“There’s a kind of hush all over the world,” sang The Herman’s Hermits in 1967. The weather a week ago Sunday and Monday reminded me of that feeling when sitting on a deer stand. The fog and misty rain wetting the leaves and tree branches, and me, made everything in the woods hushed and quiet.
It is fun most days sitting in a tree hoping deer will wander by, but rainy, foggy days were always my favorites. Everything is very calm and peaceful. Even tree rats scurrying around on the ground searching for breakfast don’t make much noise.
Some noises are still loud. The “crack” of a Whiteoak acorn quietly falling 30 feet to smack a limb over your head will get your attention. But most sounds are muted and there is a special quiet to the woods.
The patter of water drops on the black plastic bag I used for a makeshift rain cover is relaxing, bringing back memories or raindrops hitting the tin roof of the old farmhouse where I grew up. But unlike the plastic bag roof, it did not leak drops down my collar, bringing me back to the present.
A flicker of movement gets my full concentration, but most likely it is the flip of a squirrel tail. I look at it through my scope, cranking it up to maximum power to try to prove grey squirrels have some grey hair. They do not.
Sometimes the movement is from a magic deer. The woods Houdini can suddenly appear, seemingly popping out of the ground where they stand. It is no surprise they make no noise in the wet woods, but they can walk through dry leaves just as quietly, the same leaves that made your walk to the stand sound like big foot sitting beside you chomping on ice cubes for breakfast.
If a deer does appear it is time to check it out closely. Although it is legal to shoot a deer without visible bone above the hair and count it as a doe, not one of your two bucks, you look closely. Then you don’t care because you are hunting for meat, not horns, and don’t plan on filling both buck tags anyway.
The quiet is conducive to deep thoughts as well as more shallow ones. Will a doe or buck come down the trail 30 yards down the ridge from your perch in the Whiteoak. Are you hidden well enough for deer “that never look up” to miss seeing you when they look up? Can you get your crosshairs on them without spooking them?
More important, how many other hunters have been on this ridge where some of the oaks are more than 100 years old? Did the dirt farmer that scratched out a living here, terracing the steep hillside and moving rocks so he could grow crops to feed his family in the early 1800s hope to shoot a deer with his musket for some meat?
Did his children and grandchildren that lived on the land after he did shoot squirrels here for a stew, or wait for deer, maybe sitting on the big boulder almost under your tree? The old man that sold you his final piece of property before dying told you he hunted here, as did his ancestors. Remembering brought a tear in his eye, giving up the last of his ancestral land.
It almost made you regret buying his families land but if you had not, someone else would have. And they might have developed it and a subdivision might be covering the ancestral lands now.
I have insured through a “Land Conservation Covenant” that nothing will be built here before I die. I hope some future hunter will enjoy the peace of this place like I do but I fear some may sing the Joni Mitchell song from 1970: “You don’t know what you got till its gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
