First Blood

As a hunter and a father, it makes me proud that my 21 month-old son can accurately differentiate between a male and female whitetail deer. "Buuuuck" and "Doooooe" he hollers while clutching his plastic toy figurines. But I'm beginning to suspect that he prefers the doe over the buck. Nothing wrong with that; it simply tells me he's going to be a "meat hunter" as opposed to a "trophy hunter." And Lord knows we're always in need of someone help thin out the "slick-head" population.

When I see him playing with his deer toys, it makes me wonder at what age he'll kill his first one and if I'll be there at his side just like Dad was with me.

My first deer was a monumental moment in my life.

Like most male members of the Bryson Family, I've been obsessed with deer hunting since birth. I practically emerged my mother’s womb clutching a 30.06 in one hand and a box of Remington Core-Lokts in the other. Dad had me sitting deer stands with him before I could even walk and I could accurately identify the tracks of a whitetail buck before I could even recite my ABC’s. But being a hunting absorbed, know-it-all little kid is one thing, actually killing your first deer is something entirely different. Like “The Nature Boy” Rick Flair used to say-“If you’re going to talk the talk, you got to walk the walk.” To prove myself as a true hunter and worthy of the Bryson name I had to make my first kill.

It was late autumn during the sixth grade, and with Deer Season just around the corner, I was engaged in daily heated exchanges of smack talk between my two best friends, of who was going to bag the biggest buck. Roger Gonce and my third cousin Walter Bryson, both came from rabid hunting families and like myself neither had yet to take their first deer. This year was going to be a race to see who drew first blood and thereby establishing one of us as the dominate alpha-male of Mrs. Poole’s sixth grade class.

That previous summer Dad had leased several acres of land for hunting purposes from Dale Galyan at the head of South Mills River Road. I was particularly excited about hunting the property since it joined the legendary Monroe Redden hunting camp. Big bucks were routinely killed on the Redden property and it was Dad’s thinking that with some proper food plots and strategically placed bait piles, we could successfully lure some of those big boys off Redden’s and onto our land, where we’d welcome them with open arms and a hail of gunfire.

Over the course of the summer, Dad and I, with the help of my little brother, had erected several tree stands on the property. Dad of course did most of the work since Joe and I were too young to be of much help. We were there primarily for moral support and to fetch hammers and nails and in the event Dad fell out of the tree and ruptured his spleen, to run down the mountain and flag down a passing motorist for help.

Deer season opened like it always did, on the Monday before Thanksgiving and I went with Dad on Opening Day. That morning I sat in my favorite stand, the one we built high in the branches of an old red oak. From that particular vantage point I could survey a large field where we routinely saw deer in the early morning and evening hours. I just knew today was going to be my day, that a world record trophy was going to walk out in that field and I’d knock him down with my trusty .22 magnum. Well, needless to say it didn't work out that way. Opening Day came and went without me seeing hide nor hair of a deer. I was about to learn a hard lesson about deer hunting, that it’s just as much luck as it is skill to kill a deer.

The season began to slowly tick by without any success, and since Dad knew how much it meant to me to kill my first, and he tried everything to help me out. We hunted every stand on the property day and night. When that didn't work, we headed up to the government Watershed and hunted Bobby Cove and Rich Gap for a couple of days over Thanksgiving break. Still nothing. I even hunted several evenings after school up behind Gerald Rash’s house on his bait pile consisting of shell corn and fermented apples. Apparently my bad luck followed me there as well.

When Doe Day came to a close, which marked the end of deer season, I had failed to fire a single shot. I had come up short in my quest to reach the coveted plateau of manhood. It would have to wait another year.

However, I kept reminding myself, as disappointed as I was, neither of my two buddies had manged to take their first deer either. Of course that changed the following Monday morning. My friend Roger was waiting for me and Walter at the entrance of class. He was beaming a proud smile and in his had were several Polaroid pictures. Not only had Roger killed his first, but it was also a good sized buck, a small forked horn. He had killed it that weekend on his family’s hunting property in South Carolina.

I was devastated. My confidence in myself as a deer hunter had deflated like a cheap helium balloon. In my opinion I had hunted some of the finest land in all of Mills River along side my Dad, who of course I considered the finest deer hunter in the county, and not only had I failed to kill a deer, I failed to even see one. I was eleven years old and my life as I knew it was over.

I moped around the house for the next several weeks in a state of depression that would would have driven a normal man to to crawl inside a liquor bottle and die. But since Mom and Dad didn't keep any of the hard stuff around the house, I made do with what I had, a steady consumption of Yahoo’s and Little Debbie Star Crunches.

