My immediate family isn’t a family of hunters - at least no one ever took me hunting. My uncle once brought home some deer jerky that was really incredible, but otherwise I had no connection to the world of hunting. My strongest ‘hunting’ memory was crying when I learned that we would be killing the crabs that we just pulled up out of our crab pot. Killing fish never bothered me, but I guess crabs had my sympathies. Maybe it had something to do with their having legs.

In 2015, for no good reason at all, I decided I wanted to go deer hunting. At the time I didn’t have any rifles that would have been practical for hunting deer so I picked up a Tikka T3 in .308 Winchester from a shop in Monroe. I put a giant scope on it that had anywhere from 4x-10x magnification, because I wanted to be able to shoot out to 400 yards.¹ I sighted in the rifle at the local 100-yard range and decided I was happy enough with my 4” groups.² This was my first time shooting with a rifle scope, and I still wasn’t used to centering the whole image so there were no shadows on the side.

Tyson’s grandparents owned some land on the Olympic Peninsula and they were happy to have Tyson and I out to hunt. Tyson’s grandfather Ralph was a prolific hunter and trapper all over those lands and I think he probably thought I looked funny as hell tramping around his back 40 without a single idea what I was doing. He was full of advice though and he gave us some good tips. His one request was that we not shoot his favorite white doe.

Tyson drove us all around the mountains and logging roads near Joyce and stoically followed me through thick brush and damp woods. We’d stop for a few hours every time I saw the smallest sign - a single track, or some scat, or a tree that was worn away and ‘almost definitely a rub’. We never saw anything. At one point we set up a lookout over 300 ft of clear terrain and just waited for a deer to walk through it. When it started raining Tyson took a nap under the tarp and left me to soak for a good couple hours. I still didn’t see anything.

On our final day we patrolled the back 40 for an hour. I was pretty sure we’d tracked a deer there, but it wasn’t flushing out and it was past time to leave. We stopped to pee, and a doe casually walked out in front of both of us not 50 feet away. It wasn’t a legal animal that year, and anyway I didn’t want to take the chance that this was Ralph’s favorite doe. We left without a single legal deer spotted in 4 days. It was a demoralizing end to that trip.

More demoralizing was having Tyson out-shoot me with my own rifle. We’d posted a target up on the shooting stump, walked maybe 50 yards away and each taken a few shots. From my unsupported position, I could barely hit paper, let alone score anything resembling a bullseye. Tyson was able to land shot after shot in the 4” center of the target. I knew I needed to take time off hunting until I was able to do the same.

Notes

¹ To date, I’ve never taken a shot on a deer further away than 70 yards.

² This was from a bench! I couldn’t shoot better than 4 MOA even when you took most of my bad gun handling out of the equation!