Hunt Your Own Hunt

My deer camp mates and I have decided to move our transient camp for the third time in as many years, and the reasons for each have me reflecting on the reasons why I love to hunt. At the same time, the reasons why I’ve felt disillusioned with the dominant culture of hunting have been as prevalent lately as ever.

Deer hunting has been inseparable from deer camp for most of the three decades since I first started. My dad went to a deer camp on Beaver Island each year, and long before I was old enough to hunt (back then you had to be 14 to get a firearm deer license), I associated hunting with his annual ritual of pulling out the canvas and wood crate containing his blaze orange and red-and-black check wool hunting clothes the night before he left. When I was old enough to hunt, we received permission from a couple down the road whose lawn I mowed in the summer to hunt their 40-acre property, where he showed me how to still-hunt.

When I was 20, I went to the Beaver Island deer camp with my dad and grandpa – who’d
founded the camp and had recently moved back from Wyoming – where I shot my first deer
and was initiated into deer camp traditions like the fraternity I’d recently joined at college. My
dad and I left that deer camp a dozen years later to start our own in the Pigeon River Country
State Forest with a wall tent so that my brother, who lived in Gaylord but had young daughters
and his own excavating business to run, could join us. My cousin Scott joined us, too.

A decade later, though, my brother and his family, and my parents, moved to Tennessee and
wouldn’t be coming up for deer camp. Scott and I decided to keep it going and invited my
cousin-in-law Zach and another friend to join us. The first year, we went up to my family’s cabin
in Gogebic County and tracked – but never found – deer in the vast public land surround the
camp. That was pretty far to go for the few days we’re able to take off for it, though, so last
year we moved it back to the Pigeon River Country. However, we held it in October and
bowhunted to accommodate a scheduled medical procedure for a family member.

This year, we’re moving it again – hopefully for the last time – to Antrim County on the property
of a family member who gave us permission to hunt. Three of us have school-age children in
various sports, and Antrim County is where we’re all either from or currently live. In reflecting
on the decisions for each of the moves, in no case was the move about where we expected to
find more deer, or bigger deer, or easier deer to hunt. Each time we moved or changed camp, it
was a decision about family: bringing it closer to family so they could come to camp or moving
it to bow season to accommodate family schedules.

I’ve certainly hunted a lot on my own outside of deer camp, often camping solo and
bowhunting in the Pigeon River Country, but the highlight of the season is always deer camp
and spending time in camp with friends and family, no matter how few deer we actually shoot.
Yet, we come back year after year to continue the traditions. And if we leave with some venison
for the year, all the better, but it doesn’t make or break deer camp.

So it’s with frustration that I read the reactions to any decisions that the DNR or NRC make
about deer management in Michigan. I can’t understand the instinct to complain about deer
hunting in Michigan so much. It seems no matter which side of any proposed regulation the
NRC falls, a bevy of whining will follow it. Couple this with the proliferation of ever-increasing
gadgetry and technology to replace the last vestiges of woodsmanship in deer hunting, and a
dominant hunting media implying the promise of a trophy buck with every trip to the woods,
and it seems like we have a toxic mixture of expectations that can never be satisfied and a
desire for quick fixes in the form of regulation and technology to achieve them.

Personally, I appreciate the job the DNR professionals and NRC volunteers do to try to manage
mostly unmanageable nature for the long-term health of the deer herd, while providing us with
the opportunity for recreation and venison. All in the face of unrelenting waves of factors they
can’t control, from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and wildlife diseases to human
population and geographic trends. There’s so much about modern hunting culture that I’m
over, so much of the complaining, the media, the industry, and the politics of it. None of that,
however, affects what made me love hunting in the first place.

None of that comes between me and how I feel when I’m packing for deer camp like my dad
used to and the anticipation of the night before. Or when I put on my great-grandpa’s wool
jacket and lace up my boots on opening morning. When I load my grandpa’s rifle and smell the
gun oil. When I take that first step into the woods and still-hunt the way my dad taught me, the
way my grandpa taught him, and the way my great-grandpa taught him. When I see a track.
When I sit against the base of a tree and watch a trail for a bit. When I return to camp and the
wall tent is lit up like a paper lantern in the dark woods and smoke is rising from the wood stove
pipe. When I’m dealt a loner and lose track of time engrossed in conversation beneath a
Coleman lantern and we make our plans for the next morning’s hunt.

There is nothing in what annoys me about modern hunting culture that can interfere with that
experience. I’m also part of that culture, that media, and that industry, and those politics, I
realize. When I strip away all that noise, though, and operate from within my own hunting
experience, it doesn’t really matter what’s outside of it; that internal bond is too strong. I
simply hunt my hunt.

After all, what worth is the freedom inherent in taking to the woods in pursuit of venison for
your pasties if anyone else’s definition of a successful hunt or some internet comment occupies
the space in your head that should be focused on your hunt?

So here’s to the stump sitters, the swamp stalkers, the snow trackers, the still hunters, the deer
drivers; to the plywood homemade ground blind on the back 40 and the makeshift brush blinds
in the state forest; to the first deers, the personal best deers, the spikes, the forkhorns, the
basket racks, the fat does, and the old swamp bucks; to pasties, tag soup, and cheap beer; to
euchre, smear, and poker under a Coleman lantern; to Jones hats, chooks, and Stormy Kromers;
to red plaid wool, discount blaze camo, and Carhartt bibs; to canvas tents, camper trailers,

converted school buses, old lumber shacks and log cabins; to iron sights and 3x9s; pumps,
lever-actions, and grandpa’s old bolt-action; to the old-timers and first-timers:
Have a great deer season, whatever that means to you.
​
Hunt your own hunt.

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