Come November: A Troublesome Opening Day

Papa says I have the biggest imagination he’s ever seen and that I see things in the woods that aren’t really there… like big ol’ gnarly bucks, for instance… Now I was wondering if that was true.

It was opening day of gun season in October, and I wanted to see a big buck in the worst way. To be more specific, I wanted to see Slim in the worst way. Slim is the most magnificent 10-point buck you’ve ever laid eyes on, and I’ve been planning to hunt him for many weeks. We got our first picture of him in mid-July when he was still in velvet. He’s got long, thick tines but a narrow spread. As soon as his antlers reached full growth, Papa named him Slim because of his narrow spread. He’s got a large body, but he’s not real heavy. Still, he’s the most magnificent buck I’ve ever seen.

Papa says he’s probably at least 3 1/2, but he could be older, ’cause he’s one of those bucks that can fool you. Papa also said he’s big enough this year for me to shoot.

In mid-August, me and my oldest brother Matty were out looking at deer right at dark on a Saturday evening, and we saw him feeding in the soybeans with four other smaller bucks. He towered over the others. We were parked in Matty’s Jeep on a hillside looking across the wide green soybeans with our binoculars. They were about 150 yards away. If you don’t think it set my heart to pounding when I saw him, you’ve never seen a real-life slobberknocker. That’s what Mike Stringfellow, our local game warden and a good friend of Papa’s, calls some of the bucks on our huntin’ land.

Back to opening day. I was sitting on the ground in a spot where no deer could see me. A huge red oak had twisted over and come crashing down during a bad wind storm a few years earlier. It was right next to the main trail just below a hardwood ridge, and it was the perfect place to set up and hide in for trail watching. I was about 80 yards inside the woods from the soybean field where I’d seen Slim back in August. It had been real dry, and the two-foot soybean plants were just starting to turn from a rich green to a golden brown. The trail I was watching led back to a thick bedding area where Papa doesn’t allow anyone to walk. I had the wind in my face and everything was perfect.

The top of the fallen tree was full of limbs that sprawled out across the ground, and I was back against the trunk hidden as good as a hibernating bear.

Papa said, “Watch out for copperheads. They like to get in stuff like that.”

So I’d been very careful checking the leaves before I hunkered down against that big trunk. A thick limb right in front of me gave me a perfect rest for my Rossi .44 magnum carbine. Papa had bought this gun a long time ago before I was born, but it’s all mine now. It’s a short lever-action carbine with a beautiful dark stock. Papa says it’s made of some kind of special wood from the jungle in Brazil. Papa had rigged it out with a 3x to 7x scope just for me. Papa said you should always have a solid rest before you pull the trigger so that “if anything comes down the trail in front of you, you can be steady and ready.” I always try to be steady and ready, and I was then, until I saw Curly…

Then everything got crazy.

I knew the sound I heard was real before I saw Curly on the trail. Something was definitely moving through the leaves, and it wasn’t a squirrel or an armadillo. I sat there for a full two or three minutes—just long enough to start wondering if Papa was right about me making things up in my mind. Was I trying to see something that wasn’t really there? Then I looked down the trail, and there he was. My heart about jumped out of my throat. For a split-second, I was confused. I was expecting to see Slim in all his glory coming back from feeding in the soybeans with maybe one or two of his bachelor friends walking behind him. Matty keeps tabs on all the trail cameras we have out, and he told me the bachelor groups were late breaking up this year and some of them were still together. But he said they’ll be going their separate ways any day now.

I wanted the deer I saw to be Slim, but my brain was sending signals that were all mixed up. This buck wasn’t Slim, and it took a second to register. This was a different buck altogether, but my heart was pounding in my chest just the same, and this was unbelievable for the first Saturday of rifle season and the first 60 minutes of being in the woods on opening morning.

Curly was taking his sweet time, and it took me a minute to realize which buck this was. He’d take a few steps and stop and nibble on some new-growth privet leaves. With every little step he took, my heart thumped louder. What should I do? For weeks I’d been planning on hunting Slim and now another fine buck was walking toward me on the trail. I started shaking so bad I didn’t know if I could pull the trigger. But the good thing was my gun was already resting on a limb and pointing toward him. All I had to do was stop shaking, take a deep breath and draw a good bead on his shoulder when he got just a couple of steps closer. That is, if I decided to shoot Curly instead of Slim. Papa always said, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” But that was easier said than done because I was shaking like a jackhammer, and I knew I couldn’t get a good shot on Slim or Curly if they were standing 3 feet away unless I got control of my nerves.

