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I missed every deer I shot at that morning.
It was November 17th, opening morning of the Illinois three-day shotgun season and my first ever carrying a gun. I’d tagged along on deer hunts for years, riding shotgun and fulfilling my duties as a “bird dog” for the grown men who orchestrated deer drives. I walked across fields and down fencerows, fetched boxes of hollow-point slugs and zippered gun cases, and was told to sit still and shut up more times than I can count. My reward for doing all this were fun-sized Kit Kats from the bag my grandpa always kept on the bench seat of his pickup, an occasional “attaboy” and, perhaps most importantly, initiation into this blaze orange fraternity of men that I looked up to.
Now it was my turn on the trigger.
It was 1993, and I was 11 years old. In those days, you could take your tag into the principal’s office and get an excused absence from school for the opening day of deer season, which I did. Dad started my brother and I hunting with the same single-shot gun: an Ithaca M-66 Supersingle 20 gauge. It had rifle sights with a big orange prism as the front sight, and its lever action broke open with a reliable, consistent, metallic “thunk." The kind of sound that stays with you for life, like the smell of tractor grease and the taste of Big League Chew.
Our farm was roughly 125 acres, and the plan was to ride our 4-wheeler to the base of a permanent tree stand in the far West corner. It was a large platform built out of leftover lumber and nailed into the trunks of a forked Osage Orange tree, or “hedge tree” as they're called. Tink’s 69 was fresh on the market, and I’d read in a magazine somewhere that if you used their drag rag and laid a trail to your stand, bucks would follow it to you like a Walker coon hound to a den tree. So we’d bought a drag kit at Walmart and roughly 300 yards before we go to our stand, I made dad stop while I dipped the rag into a freshly opened bottled. I let the string out behind the moving ATV, like a striper fisherman trolling on the nearby Mississippi River.
Our stand was in the corner of a small field and surrounded by timber on two sides. As we drove along the field edge with my drag rag bouncing along the top of the fescue, I looked into the woodlot to the North to see a buck locked with a doe not 15 yards away. Dad saw it too, and was casually driving past them, hoping the deer would think we were just farmers doing farmer things and wouldn’t spook. But I freaked out when I saw them, slapping dad on the shoulder and dramatically pointing at the biggest buck I’d ever seen on the hoof. This caused the doe to turn and bolt, taking the buck with her, their white flags bouncing back and forth in the gray light like my drag rag across our ATV tracks.
Deer were moving and we were late. My Tink’s experiment had cost us some valuable time, and I’m sure I took too much time putting on my hand-me-down coveralls and cheap orange vest. It was already shooting light when we got to the tree, so rather than both of us clambering up the 2x4 steps into the stand, he killed the ATV at the base of the tree and we simply sat behind it, using it as a blind and the seat as a gun rest.
What happened next still dumbfounds me.
The woods were crawling with deer. The buck we drove past on the way in never showed himself, but within minutes a doe bounded out from that same woodlot into the field at a mere 40 yards. I adjusted my gun on the seat of the 4-wheeler, pulled the trigger…and missed her. I regrouped, worked the lever of the single shot and broke it open with that familiar “thunk.” Dad handed me another slug from his pocket and we settled back in.
Not ten minutes later, two six pointers walked out at 30 yards to the South and stopped broadside. I felt like the first six pointer had at least a couple inches on the second one, so I covered his front shoulder with the big orange triangle sitting atop my barrel and took the shot….and missed. We checked for blood at the spot and found none. This time the “thunk” of the single shot came with a sinking feeling in my stomach as we walked back to our setup. I was 0 for 2.
Minutes later though, my spirits lifted, as I turned to the East into the rising sun, and saw a 4 pointer at 300 yards. In complete amazement, I watched as he hit my trail of Tink’s 69, turned 90 degrees and began trotting with this head down directly to us, just like I had imagined in my dreams. The combination of Tink’s and ATV exhaust must have been a powerful one, and as he covered the distance to us, I propped my gun up on the back rack of the 4-wheeler and waited for him to get in range. Then I proceeded to miss him. Once again, I broke open the shotgun with that insidious “thunk” and accepted another yellow slug from dad. 0 for 3.
We saw deer at a distance for the next hour but nothing within my increasingly shrinking effective range. I don’t remember us talking that much, probably for good reason. Then we heard the unmistakeable footsteps of a deer approaching from behind us. We both turned to reposition, this time with the 4-wheeler at our back. I sat against the rear tire and propped the gun up on my knee as a big old doe walked to less than 20 yards and stopped broadside in an opening. A chip shot. A gift from God. Light at the end of a long, dark tunnel filled with smoke from a single-shot 20 gauge. I tried to settle down, take my time, aim carefully and make the shot…but I missed. We slowly got up and walked to the spot, hoping the 4th time was a charm, but only found a handful of white belly hair where I had grazed her.
My dad was not a patient man, at least not in those days. He was the type to ask you for a 7/8” wrench from underneath the combine and then cuss you because you handed him a 5/8”, even though you were only 8 and didn’t know fractions, or combines. But that day he looked out for me. I was a pretty fragile boy at that age. I was good at sports and loved fishing and feeding cows and riding shotgun doing farm things - all the stuff rural Midwest kids did at the time.
But I was soft inside. I didn’t have that inner confidence that other boys seemed to have from birth. That reckless, shoot from the hip, swing for the fences confidence that either got their arms broken or got the girl. Maybe it was that nagging internal self doubt that kept me missing. Maybe I was anticipating the recoil and flinching. Or maybe I simply wasn't ready to take a life, and subconsciously I missed because I knew it. I’d seen plenty of dead deer on man drives. Held their back legs while the men field dressed them. I’d helped drag does out of multi-flora rose patches while my cheap brown gloves slipped on those damned lower legs and my boots slipped in the mud.
But being on the trigger is different, and I think I needed time to grow into the role. A year later I fell in love with bowhunting, and from that moment on my trigger of choice has been attached to a bowstring. I still shotgun hunted throughout high school, more out of tradition than anything. That single shot Ithaca now hangs on a gun rack in my studio and I took it down to hold it again before writing this. Of course I cracked it open to hear that familiar, metallic “thunk” of a well worn gun. Three decades later the sound still takes me back to that opening day, but in a good way. I’ve swung and missed at a lot of things since then: in marriage, fatherhood, business and life.
Like my dad, I’ve learned patience and persistence as I've gotten older. I’ve learned to pick myself back up and dust myself off and try again. I’ve got my own family now, and I’m doing my best to instill those same lessons into my son, Rhett. When he misses, I promise I’ll do my best to keep my emotions in check, stick by him and do the same thing my dad did for me.
I’ll just hand him another shell.
This story helped to inspire me in the creation of the cover art for the Fall 2024 edition of the Field & Stream Journal. Canvas prints available here.
