9. november 2023 A Crossbow First

A Crossbow First

    I was on a ladder painting our house when my cellphone rang, so I couldn't answer it. By the time I got down and wiped my hands, it rang again; it was Craig.

    “Yeah, Craig,” I said. “Whazzup?”

    “I ... just shot a ... MONSTER BUCK ...,” he whispered almost inaudibly. “It may be an eight pointer,” he continued.“HE’S BIG.”

    There was no mistake in his voice that he was in a state of euphoria. "He was, like only twelve yards away from me,“ Craig continued whispering, his eyes riveted on the brightly shining red-lighted arrow nock protruding from just behind the deer’s shoulder blade.“I don’t know what I should do ...”

    “Yes-s-s, you do, I said, knowing he was experiencing ‘buck fever,’ a phenomenon moreso typical of deer hunters who have shot their first deer, not 56 year old Craig, an avid deer hunter since his early youth. This animal was like his 100th. I had never heard him more excited about anything, when the lights in my head went on in realization, 

    “This is his first deer with a crossbow!”

    “I didn’t bring a knife,” he sheepishly admitted .

    “Wha?” I teased. “You weren’t planning to shoot a deer tonight? Well, just sit back down, relax, and I’ll bring the gear over there.”

    ‘Over there,’ meant across the long broad basin of Mikinaak Creek; a normally water-laced wetland tributary of the South Fork of the Roseau River, south of Wannaska, we describe as "Too wide to jump and too deep to wade." The creek is presently in a dry-bed cycle; the last similar event being in 1981. 

    Although the main channel had been easy to cross on foot most of this summer, recently abundant September rains all but eliminated that, making it more difficult to determine water depth and potential obstacles underneath. 

The main channel had been easy to cross on foot most of this summer.

 

Beaver created deep ponds behind the dams linked by lengthy circuitous ditches, known as ‘runways,’ as in foreground.

    For hundreds of years, beaver have altered its course by damming its channel and creating deep ponds behind them linked by lengthy circuitous ditches, known as ‘runways,’ that enabled the beaver to enter and exit their world safely, underwater.

    With no water in the creek to float a boat and no bridge across the creek, our only crossing option is to negotiate deer trails through the waist-high grass that make the trek treacherous for man and beast alike, who don’t see the hidden runways in time and stumble into them. After similar difficulties last year, I had modified a six-foot long plastic sled adding a strong pull rope and steel eyelets along each side so we could tightly secure the load.

    It was after six pm on October 10th, and the sun was low on the horizon. I wasn’t looking forward to the walk across the creek at all having ‘been there and done that’ last deer season when I helped Craig’s older brother, John, pull two deer out of the woods after dark, and across the creek when we had snow and ice; hard enough work for two old guys.

    I have a ‘four-wheeler’ to aid us normally, but there was no easy way to get it to where the creek crossing was at the old beaver dam, or traverse the high grass, avoid falling into runways, and into the woods from where we started out. Between the fallen trees and holes, it would’ve demanded as much physical effort driving it there as it would pulling the sled with the deer aboard by hand.

    I drove the ATV to the end of our farm lane, unloaded the sled, slipped on the backpack carrying butchering supplies and a couple bottles of drinking water; and pulling the sled, started off down the steep creek bank toward our rendezvous site where Craig waited for me.

    “Remember the hole in the top of the beaver lodge!” Craig yelled. Hidden in the high grass were hundreds of criss-crossed gray sticks beaver had woven into an impregnable, half-submerged cone- shaped shelter approximately seven-feet tall and twenty-feet in diameter, above ground. I chose to walk behind the hole than fall through it, as did Craig three-hours earlier on our scouting foray to where he planned to hunt that evening.

     Pulling an empty sled is child’s play, I remember thinking, knowing we’d likely be dragging the deer back atop it on the way back. Craig showed me where he had been sitting on a three-legged camp chair amid the spruce and large-trunked poplar trees edging the creek. His wide-brimmed hat and hunting clothing had a scent control feature built into them; he also wore rubber boots to further stave off his scent.

