence of something almost like fear. I called Jack Unruh, the guy who draws me with a big red nose in the magazine every month. “So you missed,” he said. “But it was because you got so excited, right? And that’s what it’s all about. The day you see a buck like that and don’t get excited, that’s the day you ought to start worrying.”

He’d nailed it. I’d missed. But if there was any doubt about the power of hunting, my wobbly knees had pretty much settled the question. Here’s the one secret you won’t find on any Mega Monster Madness video: the most important trophies don’t go on the wall; they go inside the heart. 

Bill Heavey's Deer Diary: Keeping Track of Gear

I’ve noticed that the less money I have, the more gear I want. (Which reminds me, I need about a gross of Lumenoks. How did we ever manage without strobe-lit nocks?) On the other hand, all you really need to kill a deer is your bow, an arrow with a broadhead, and – for most of us compound shooters – a release.

The release is, of course, the weak link in this chain. For years, every time I took mine off I dutifully placed it in my fanny pack. Where it would take up temporary residence with my pull-up rope, range finder, gloves, head lamp, calls, compass, cell phone, wind-checker powder, hand warmers, bow hanger, knife, and the collected works of Charles Dickens. I would lose one or two a year this way. I still don’t know if they jumped, were kidnapped, or went to be with Jesus.

Not long ago, I found the solution.

Bill Heavey's Deer Diary: Welcome to the Bachelor Party

It’s deer season. Which means I’m pinned between a mortgage payment, a deadline, and an editor who says that I would be making a “career decision” if the promised copy failed to arrive by close of business today. And I don’t think he meant a promotion.

And all I want to do, all I can think about, is showering up, getting in the car, and riding that 2 p.m. bow wave of rush-hour traffic out of town like a happy dolphin to be in the woods for the evening hunt.

So far this season, I’ve already had two bachelor groups of bucks bed down under my stand. The biggest one in the first group was almost a shooter, an ears-wide 8 that, strangely, was the only one of the four still in velvet. He had the long legs and thin neck of a 2 1/2-year-old, though, and I’m starting to believe in letting those guys biggen up. (Remember when people said catch-and-release fishing would never take hold? Now it’s the norm. Let’s do the same thing with deer. Let the little bucks grow. Not because the law says so –  though it does in some places- but because we could all be shooting bigger bucks. End of sermon.)