Stories of first deer hunts are a staple of family lore for many Americans. The genre peaks around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas, where the token vegan relatives, already feeling a twinge of guilt for demanding a meatless turkey molded out of tofu, are obliged to hear how cousin Johnny-the-future-serial-killer bagged those antlers. That’s not the reason the story is being told, of course. Hunting stories are about honor and respect and other timeless values. The plot is always the same: Johnny enters the forest a boy and emerges a man. For my younger brother Noah, however, the saga lacked all romance.
It was the last day of his very first deer season. Noah had been hunting with his friends since dawn on their grandfather’s tree farm, a wonderfully isolated stretch of wilderness in Culpeper, Virginia. He’d spent countless weekends there fishing in the pond, riding dirt bikes, and tossing fireworks, but the sacred rite of deer slaying is reserved for 16-year-olds. Now he was finally of age, but his first deer season was coming to an unsuccessful close. The fall had passed quickly without a kill, and daylight was fading fast.
Freezing and bored, Noah’s friends trudged uphill to the house. My brother stayed in his tree stand, insulated by inexperience. It was 5:45. The season ended at 6:00. Swallowing a lump of disappointment, he knew his next chance was eight months away.
He heard movement behind him. A buck stepped into the clearing. Noah’s brain and heart gave each other a sideways glance and flipped out screaming in unison. The deer grazed. Noah’s brain and heart knocked the top off a bottle of adrenaline, clinked glasses, and drank to excess. The deer stood almost perfectly still, flicking his beautiful white ears. Noah remembered the existence of his rifle. The deer, deep in deer thoughts, failed to notice the first bullet flying overhead.
Noah is a talented shot under normal circumstances. But at that critical moment my brother had no scope on his rifle (it had malfunctioned the day before), no iron sights, and no common sense. He was guessing instead of aiming, and somehow his second guess went through the deer’s head.
Most whitetails run after they’ve been wounded. This particular buck, at peace with himself and the universe, flopped to the ground like a World Cup soccer player hoping for a red card. Noah took four more shots and missed four more times.
The horror sank in. Three generations of men, all waiting for him up at the house, had taught Noah that a hunter obsesses over accuracy, ammunition, and his prey’s anatomy for the sake of a humane kill. Now he’d maimed a living thing. Noah always carries one extra round with him in his pocket, a romanticized lucky bullet that he plans to keep until they make that Duck Dynasty spin-off reality show starring him, in which he wills the bullet to his son, Noah Jr., during an emotional season finale. To clarify, that will be a new lucky bullet—because Noah chambered the original lucky bullet and missed again.
Petrified, he climbed down and ran toward his victim. Up close, it was clear that the buck was about the size of a family dog. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it took a hunting knife, a rifle butt swung like a croquet mallet, and Noah running a mile through the snow to get a second gun to finish the task.
“Congratulations,” the grandfather said, “you shot the smallest deer of the season,” watching one of the deer’s limbs spin freely on a string of cartilage. On the way to the butcher shop, the hunters heaped character-building shame on Noah. “It’s a tradition that you eat part of the heart of your first deer,” they told him, offering a Temple of Doom-style slice. Traumatized and looking for redemption, Noah snatched it like a Costco sample. “And then he actually ate it,” his friend told me later. “We were just joking!”
I hope the story of Noah’s first deer hunt comes up at the dinner table more often than Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hemingway might be unimpressed, but it’s one of the best tales I’ve ever heard. Is hunting sometimes a cruel, brutal sport? Clearly. Love hunting, hate hunting, I don’t care. My brother went into the woods an adolescent and emerged a kinder, gentler man.