    Positioning himself off the center of the woods out of the wind, he settled into a long vigil of sitting very still to avoid the detection of passing deer; when it paid off:

    “I was facing east, holding my crossbow vertically in my lap, when I got the distinct feeling something was watching me,” Craig said. “So I began turning my head to my right, very, very slowly to see for myself. Ho boy! There he was looking at me, but he couldn’t get my scent! 

    "Every time he moved to see me better through the maze of trees, I shifted into a better shooting position. He looked huge! I never felt so much excitement in my life! My heart pounded like it was going to leap out of my chest! He stepped from behind a tree just enough to offer me a broadside shot, and I took it. 

    “He took one or two jumps, then fell dead. Strange thing though, he doesn’t look like the 8-pointer I thought he was..."

    Sure enough, Craig’s little buck strongly resembled the one-antlered deer, ‘Elliot,’ in the animation movie, “Open Season,” with its short broken-off antler on one side of its head and a broken-off forked antler on the other, hardly the monster buck he had imagined in the beginning. 

Craig and Elliot. His first with a crossbow.

    Once Craig finished field dressing the deer and ensured all the gear was accounted for, we tied the deer to the sled and looked for the shortest route back to the creek where we would cross. We didn’t need our headlamps quite yet as we could still make out where we were going. The small diameter pull rope made its disadvantages increasingly apparent as our hands met in its center and created an ever narrowing place for each of us to walk in stride over uneven terrain, thick brush and over-hanging tree branches. Did I mention beaver runways? 

"... uneven terrain, thick brush and over-hanging tree branches."

    Carrying the crossbow, and Craig carrying the backpack, I fell first, headlong onto my right side. Craig helped me up, worrying that I, sixteen years his senior, may have been hurt; then he did the same thing, falling to his knees; one of which he had replaced only six weeks earlier making the two of us not quite up to par for such vigorous exercise nor the several subsequent mishaps that followed. Craig characteristically shrugged off my concerns about him as we stood on the beaver lodge catching our breath; both silently wishing we were all done. I began redesigning the pull rope handle in my imagination as we resumed descending the creek bank.

    Wading through the shallow water and stepping onto the opposite grass-covered bank; Craig a little ahead of me, I fell again but righted myself, gasping, trying to catch my breath.

    “Inhale through your nose. Exhale through your mouth,” advised Craig, doing it himself. “Better yet clasp your hands over the top of your head like this, ... Learned it in a Ju-jitsu class one time.”

    “Yeah, that helps, I said.”That helps ... Whew, we’re in the homestretch now. I’ll go start the wheeler.” Then I began climbing the bank, pushing aside the thorn-laden branches of a hawthorn bush.

    Freewheeling the winch rope, I pulled it back down the bank behind me to where Craig waited with the sled, and hooked it to the pull rope. Slip-sliding, grabbing for a handhold, I got back up to the ATV and started the winch; Craig following.

    Arriving at the meat pole, I sickeningly realized I had lost my cellphone! I looked in all my pockets and in the backpack but just knew it was hidden in any of the dozen places we stumbled in. I told Craig I was so tired by that time that I was happy enough to just look for it in the morning than go back down there then.

   “I’ll bet its laying in the last place you fell, like below the four-wheeler,” Craig said confidently, trying to assuage my disappointment.

   “Hope you’re right," I said restarting the four-wheeler. “Hop on, let’s go look, but I just doubt it’s going to be that easy.”

    Skidding to the bottom, Craig called my phone with his -- and amazingly, four-feet away from where we stood, my phone lit up and rang! 

"YES! OH YES!”

 

This story was originally published in the Grands Forks Herald, Saturday October 28, 2023, 'Northland Outdoors' edition, titled, "First Crossbow buck an adventure to remember," by Steve Reynolds.