here's what it means to me: Trophy
"Hey Guys! Come look at this dinky deer! Boy, I'd have passed on that one."
I couldn't hear their conversation all that well, but I knew it went over poorly with the young fellow who was checking it in at the State Wildlife area. I could see the color in his cheeks and his clouded, narrowed eyes.
I was helping out at the check station, having filled my tag early with a fat, mature doe. I wouldn't hunt them again until the late season when the bucks are trying to breed last year's doe fawns and the woods is empty of this crowd.
As we checked his little deer, he nervously told me his name was Joe. He was from Columbus, and he said he had hunted deer for three years. This was his first one and he was proud of it. I had some time to kill and I could see that he wanted to tell someone about the hunt, so I asked him to fill me in.
He told of the first couple of season's frustrations and close calls and tags that went unfiled.
He went into detail about how he had scouted and built a treestand from scrap lumber in the summer after work so it would be nicely aged by deer season. How he had cut shooting lanes just like it said in the magazines. He kind of got caught up in it and began telling me about his father.
His father had been a hunter. A bowhunter.
He had been too young to go, but he remembered the sweet venison and how his father had loved hunting them before the war. "Dad would take a bite of his deer steak and say, That's God's own candy!" he said with a smile.
His father hadn't come home.
"Missing in action, presumed dead" was what the letter had said. His mother remarried after a time, but stepdads don't always make time for someone elses' kid.
He taught himself to hunt by reading everything he could get his hands on and spending his spare time in the woods.
He had to work his muscles into his dad's old Bear recurve, and make his own practice arrows with money earned working weekends and after school. He said he'd had an awful time learning to release, but had practiced daily, rain or shine, until he felt comfortable with his shooting. The other guys were busy with girls and their places in the pecking order, so he was on his own.
He said that as the deer turned broadside and he drew the bow, he could feel his father there with him and I suddenly felt the need to wipe something damp out of my eye and I thought of my first deer--shot with a model '97 Winchester--so long ago I can't remember the exact year, and of the fox squirrel that was my first bow kill and the 42 lb. Kodiak special my father had given me.
We passed a few more pleasant moments in conversation before he left.
I was impressed with this young man.
He could have been out raising hell or on drugs but, despite the odds, he had taught himself to hunt- the hard way- out of love and respect for his missing father.
His "Dinky deer" was a trophy !
Not so much for itself, but for how the purity of it's spirit had mingled with that of a young boy's.
How it had helped him through some rough times.
How it had helped forge a man from a boy whom circumstance forced to grow up much too soon, and how it showed me that his big heart was indeed,
"God's own candy!"
John Nail
Topic: trophy animals (Read 2012 times)
