Moon Up Deer Camp

 

I love deer meat as much as the next man or woman, but as I’ve aged (yes, I have) camp itself has become even more important to me. If the wind doesn’t blow right, for my stand, or if rain is drumming the tent roof when I hear the alarm go off at five, I’ll sleep in. Just not as mad at ‘em as I used to be.

Getting up to a fresh cup of hot coffee in driving rain, or swirling snow, is never unpleasant, but it’s even better when you know you don’t have to go; when you smell bacon frying, and the toughest decision of the day is whether the eggs need to be over easy, or scrambled. Will there be one cup of coffee, or two?

So and so got a bigger buck than anybody has seen around here in years? Well, good for him. Pass that apple butter, would you please? Hey, these biscuits are still hot. Pass the butter.

The last free place in this country, never mind the world, is deer camp. Turn your cell phone off, you fool.

Brian Loveland got to ours up on the Big Bend of the Arkansas before me this past week, and already had a nice buck hanging from the hackberry at the corral gate. He was gone, which meant he was hunting for a doe; maybe a hog, and would be in at dark. The boy is a meat eater like me.

Jerry Ballard, my old Osage County “potnah” from up Hominy way, called the house while I was on the road to deer camp. He told Pam he’d missed a monster buck because of a misfire, an anomaly in today’s muzzleloading world because all modern muzzleloaders are internal ignition, i.e. “out of the weather”, and “set fire” with a #9 shotgun primer, the same fire source that sets off modern, three-inch mag. duck hunting loads. A misfire with one of those? I’d never heard of it.

Old school percussion cap guns misfire in weather that even smells wet. Ask me how I know. I was still mulling Pam’s relay call when I pulled up to the lease gate and got out to unlock it. Didn’t sound right, something weird about it, but Jerry’s no liar.

“Ok, I’m turning the phone off. I’m at the gate. This is a spooky call,” I said.

“It’s Halloween.”

“Crap.”

I believe in jinxes. Ghosts? Oh, my goodness.

Brian hunted the next morning, then left because he was afraid he’d lose his deer to the hot weather. Smart boy. I slept in because the wind was wrong.

I hunted that evening because the wind had shifted, arriving at my stand on the ground flush against an old hackberry that’s due to come down any year now, possibly on my head if I live long enough to see it. Well, wait a minute. I probably won’t see it, right?

I’ve killed a lot of deer with my back to that tree, my butt solid on the ground. Sitting there, the wind has to be in my face, and it was just an hour before sundown. I saw the eight point’s bone white antlers coming through the lush summer cover well before I saw his body. The antlers could’ve belonged to a ghost deer, so ephemeral did they look floating unattached to any deer body that I could see. The cover was that thick. The sun was coming down.

The antlers were just floating along, attached to nothing. What, the ghost of murdered deer past? Spooky, with the sun going down. Look, I don’t care what you say. I believe in ghosts.

Then I saw the antlers attached to a body, about a two-and-a-half-year-old buck that looked as big as Brian’s did hanging back at camp. I picked an opening in the heavy cover it appeared to be heading for straight out in front of me thirty-five, maybe forty yards out, and took as solid a rest as I could atop my knees and got ready.

The buck filled the opening, and actually stopped. Perfect. The crosshairs settled on that perfect spot behind the shoulder, and I started taking up slack in the trigger pull. Snap! Misfire!

The buck stopped as if paralyzed and looked straight at me without seeing me as a person. I pulled back the hammer and took up the slack again. Maybe the Thompson Center’s firing pin had congealed oil or grease impeding its function. Try it again, Conrad. Snap! Again! Misfire!

This time I broke open the gun’s breech to drop in a fresh primer, and a deer whose mother was not stupid left the crime scene at about thirty-five miles an hour. And then an owl hooted. Twice. Dark thirty, comin’ on.

In camp I kindled a fire in the woodburner, lit the Coleman, and ate an apple and then a pear. The coyotes were out, and close, as they always are up there in The Big Osage. I checked my old Colt Woodsman twenty-two automatic to make sure it was loaded, slid it back into its holster, and sat there under the hissing Coleman thinking about the cause of my bad luck.

It had to be Pam’s fault. Relaying the bad news of Jerry’s misfire was a mistake. It’s never good to mess with a superstitious person’s psyche. Especially right before dark. On Halloween? C’mon. Take some matches and start looking for gas leaks in a refinery.

I got out some rubbing alcohol we keep in camp for cuts, and cleaned the rifle’s firing pin of anything I could find that looked even remotely like grease sludge and went to bed. “Tomorrow”, Scarlet said, “will be another day.”

The next morning’s wind was wrong again. I checked the woodburner’s smoke before daylight for that message. I primed the coffee pot for a late morning cup, and went back to sleep, wondering about the strange alignment of what I took to be Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, in the eastern sky. Bright as radium they were, except what I took to be Mars which was red.

An hour before sundown found me set up exactly square on yesterday’s circumstances. It was beginning to get dark again when the wildest thought came into my brain. Was it possible I could have put a primer at the back end of a completely unloaded barrel? Me? Forty years of muzzleloading from Alaska to Mexico? What? It was just a thought. Crazy. Like an old man can be.

I thought about it for two more minutes. Then, for no apparent reason, I stood where I sat, pulled my gun’s ramrod from the gun’s thimbles, and dropped it straight down the barrel. Ping! The metal rod dropped clean out of sight and hit the back end of the barrel. There was nothing in the barrel but the ramrod. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had dropped the pin on an empty chamber the night before.

Nothing wrong with the # nine primer. Something wrong with the man. Old?

Now it was really getting dark. That owl hooted again, from the same tree as the night before it sounded like, while I fumbled two pellets of powder into the empty barrel, and topped them with a saboted, .50 caliber bullet, for a change, and sat back down.

Only magic could explain the small herd of does that appeared thirty feet away to my left not five minutes later. The biggest one, the fattest one, turned broadside to me, and dropped in her tracks when the gun went off like Mr. Thompson had said it would years ago.

This was an embarrassing story to tell. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t pass it around.

Copyright © 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen