Of Life, Death, and Deer Camp

Charlevoix, Nov. 2000

Of Life, Death, and Deer Camp
by Drew YoungeDyke

Ten years ago this November, I experienced the most perfect hunting season I could imagine. I was twenty years old, a junior at Michigan State and five years removed from the most recent deer season in which I'd hunted. During the intervening years, varsity sports, girls, and fraternity parties had distracted me from an overwhelming interest in deer hunting. However, a couple years earlier my maternal grandfather had moved back to Michigan from Wyoming, where he'd lived since before I was born. To understand the effect this had on me, you would have to understand something about who he was: a genuine legend of a man, someone whom a boy on the cusp of manhood could only hope to emulate.


We fished often in the preceding summers when I would come home to Gaylord from East Lansing. He had a small fishing boat docked on the Torch River from where we'd troll for pike in Lake Skegamog and Torch Lake. While my limited fishing ability must have frustrated him, he didn't show it, and we talked of life through stories from his past, which included boxing as a teenager and staying in the United States when his parents moved to Canada so that he could enlist in the Army Air Force, where he served as a Second Lieutenant, gunnery instructor, navigator and bombardier stationed in North Africa and Sicily during the second World War. He returned from the war and spent fifty years as a small-town doctor, one of the last who would make house calls and accept home-baked pies in lieu of payment, first in my hometown of Central Lake and then in Lusk, Wyoming, where he moved for the mule deer and antelope hunting opportunities. He often mentioned the deer camp on Beaver Island which he'd started with some friends in the late 1960's. I'd heard of the camp from my dad, who'd been a member of the camp since my grandpa moved to Wyoming in 1977, and where he'd go for opening weekend after football season ended each year when I was younger (he was the varsity high school coach). I'd never been there, though, as I was too young at fourteen and fifteen and had little interest at sixteen, seventeen and eighteen.

 
I regained my interest in hunting by the time I was twenty, though, and my dad decided to take my grandpa and I to the camp as guests for the 2000 opening weekend. It would be my first trip ever, and my grandpa's first in at least twenty years. I was as excited as I could be, and anxious to see the legendary camp of which I'd heard so much about. I didn't feel too bad about skipping a few classes, as that was something I did much too often, anyway. After sighting in the rifles at the gravel pit behind my parents' house and packing our gear the day before, my dad and I left Gaylord early on the morning of the seventeenth, two days after Opening Day, and met my grandpa at the Beaver Island Boat Company in Charlevoix for the ferry ride to the island. A picture snapped of us that day now rests on the mantle above my fireplace: my dad in his blaze orange parka, my grandpa in his camouflage goose-down bomber jacket, and me in my dad's old red and black checked wool coat; three generations of hunters embarking for a deer camp by the swamp on the island in the lake, layers of insulation to separate us from the trivialities of work, age, and the lecture hall.  

 
We played cards, snacked, and sipped cheap beer at our booth aboard the Emerald Isle, the newer ferry boat which sliced relatively smoothly through Lake Michigan's mid-November waves, while my dad and grandpa traded stories about the Northern Islander and other older vessels which churned the stomach during passages from years past. The trips were referred to as "two-baggers," or "four-baggers," depending on how often one puked during the three-to-four hour journey. The Emerald Isle's captain came down from the bridge and told us how the hunting had been on the island thus far. Beaver Island has had some lean deer populations over the last thirty years, though occasionally the population does well with moderate winters and through the efforts of the Beaver Island Conservation Club. 

 
My grandpa's Jeep Grand Cherokee awaited us near the dock where it had been unloaded from the cargo hold, and we drove down King's Highway toward the camp, the road named for the famed "King" Strang, who ruled the island in the 1850's when it was an independent Mormon kingdom until Strang's assassination in 1856. The island has rich history which is never below the surface but always prominent. We turned onto a rutted dirt road and pulled into the two-track that served as the driveway. The camp was a wood-sided 1950's-era mobile home, but the mowed field next to it drew our attention as a dark gray buck with a sizeable rack sauntered along its edge a hundred yards away. I jumped out of the Jeep and tried to uncase my rifle, but the buck had disappeared into the woods and swamp beyond. My heart leapt and the deer has remained an enigma of possibility, a swamp ghost, as I have never since seen such a magnificent buck on the island and I sometimes wonder if it was real or a phantom. We helped my grandpa out of the van along with his oxygen tank, which would limit him to a nearby and easily accessible blind from which to hunt during the weekend. We set our rifles on the porch and walked inside, and my eyes moved from gear left over from the 70's to rules posted on the wall in the 60's and a blaze orange Jones cap from the 80's. The other hunters at the camp greeted us as they came in for lunch after the morning hunt. We ate, drank beer, and told stories of hunts, customs, and antics from years past which cannot be put in print due to the maxim, "what happens at deer camp stays at deer camp," which far predates the similar Las Vegas tourism slogan.