By now it was early December and it was my parents hope that with Christmas fast approaching, my spirits would soon brighten. I went through my annual Christmas ritual of circling gift ideas in the JC Penny catalog but without the zeal of previous years . This Christmas I was asking for your standard go-to Holiday gifts- He-man, GI Joe, and of course the average yearly quota of Stars Wars action figures. I was hopping that the Rancor/Jabba the Hut action play set from Return of the Jedi could help ease my depression. But in the end, I still felt empty inside. I had wanted to kill a deer so badly and I had failed, and In my youthful naitivealy I believed that I’d was forever cursed as a hunter.

Dad knew something had to be done. He couldn't sit idly by and watch his son turn into an obese, slothful, sugar addicted manic depressive. He had no choice but to resort to drastic measures, even if it meant breaking law.

By now it was Christmas Eve and all day Mom had been getting ready for an enormous Christmas party she was hosting at our house that evening. Friends, neighbors, family and the who’s- who of the Mills River social scene would be turning out in droves to get down to the holiday sounds of Anne Murray’s Christmas Wishes and gorge themselves on summer sausage, Ritz Crackers, port wine cheese balls, my Aunt Elaine's homemade butter mints, an assortment of freshly baked cakes and pies and all washed down by gallons of steaming cups of spicy Russian tea. It was going to be one heck of a shin dig and any normal eleven year old should have been giddy with anticipation and excitement, but I spent most of the day in my bedroom pouring through back issues of Outdoor Life, drowning in self pity.

Dad stepped into my room and shut the door. “Hey, what do you say me and you take your Marlin up the mountain this evening before the party and do a little hunting,” he said.

“Season’s over.” I grumbled, without even looking up from my reading.

“I won’t say anything if you don’t.”

I looked up and I could see in Dad’s eyes that he wasn't kidding around. This was serious business. Could this be I thought? One last chance to slay a deer before the year was through? Of course, what a perfect day, on Christmas Eve of all nights. The night wishes come true.

In a flash I had donned my hunting attire and grabbed my rifle from the the downstairs gun cabinet. And around three o’clock in the afternoon, while Mom dipped peanut butter balls in molten chocolate and my little brother licked cake batter from an electric beater, Dad and I headed up South Mills River Road about to North Carolina state law on the holiest night of the year.

I decided to hunt the same stand I hunted Opening Day. It was my favorite, and I assumed that sooner or later I was bound to see something out of it. Once I was safely in the stand and had hoisted up my rifle with the help of an old clothes line rope, Dad whispered his signature “Good Luck” and headed up the edge of the field and disappeared into the woods at the far end. He carried a rifle, a Ruger 243, which was a smaller caliber than he was accustomed but whose muzzle break wasn't as loud as his 30.06 and wouldn't reverberate as loudly if he was to shoot a deer. We were poaching after all. Looking back on it now I know Dad had no intention of shooting a deer that evening, even if a buck bigger than the BLANK Buck were to walk out in front of him. He was there for one purpose- me. Of course, he’d be the one going to jail and paying the stiff fine if we were caught by the local DNR.

Now, it being Christmas Eve, any normal kid would have been distracted and would have let his mind wander to other things like such as presents wrapped in shiny paper, toys, candies and sweet holiday desserts, but not me. That afternoon, I was all business. I was completely focused on my task at hand. That day was the quietest and most still I have ever sat a deer stand. I was at one with the forest around me. In fact, being the Star Wars nerd that I was (and sadly still am) I even made a fruitless attempt at using The Force in order to bring a deer into my bait pile. But as I watched the hours pass on my cheap Timex wristwatch and the sun slowly sink behind the mountains behind me, I began to feel that this night was going to be just like all the others.

As the winter darkness rapidly descended on the countryside and the trees began to cast long foreboding shadows on my little field, the feeling of failure stared the creep over me. I soon gave in to the powerful sway of Christmas Eve and my thoughts began to drift from my sparse, cold hunting stand to a warm, cozy fire, heaping plates of mom’s pumpkin pie smothered in Cool Whip and harmonious sounds of The Carpenter’s Merry Christmas Darlin’, another one of Mom’s holiday favorites.

Then suddenly, just before all the light had faded, something caught my eye. A small dark shape at the edge of the field, that wasn't there just a few seconds earlier. I held my breath, and to my surprise the shape began to move. It stepped from the edge of trees and began to walk ever so slightly into the center of the field.

It was a deer.

It wasn't a large deer and from what I could tell it had no antlers of any kind. It wasn't the Boone and Crockett scoring monster that had been haunting my dreams for the last several months but that didn't matter now. It was an actual, living breathing white-tail deer, an Odocoileus virginianus, and it was about to meet it’s Maker.

I lifted my rifle to my shoulder in one slow but steady motion, careful to make as little movement and noise as possible. I found the deer the deer in my Nikon scope and watched. I was waiting for the deer to turn it’s body just right so I would have a clear shot at it’s vital organ. As any deer hunter will tell you this moment seemed like an eternity. The adrenaline was pumping through my veins like a line of stockcars at Talledega. My heart was in my throat and it was all I could do to control my breathing. Seconds seems like hours and I was losing light fast. It just a few more minutes I’d lose the light completely, making it too dark to fire a shot.

I continued to watch the deer. I could hear the muffled munch munch as he nibbed on the shell corn in the bait pile. I was beginning to grow impatient. “Come on, come on, turn to your left.” I whispered repeatedly under my breath as a sort of mantra.

Then, just as the light completely faded from the hill top, the deer took a side step to his left giving me the clear shot I was waiting for. I placed the cross hairs of the scope just behind his right shoulder and fired. My little Marlin .22 magnum made a sharp CRACK, interrupting the calm silence of dusk. I watched my deer suddenly spring up vertically in the air and retreat into the woods on the opposite side of the field.

My body was shaking as though I was having a seizure. After several seconds, I managed to collect myself enough to climb down from my stand. I was too excited to lower my rifle down by rope, I simply slung it over my shoulder and down I went. Once I reached the ground I had another problem, “Now what?” I thought. In my mind, when a hunter shoot a deer, it simply dropped to the ground in a noble and quick death. Was I supposed to track it? What if it’s wounded and comes after me? Tries to kill me with it’s hooves or tries to gnaw my face off? I had read after all of bucks attacking hunters in the woods. These were the thoughts that were running through my young, over imaginative mind. At this point I was very confused, but eventually my hunter’s instincts kicked in and I started across the field towards the spot I’d last seen the deer.

Just as I reached the bait pile, I saw another dark shape emerge from the woods, but this time it was Dad. “Do you get him?” he asked excitedly. “I think so.” I replied. I showed him the spot where I saw the deer jump. We looked around the bait pile for a few minutes but didn't find any hair or blood. I was beginning to get nervous that’d I’d missed the deer completely.

“Now, don’t get upset,” Dad said calmly. “You shot him with a small caliber so, he’s not going to just drop in his tracks. Plus I've seen deer shot with .22’s run for miles. But if you placed those cross-hairs in the right spot, he shouldn't be far.”

He was right. Just inside the woods we found the deer lying down. But it wasn't dead, no yet any way. We stopped several yards form the deer.

“you’re going to have to finish him off.” Dad whispered. “If we get any closer he’ll run, and we may never find him.”

I again lifted my rifle to shoulder. “Right behind the ear,” Dad whispered.

I fired, and the deer flopped over on it side, dead.

“Nice shot, Son!” Dad hollered. “Your first deer.”

As the two of us approached the deer, I started shaking uncontrollably. I overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. I was excited and exhilarated, I had just killed my first deer, something I had yearned for since before I could remember. Yet at the same time I felt strangely sad and somewhat melancholy as I stared at the little deer lying still and lifeless at my feet on the cold forest floor. It’s death was something I alone was responsible for, in the blink on an eye I had snuffed the living breath out of one of God’s creatures.

It’s an odd feeling when a hunter makes a kill. Even now as a grown man, who over the years has killed numerous deer, elk, and and even the occasional caribou, I still get a twinge of that same sorrowful sensation, that I encountered that first night. Yet I believe it’s something that every hunter senses, it’s what makes us human.

I also believe that on that cold winter’s night so many years ago, I encountered critical moment in my life as a hunter. Had I let the guilt and sadness of the kill overtake my emotions, I may have never picked up rifle again in my life and my hunter career would have come to an end just as it was beginning. It’’s a test that all first time hunter’s must pass.

Thankfully, Dad drop-kicked all of that wussy none sense out of my head with his next statement.

“Hey Bud, looks like this is a buck! Look here,” he said rubbing his hand over the top of the deer’s head. “He’s got two little nubs here. He’s a little buttin’ buck.”

Yeah Baby! A buck, my first kill was a buck. I couldn't believe it. So all of that foolishness, about feeling broken-hearted about killing Bambi, all of that nonsense went right out the window. I had just killed a buck, I was now officially a man, right up there with the likes of Davey Crockett, Jeremiah Johnson, Sonny Crockett , Snake Plisken, Han Solo, and John J. Rambo. Form that moment forward, my life changed, I had become an official member of the oldest fraternity known to man. I was now a hunter.

But my initiation into this ancient brotherhood was yet to come and it was to be a baptism of blood.