A Little Help From Pap

I killed my first deer when I was 12.  My parents had given me a Marlin 336 chambered in 30-30 the previous Christmas and my dad took me to the deer woods one cold Saturday morning after he had fed the cattle.  I took a young spike buck that tipped the scales at a shade over 70 pounds dressed.  Dad took me for my first few deer hunts, but the man that I hunted with more than any other in my youth was my grandfather, Pap.

Pap was the quintessential southern Appalachian woodsman.  He had spent virtually his entire life in the woods.  Born five years before the Great Depression got great, he was raised in one of the most beautiful valleys in the state.  He coon hunted, he trapped, he fished, and he blazed trails through the mountains around where he lived.  And on top of all that, he was a logger.  So it's safe to say that few people spent as much time in the woods as Pap.  He spent his days and his nights in the woods and he knew them like no one else.

It was his knowledge of the woods that impressed me most as a young man.  Pap could identify every tree in the woods.  Not only did he know the species, he knew several individual trees by sight.  Pap had a remarkable memory for detail.  Many were the times we would be walking through the woods and Pap would point his dogwood walking stick at a tree and tell a story about a hunt many seasons ago when hounds long dead had treed a coon.  He could remember who he was hunting with, which dog had struck the track first and how many coons were in the tree.  I heard so many tales of Pap's hounds from over the years, I felt as if I had known them all.  There was Buttermilk and Bawly, Champ, and Old Blue.

Pap was legendary for his pace in the woods.  Even at an advanced age, in his seventies, Pap would leave much younger men (including myself) gasping for breath and leaning on trees.  In the early, impressionable days of my sporting youth, Pap showed me woods that he had hunted for decades.  Woods that I still hunt today and God willing, will show my children so that they may hunt them as well.

It was in some of these woods last November that I found some promising buck sign and slipped in one afternoon and hung a stand.  I hunted it that afternoon with my bow and had an encounter with a buck.  With only a few minutes of good shooting light left, I heard a deer coming down the creek bed towards me.  It stopped in a thick stand of young timber.  I'm pretty confident that I heard him make a rub, but he never made an appearance until after legal light.  I saw just a shadowy form slipping below me on his way to check some scrapes on the edge of a hayfield.  I waited several minutes until I was sure I wouldn't spook him and I climbed down and walked in darkness the quarter mile back to my truck.

As I walked, I had an overwhelming urge to call Pap and tell him about the encounter.  I wanted to tell him the tree I was in.  I'm sure he would have known the tree, a white pine on the edge of a creek.  I wanted to ask him where he thought the buck was coming from, where he was bedding, where I ought to set up to catch him.  Pap passed away two years ago, a month after his 90th birthday.  We laid him to rest next to his bride of over 60 years.  The man that taught me much of what I know about hunting and fishing these mountains wouldn't be around to teach me any longer.

I thought about the buck.  I knew where he wanted to be.  There was a line of scrapes on the edge of a hayfield and he would be checking them for does in estrus.  But he was checking them after dark and I would have to catch him somewhere along his path from his afternoon bedding area to the fields.  There were two different laurel thickets (Pap called them Ivy thickets) that I figured he probably called home.  I knew if I could catch him leaving his thicket, I could kill him.   So the next day, I checked the weather and wind direction and positioned myself between one of the thickets and the patch of young timber where he had made his rub the evening before.  Instead of my bow, I carried my rifle this day.

I got into the woods about an hour before dark.  I knew if he came, it would be right before dark.  And I was right.  Sticking to the exact same script as the day before, I heard him coming down the ridge out of the thicket.  I had guessed right.  I heard his footsteps as he entered the stand of young timber along the creek bed.  Occasionally, I caught a glimpse of forked antlers as he stood in a scrape and worked his licking branch.  He was on the same schedule as before, only this time I was in the perfect position to drop him when he exited the thick brush on his way down the creek.

A perfect, healthy specimen, he was the fourth deer of my season and would add valuable protein to the diet of my family over the next year.  I just wish Pap was here to enjoy it with us.