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Proving Ground: my first deer
By Jeremy Alcorn

It was warm for a late November morning, around 40 degrees (F) to be exact, and I was out hunting with my family, which consisted of my father and uncle. I decided to take up position in a stand of timber that I had never before hunted. I entered the timber before sunrise and walked within the area I wanted to hunt. Once there was adequate light I moved once again to a tree that I could lean against. The tree was large enough that its circumference was wider than my body. This would hide my silhouette. In front of me lay a large limb that had fallen from a tree. The limb was perfect cover with its smaller branches reaching skyward serving to break up my outline. This position was quite the compliment to the tree bark camouflage I was wearing.

Around 9am I heard numerous deer approaching. As I took the shotgun from my side a string of female deer came wandering down a trail directly in front of me. I raised my shotgun, pushing the safety to the off position with my thumb. As the group passed I was busy determining which female I should shoot. As the third doe walked by I decided that the time had come. I let out a whistle causing the deer to freeze in their tracks with ears perked and all eyes pointing in my direction. Aiming where I thought the heart and lung to be, I fired a shot at the third female. It was readily apparent that something had gone wrong as she jumped into the air and kicked her hind feet. I realized then that I had likely aimed too far back on her body and had shot her in the stomach. I was leary of shooting to far forward on her body for fear that the shotgun slug would strike her in the shoulder blade and not kill her as I wanted.

As she fled away I walked up to a deer path and began to look for blood. Finding none I waited knowing that if she was injured it was necessary to let her lay down to die. Pursuing her at this point would only drive her deeper into the forest where I would risk losing a means of tracking her. My father soon arrived, beckoned by the sound of my shotgun, and began to help me track her. We walked to where I had thought she was standing, but could find no blood. After a search of the area we concluded that I must have missed given that there was no evidence to the contrary. However, because I had seen her jump, presumably from having a bullet tear through her body, I was puzzled as to why there was no blood.

Having no trail to follow my father returned to his hunting position and I to mine. Once I had taken up my position against the tree I realized we were looking in the wrong place. Sure enough, upon investigation there were two trails that ran parallel to one another spaced about 15 feet apart. The farther trail was covered in blood. Contained in the blood were pieces of food. I had indeed failed to shoot where I intended. The food that earlier this morning was nourishing her body was now leaching out onto the ground, the situation exacerbated by each fleeing step she took. I began following the trail of blood and undigested food until I heard movement. Not wanting to scare her off and risk losing “my prize,” I went to get help.

With my father, a more experienced tracker, we approached the area where I had heard movement. We were searching in the briars and brush when a deer jumped up about ten yards from us and started to flee. My father fired, the bullet splintered the deer’s right rear hip bone knocking him to the ground.

Immobilized, we could see that the deer was a spike buck (young male with only one antler spike on each side). My father walked up to the young buck and fired a fatal shot through his head. Death did not come instantaneously, as often seems to be the case when larger animals are head shot. The young buck flailed on the ground in a display of what most hunters would regard as reflexes of the muscles as opposed to the torments of a dying creature.

The fortuitous thing about this deer, if ever a fortuitous thing can be said to exist when slaughtering an innocent being, was that this deer had been injured by my father the day prior. We had been walking through the timber when a spike buck crossed our path and stopped to look at us. Dad could only see the deer’s head when he took the shot. He had hit the young male in the head, but the shot was high and bullet grazed the bucks scalp removing his skin and hair. The young buck, though likely in great pain, was able to run off and live for another day. Now, lying on the ground, dying, was the same deer, marked by the strip of hair and skin that had been removed by the searing hot bullet of the preceding day. I had worried about that little buck during the night and it was somewhat reassuring to know that his pain was over.

We resumed our task of looking for the female I had shot. Around five minutes later we found her immobilized, but still very much alive. She could no longer stand using her front legs and was using her hind legs to push herself along the forest floor. However, she had pushed herself into a brush pile containing a large fallen tree and could not get over the log. Still standing on her hind legs with the rest of her body resting on the ground, we pushed her hind quarters over onto the ground with our feet. As she lay on the ground our eyes locked for an instance. I never thought it possible, but I saw her pain and fear as reflected by her eyes and it was in that moment that she seemed to give up. Did she accept her demise because she knew it impossible to flee, or was it because of something else, did she see something in my eyes that made her realize her life was about to end? The latter possibility haunts me to this day. I raised my shotgun in order to shoot her in the head. As I did so it felt wrong, this was not hunting - - killing an animal lying on the ground - - this was not the first time I questioned what I was doing, but it was the first time I had experienced such a revelation. I steadied my aim, not wanting to miss; unnerved by the thoughts I had just experienced and squeezed the trigger firing a bullet into her head.

She began to kick furiously and I had to jump out of the way in order to miss being struck by her rear feet. It was soon apparent that another shot would be needed to complete the deathly process I had started over an hour ago. If firing a bullet through her body while she lay helpless on the ground wasn’t hard enough before, I now had to do it again. Another shot to the head brought death, though not immediately. It had taken three shots to do what sometimes only takes one. More so; it had eroded my confidence in the justness of hunting, and caused me to identify with my victim, something I would deny for years, but never recover from.

Still, these thoughts bothered me little and as my father congratulated me I was elated to have killed my first deer. This was not my awakening to any position against hunting, far from it. Even though I had experienced doubts about the justness of hunting, it was only for a few fleeting seconds, for the glory of proving that I was a hunter by virtue of killing a large animal is something that in the right social circle can last much longer.

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Posted/Updated: 12/26/04