 
We drove my grandpa to his blind, which overlooked a field behind which was a bedding area, and my dad and I went on a two-person still hunt: he's always been a still-hunter, practicing a technique coarsely called "pussy-footing" in some hunting circles, and he taught me to hunt the same way. We didn't see any deer, though we saw sign, as we probably moved too fast to be effective, though it served the purpose of acquainting me with the terrain. We returned to camp after dusk, played poker, ate back straps from a deer shot a couple days earlier, drank more beer and recounted our day's hunt under the simmer of Coleman lamps suspended from the ceiling. We sat on old couches and discussed deer-hunting strategies and more bucks taken, and I watched my grandpa look with pride at my dad and I sitting across from him, carrying on the tradition he'd started thirty years earlier. We retired to our separate bunks to awake early and rested for the next day's hunt. I awoke in the middle of the night and found my way to the porch by flashlight, and was swallowed by the immensity of the wind whipping down from the north, across the field, into the woods beyond and out to Lake Michigan. East Lansing was a million miles away, and I was in the old northwest, in a place where Odawas, French trappers, Mormans and Irish fishermen and farmers had staked their piece of history. 

   
Well before dark on the following morning, we drove my grandpa down a two-track to the blind. We carried his gun, oxygen tank and an extra blanket, and helped him around an old fence and into the blind. I know it hurt his pride to have to be helped like that after the adventurous life he'd lived, but he was content once situated in the blind. Before we left him, promising to come get him in mid-morning for a breakfast of shit-on-a-shingle, he said, jokingly but earnestly in his smoky, gravelly voice, "If I'm dead when you get back, you'll know I died happy."

 
He was thankfully alive when we returned, and for the next couple days I sat in a blind, built by my dad in the section where my grandpa used to hunt, during the morning and evening and still-hunted during mid-day. It had snowed and tracks were readily visible. I jumped a few does but didn't get off a shot.

 
On the second to last afternoon of the hunt, I was sitting in the blind, which was built in the crotch of a tree where its trunk split in three. I'd been there for a few hours, silent, still, cold, and alone with my thoughts. I was thinking about a four-pointer I'd passed up earlier because I didn't have a clear shot, wondering if I should have taken it,  when a big, fat doe emerged from the cedar swamp into a clearing fifty yards away. My breathing quickened, and I slowly turned to shoulder my Remington Model 700 .243, and located the deer in the crosshairs of the scope. I took a breath and pulled the trigger evenly as I exhaled. The doe jumped and ran into the swamp, stumbling. Not remembering to sit still for a half hour, I immediately followed its blood trail and tracks into the swamp behind it. I jumped it twice from where it crawled under brush to die, until it could go no further. It still breathed as its vacant eyes looked into mine, and I felt immeasurable guilt at what I'd done. I racked another shell, pointed the muzzle at its head and pulled the trigger to end its suffering. I sat down in the snow and stared at it. My gut felt hollow. I did not the feel the joy often seen plastered on the faces in outdoor magazines as they smile broadly next to their trophies. I felt the heaviness of life and death, the tenuousness of mortality, tempered by a measure of satisfaction at having accomplished the task. I apologized to the doe and removed my knife from its scabbard.

 
My dad, who had heard the shot and recognized the report of his old gun, walked up from behind me and showed me how to field dress it correctly. I tried to leave my guilt in the snow, focusing instead on the process of removing the entrails and draining the cavity, hands and forearms warm and red with blood. We then marked the trail back to camp, where I grabbed a wheelbarrow and retrieved the doe while he investigated another shot in another part of the woods. When I returned with the doe, I told my grandpa how I felt and he told me "That's how you're supposed to feel," in a tone suggesting that was the only way one could feel, but that we don't talk about it. We hung the deer from the buck pole and fried up its tenderloin along with that from a deer another member of camp had shot shortly after mine. The circle of life complete, for the first time I tasted the meat of a deer that I had gone into the woods and killed, rendering sustenance out of wilderness. The first bite was both sweet and bittersweet. The unvoiced pride on my grandpa's face stayed with me; not pride that I had killed a deer, but more likely that I had respected the process and not acted like a jackass about it.

 
This is not a unique story. It was a seminal moment for me, to have taken my first deer at The Camp with my dad and grandpa there, but it happens every November hundreds of thousands of times across the country. It is why deer camps exist and why we hunt (at least most of us). It is the generational transfer of knowledge, of skills, of the old ways and the understanding of how our species exists and how nature works. It is the realization that, as omnivores, we exist because animals die. It is coming to terms with life from death, with respecting an animal even as we kill it, because respect for our prey is what separates hunters from killers.

 
My grandpa was able to come to deer camp once more before he died in 2004 at the age of seventy-nine. He came the next year with my dad, my old college roommate and me during Thanksgiving weekend, though the boat ride back to the mainland was so rough on him that he didn't go again. My old roommate died unexpectedly in St. Louis in August of 2003 at the age of twenty-two. On the inside of the utility shed door at deer camp, their names and those of many others to have hunted there - some alive and some now dead - are etched in eternity, or at least as long as hunters hunt. I've gone there a few times since, but no hunt has matched the soul of that first season ten years ago. There are no antlers on my wall to remind me of it, but there is a picture on the mantle and a memory as long as life itself. 

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