Curly is a really nice 9-pointer. Matty has five or six good pictures of him. Every year in late summer Matty takes all the trail-camera photos we get of every buck 3 1/2 or older and puts them in a big scrapbook. Curly’s antlers are just outside his long ears, and I could easily picture him hanging on the wall in my room. He has about a 6-inch tine growing out of his left burr, and it curls around next to his eye like a big ‘U.’ That’s why we named him Curly. Now he was within 40 yards, and I’d never seen a buck this big or this close up before in real life. He was more beautiful and noble than any picture I’d ever seen on my phone or in any magazine. All he had to do was turn slightly broadside, and then I could squeeze the trigger if I decided to.

He looked so big. He had a thick neck and a white throat patch and big ol’ brown eyes with a little white in the edges that made him look wild and strong. Forget Slim. This buck looked like he was king of the woods. He would be my first real buck, and I knew Papa would really be happy for me no matter which buck I took. It didn’t matter that my three brothers might be jealous as all get-out… that’s just the way brothers are. But I had to stop shaking…

I took my eye off the scope for a second and tried taking a couple of slow, deep breaths. Papa always says that helps when you get nervous. I looked back through the scope to make sure I was lined up on his shoulder, and there was nothing there but green. I looked up from the scope and searched the woods where I knew he’d been standing. Now a new kind of nervousness came over me. The thought of losing him and not getting a shot—if I decided to take it—was scarier than shooting at him and missing because of buck fever. And now I was shaking worse than before. I was desperate to see him, but he had vanished into thin air. Just like that. This couldn’t be happening…

He had been so close…

I waited a good five minutes hoping and praying the whole time that he’d come back. I thought maybe he’d just stepped off the trail and he’d be back any moment. But the minutes ticked away and pretty soon I was wondering if it really had been my “big imagination” working overtime. Then, instead of seeing the beautiful four-legged buck I was hoping for, I spotted a two-legged hunter sneaking along the trail 20 feet from where my buck had been standing. My gun barrel had been pointing toward Curly, and I quickly took it off the limb. As the hunter slinked along the trail coming toward me, I could have told you who it was even with my eyes shut.

“I see you Dace Maxwell!” I yelled out. I was mad.

Dace stopped in his tracks, like a deer in the headlights, knowing he was caught. He started looking around, trying to locate the spot where the sudden voice had come from. He was wearing faded blue jeans, a camo jacket and a camo hat with a large set of antlers on the front. He looked up in the surrounding trees for someone in a tree stand but you could tell he thought the voice had come from the ground level. He was holding a black AR-style rifle with a big scope on it.

“Is that you, Rusty St. John?” Dace yelled out. “Where you at?”

“Over here.” I turned my head and yelled out of the corner of my mouth so the sound wouldn’t give me away.

Dace’s eyes flashed all around, but I was too well hidden for him to see me.

“Yer trespassin’ again,” I yelled.

“No I ain’t.”

“Yes you are.”

“You don’t know nothin’”

“I got you red-handed,” I yelled.

“I’m just huntin’ a few squirrels is all.”

“With a high-powered rifle? Yeah, right.”

“It ain’t your land.”

“Yes it is. We got it leased and you know it.”

“Who you think you are, accusin’ me? My daddy says I can hunt here any time I want ’cause we got as much right to be here as you do and you cain’t stop us. I’m gonna kill me a buck right under yer nose ’cause you couldn’t shoot a deer if he walked out in front of you and laid hisself down on the ground. You hear me you little squirt? You ain’t never gonna be a buck hunter.”

Dace Maxwell was pure mean like his daddy. Papa always said it had something to do with his red hair and freckles but I never understood that part of it. Nobody had any use for the Maxwells, but they seemed to get away with all the bad things they did, and breaking game laws was in their blood.

“I aim to kill me a buck this year bigger than you’ve ever seen, and if you don’t get off our land, yer gonna be in big trouble,” I yelled. He had no way of knowing he had just spooked Curly, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“Show yerself you little squirt. Show yerself and I’ll teach you about what real trouble is.”

Dace is a lot bigger’n me, and older—he’s 14, I’m almost 12—and he likes to bully people around. I don’t mind tellin’ you I was scared ’cause you never know when somebody like him might fly off the handle and do something crazy. I’d seen him do some mean things to other boys at school. I wanted to crawl under that oak trunk and hide, but something came over me, and I stood straight up and faced him eye-to-eye.

“Get off our land right now or I’ll call Mike Stringfellow.”

Papa made sure we all had his private number in our phones. Mike knows we’ve had trouble with the Maxwells poaching, and he told us to call him any time if anything happens.

Dace stared straight back at me, and his red face turned even redder than usual and he said, “If you think I’m afraid of you, you got another thing comin’, Bubba. Whatcha gonna do, sic one of yer big brothers on me? Anyways, whatcha doin’ out here all alone? I thought somebody always had to hold yer hand when you was in the woods huntin’. Ain’t yer daddy worried you might get lost?”

