The Big One

In different cultures, large bucks or Stags, represent spiritual authority or the supernatural. In Celtic mythology they were messengers from the otherworld.

My brother Dave and I both started hunting when we were twelve, Dave two years before I did. In the early sixties, only buck could be harvested. Our father taught us gun safety, hunting etiquette and our love of nature and the outdoors. Not so much about Celtic myths, only that there are big ones out there if you are in the right place at the right time.

Dave has been in pursuit of that mythical buck for over sixty years. I’ve harvested around fifty deer in that timeframe, Dave probably five. Two were doe he shot so I’d have meat on our table. He doesn’t generally eat venison; my family thrives on it.

It was a cold, gusty, morning; the zero windchill finding every weakness in our day-glow armor.

Three of us were posted in elevated deer stands; we have six varied locations on our sixty acres. Opening morning, shots begin to ring out as dawn breaks in the surrounding area, but our woods remained quiet. By 9:00 am I hadn’t seen anything but squirrels.

Then, a loud shot rang out. That had to be Dave, I thought, the sound came from his direction. I wondered if I should head over there, but because it was a singular, definitive report, I chose to let him sort it out. Dave never took a risky shot and he’d walk past me to return to the cabin for the ATV if he scored. Fifteen minutes passed and he appeared out of the woods one hundred yards away. I watched him approach, looking for any signs that would broadcast his results, but he just plodded along, laboring in his over-sized boots. He didn’t even look up at me until he was close enough to simply speak without yelling, “I got one. It’s the biggest buck I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The pleasure I experienced for him in that moment felt like an ascending, weightless leap, the jump from the picnic table into the leaf-piles of our youth. I’d lived the history with him, he’d been in readiness for this opportunity all of his hunting years, “Damn, that’s awesome, bro.”

I began clambering down my ladder to his objections, after all, it was still opening morning of deer hunting. Dave didn’t want to interrupt my morning, but I still had plenty of time to hunt and I was driven now by the joy to help him celebrate. He went for the ATV and I walked over to his buck to lend a hand. It surely was the biggest ten-point buck I’d ever seen, almost a horse. Where the antlers connected to the skull were as thick as corncobs.

He backed the ATV close enough to attach the buck. He was still in the best kind of shock; his hands shaking from the adrenaline. I gladly tried all the knots making sure the antlers stayed off the ground. I don’t know how he felt pulling his prize slowly back to the cabin, but I’m sure there was: relief, pride, redemption, satisfaction and the private, undefinable emotions any of us experience when life-long dreams and visualizations come to fruition.

Dave had been sitting with his back to the marsh. We do that because you can generally hear them splashing around, not so in the woods he was facing. His classic 30/30 lever-action rifle perched on the railing of his stand. The silence was broken by a doe scampering around to his left. Dave watched in delight as the doe approached the foot of his stand, he never even reached for his rifle. Then, he recalled thinking sometimes buck are chasing doe. He looked up to see the gigantic buck, twenty-five yards away, focused completely on seeding the doe.

It was a simple task to pick up the rifle and dispatch the buck; no Annie Oakley heroics or Seal Team sniper-skills necessary. That simple task, however, was the culmination of a sixty-one-year journey beginning when Dave was twelve. A journey of patience, disappointment, serving the other hunters, enjoying the outdoors with friends and family and perhaps, one day, having all those hours in the woods produce an opportunity.

The otherworld myths have rewarded you for all those hours in the woods Dave and I, for one, am pleased beyond measure you bagged the Big One.