Thursday November 27, 2025 The Last Day of Deer Season, 11/23/ 2025

 

Sundown on Minnesota's Firearm Deer Season 2025

    I know a lot of you are happy about the end of deer season here in NW Minnesota. Between the blog posts of Chairman Joe (since he's ended his travel blog about hiking the Thames River), and mine, you've been avoiding these deer hunting-associated posts these past couple weeks. "Why do they romanticize killing wild animals and eating them? The brutes!" But at least we don't publish the gruesome images because, after all, the Wannaskan  Almanac is sensitive toward its readers -- not that it's written down anywhere; we just  know what is acceptable content without instruction. (Psst, somebody tell Mr. Hot Cocoa.)  

   I know I wax sentimental about this particular outdoor activity. To me, this hunter education program greatly over-simplifies the activity of hunting when everything is staged for hunter enjoyment and guarantee of success in the field instead of practical experience of the physical and psychological investment of time, patience, and experience becoming a conditioned muscle-memory response.

   A case in point may be the years I hunted pheasants along grassy railroad right-of ways, overgrown fence lines, and walking the rows of vast cornfields with my friends and family in Iowa, similar to this YouTube offering. As an inexperienced person I sometimes did the work of a dog by driving the birds ahead of us: marching through thick brush places, high grass, and willow swamps, hiking up and down hills, in and out of ditches, in an attempt to chase pheasants out of their hiding places so that someone in our party could get a shot at them.

   Such as happens when hunting deer in our case this year. Sometimes we have to make a drive or push them out of cover.  A hunter has to be willing to put a little work into it. With little snow on the ground in Roseau County, unless we chanced seeing deer from one of our elevated deer stands just during a morning or evening 'post,' we still-hunted the area (not at all the immediate imagery bombardment one receives Googling 'still-hunt.') but the act of moving slowly and quietly; stopping often for varying lengths of time sometimes of several minutes hoping to see a deer before they see or scent you. I've learned that changing direction abruptly or even back-tracking, make deer nervous i.e., those that are listening to you at a distance and normally hold their position as you walk past them, make fatal mistakes by bolting from cover. (It even works on squirrels.)

   Then, even if you've walked yourselves into a swamp of perspiration, something can happen in your favor when you least expect it, as happened the last day of season when John and I had come in from our morning posts and long walk back home for breakfast about ten o'clock. Sitting at the dining room table, Jackie, John's mother, got up from the table to get the coffee pot when she looked out the window, then quietly but urgently said,

"T-T-THERE"S A BUCK OUT THERE! GET THE GUN!" creating a collision between the two of them in the frantic effort not to attract the deer's attention and John running downstairs to get a gun for both our hunting rifles we had left outdoors, and there was but one rifle at hand in the basement. Not fifty yards from the house, the buck went on eating the lush green grass in our yard, raising its head every 5-10 seconds to look for danger when John managed to open the door ...

Jackie smiled knowingly pointing to the kitchen clock,

"See? See? What have I told you? Bucks are on the move from ten til two! It's ten thirty!"

Sundown November 21, 2025     Palmville Township, Roseau County, Minnesota

   John managed to slowly open the walk-out basement door just as the deer looked in his direction, whether or not it saw the door open e’er so slowly, and shot it. The deer bounded easterly from the yard, arced northerly toward the woods for cover, disappeared from our lines of sight, and was gone.

  As is practical in deer hunting — as experienced hunters know — we didn’t track the deer immediately, but instead went back into the house to let the animal lay down, without the idea it is being pursued. I learned that ‘way back in 1974 on my very first deer hunt on my own here in Palmville, at Davidson Camp, when I had driven up from Iowa with an older friend with whom I used to work in Des Moines. That important bit of wisdom would’ve saved us a whole day’s hard work.

  Ennaways, forward to 2025, we had our breakfast, ‘did our chores,’ took a nap of an hour or so then grabbing our outdoor rifles went out to find our buck. We spread out from one another on either side of what we remembered was the buck’s trajectory, serendipitously locating the animal dead, on a mowed trail I had made many years ago. “Here he is, John!” I yelled across the little woods quite near my deer stand. “Yeah, he’s dead!” 

   Examining the wound, and the short distance the deer had ran, John estimated the deer lived about 30-seconds on its feet, leaving the yard.