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oresaptowntheEach year about this time, people still ask me if I got my deer. I have to tell them I didn’t even go hunting. It seems like it’s been a long time.I could go again. Enough people have asked me. I tell them I got tired of being shot at. Twice was enough.That’s part of the truth. The people I used to hunt with wouldn’t have shot at me, nor I at them. It was the poachers.A fellow at the paper was irritated with himself for missing a spike buck last week. As he told his story, I remembered one of my own.I saw the horns before I saw the deer, and there was plenty of him to see. Brother, was he hauling it.I shot as he started up the hill, and when he kept going I kept firing. He went down after the fifth round, just as I was digging for more shells.There were seven points in his rack and four bullet holes in his neck, just above his shoulder. They were in a group an inch and a half across. We measured that. My fifth shot was about an inch below the others.Frank Calemine came in off the drive that ran him out. “Any one of those shots would drop a standing buck,” he said. He said that was pretty good shooting at a running deer, with a bolt-action rifle and open sights.He asked me where I had beenOLDSWORTHYstanding and I showed him. We paced it off, and it was 85 yards.I was damned proud of that shot. The next year, I missed one standingbroadside about 30 yards away.Frank, his son-in-law Jim Hofstad and I spent Thanksgiving talking about the deer we’ve dragged out of the woods. Grandson Anthony has heard all these stories before. He grins when I remind him that of the four of us, he and I are the two youngest.We talked about the time it was two above zero and everybody went to the cabin but me. When they came looking for me and saw what I’d been doing, Ernie Helsley gave me hell.“Why’d you have to shoot that damn buck so far from the house?” Ernie bellowed. “Now we’ve got to stay out in this cold to drag him home! ’ ’On a day just that cold, Ernie ran into the house to the back room, pastof times caneverybody else who was sitting there drinking coffee. He ran back out and never said so much as “Hello,” “Good-bye,” or “Kiss my foot.” Ten minutes later, we heard a shot.“Ernie saw that buck and he realized he’d forgotten his bullets,” Frank said. “He ran down the hill to the house, a quarter of a mile away, to get them. Then he ran back up that hill, and the deer was waiting for him. Nobody believes that, but it’s so.”We had to go out in the cold to drag that one home, too.One time, we thought we’d have to drag Frank, and not because any-body’d shot him.Frank was in a field and heard shots. The deer was heading toward him, and so was a line of puffs of dirt from bullets impacting. He jumped into a ditch and landed on his back.“That deer went right over top of me,” said Frank, “and I held my gun up and shot him in the chest.”Frank jumped a six-foot-high barb-wire fence to get at the deer, but couldn’t get back across. He had to walk a quarter-mile to end of the fence to get around it — and still had another quarter-mile to walk back.All we had to do with that deer was drag it a quarter-mile to the road. We didn’t ask Frank to help.ra bureaucracy. Each product unit won’t) some streamlining of its own.dragOne fellow we did have to drag home. He got lost, although he still denies it, and waded through Patterson Creek in December to get to a phone and call us to come get him.“I knew right where I was the whole time,” he insisted.Right, I told him. You looked down at your feet, pointed to the ground under them, and said “Here I am! ”We talked about the last deer I shot, the one Jim and I dragged 200 yards up the steepest hill on Frank’s place. It took us an hour of cursing and sweating and being torn by brambles.Jim’s wife Carole listened patiently, then asked why we didn’t drag it down to the old road — about 10 yards away — and drive the truck to it.OHHHH, NOOOO!!!!I told her that in all the years I’d been hunting, I’d never dragged a deer downhill. It never occurred to me that such a thing was possible.We talked about the time I walked down after a herd went past Basil Martin, and he shot five times. Basil was slumped against one tree and his rifle was leaning against another.“I missed every damn one of them,” he said, “from ten feet away.”Two days later, he shot one of the biggest bucks I ever saw. The biggest was a monster that Mary Caleminedropped the day after Bill Shoemaker gave her hell for missing an easy shot at a spike buck.That deer all but filled the cavern in the back of Mary’s Buick station wagon. She drove down off the hill, sounding battle stations with the car horn and yelling out the window.“Where’s that damn Shoemaker now?” she hollered. “Where is he?““That’s funny,” said someone. “He was just here.”I walked out of the pines following a deer drive in a blizzard one afternoon to see Basil standing in an old road.“No deer,” he said, teeth chattering, “but I figured yqu’d be the one coming through here, so I saved this.”It was a half-pint of ginger brandy, seal still unbroken. We drank it and headed to the house, the fire, the coffee, and the rest of our friends.That’s how all hunts should end. Ours have ended now. In one way or another, most of us have gone away.I could go again. Enough people have asked me. Someday I might feel like doing it.Jim Goldsworthy writes columns for the Sunday Paper. Every now and then he spends an hour cleaning his Model 70 and oiling its stock, even if it doesn ’t need to be done.
Newspaper Details
Cumberland Sunday Times News
Cumberland, Maryland, US
Sun, Dec 08, 1991
Page 12
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
MD, USA 05 Jan 2019
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