He liked to call other boys “bubba” whenever he was bullying somebody. It was true that I was hunting alone for the first time. Papa said I was finally old enough to kill a buck on my own. For some reason I stepped over the limbs of the tree and out into the open. I intentionally put the sling of my rifle over my shoulder so the gun wouldn’t pose a threat. Dace had his AR rifle resting across his arm. “You just ruined my huntin’ for the day,” I told him.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Dace said.

“You’re trespassing on private land,” I said again.

“Yeah, and whatcha gonna do about it, Johnny-boy? Yer daddy ruined our huntin’ when he leased this land out from under us.”

Since my given name is John, Dace likes to call me Johnny-Boy sometimes as sort of an insult, but I prefer to go by Rusty.

“Y’all never had a lease and you never even had permission to hunt here,” I said. “That’s why Mr. Colby leased it to our family. He was tired of the Maxwells poachin’ and trespassin’ and ridin’ four-wheelers all over it.”

“You better watch out who yer callin’ poachers, Johnny-Boy.”

“You don’t have any right to be on this land, ’specially on openin’ day.”

“Well I tell you what… soon as I kill me the buck I’m after you can have the whole place to yerself. Meanwhile, I’m gettin’ tired of yer sass. I might just have to come over there and teach you some respect while you ain’t got any big brothers aroun’ to hide behind.”

• • •

I had totally forgotten Charlie was hunting in a tree stand on the edge of the soybean field about 150 yards away. Four years older than me, Charlie’s the only person in our family who hunts with a bow. The sense of relief I felt sent small shudders through my body as I saw a hunter in full camo holding a bow step out onto the open trail 20 yards away and look toward Dace. Even though I knew Charlie was no match for this overweight bully if he got riled up, at least now it was two against one, and believe me, you don’t know how fierce Charlie can be. Charlie’s about the last person on earth Dace would ever want to tangle with.

“I think you’re the one who’s lost,” Charlie said in a feminine yet commanding voice. She had been listening to the whole conversation.

I guess you figured it out by now. Even though I’ve got three older brothers, and even though Papa likes to jokingly refer to his five children as “the boys,” Charlie’s a real live girl. Of the five St. John children, she’s maybe the best deer hunter in the bunch, even if she is a member of the opposite sex. And to top it off, she hunts with a recurve bow. It used to belong to Papa. She practices all the time, and she’s better than good.

Now, for the second time of the day, Dace was confused at the sudden challenge from a voice that had come out of nowhere. Especially since it was a female voice. It took him a moment to see and recognize the tall hunter in the edge of the woods. Dace immediately tried to change his demeanor and act cool.

“Well I’ll be…. If it ain’t Miss Naomi St. John… I knew Johnny-Boy wasn’t allowed to hunt by hisself, but I never thought you’d be the one yer daddy would send out here to baby-sit.”

Dace has had a crush on Charlie as long as I can remember. What’s worse, he still fancies a foolish notion that she likes him back, as well. The truth is she has no use for his sneaky ways.

“My name’s Charlie in case you’ve forgotten, and Rusty’s doing just fine on his own,” my sister said loudly. “You’ve got about five minutes to get off our land!” With her bow tucked under her arm, Charlie was already dialing a number on her cell phone.

“Whatcha doin’? Who you callin’,” Dace asked.

Charlie didn’t answer. She held the phone up to her ear and started talking loudly. “Good morning Mike. This is Charlie St. John… Rusty and I are over here huntin’ on the Patterson farm, and we just found somebody poaching…”

“Wait a minute!” Dace yelled. “You don’t have to call Stringfellow. Pleas-e-e-e… I got turned around and I was just leaving… Pleas-e-e-e… My daddy’ll beat the daylights outa me if he finds out… I got caught… I just came over here to see if Rusty needed any help gettin’ any deer outa the woods.”

“You liar,” I yelled.

Charlie lowered the phone and stared at Dace. “You say you came over here to help Rusty?”

“Yes,” Dace pleaded. “That’s right. I swear.”

“Rusty doesn’t need your help, but I do,” Charlie said. With that, she held the phone up to her ear and said, “I guess there’s been a mistake, Mike. Thank you for offering to come right out but everything’s okay here… Yes sir… I’ll tell Papa… Bye now.”

She put the phone in her pocket and turned and started walking toward the soybean field.

“Put your gun down and follow me,” she ordered.

“Where’re we goin’?” Dace asked.

“You’ll see.”

“You ain’t…  havin’ me… arrested, are you?”

“Not if you do what we say.”

Totally confused, Dace leaned his rifle against a tree and followed Charlie. I fell in line behind him with a big smile on my face. Dace always gets tongue-tied whenever he’s around Charlie, and I love to watch him squirm.

 

Part 2 of Come November