My worst fears have come true: I have a full-blown cold on the eve of West Virginia's buck season.
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Cough in the woods and you might as well be blowing an air horn. And here I am, sniffling like I do every time the father and son play catch in the movie "Field of Dreams."
Just as bad, I have to keep pulling out a hankie, breaking the motionless sentry duty I pride myself on.
My nose is so dry and cracked that I draw blood when I wipe it and one violent sneeze splits open my upper lip.
Now, as daylight approaches on the long-anticipated opening morning, it has begun to rain. I reluctantly pull up my hood, cutting off my peripheral vision.
Our family has lost permission to hunt on some prime private hunting ground. Now we are compressed fairly close together on our own properties.
We're triangulating the deer, we joke. But I don't like being this close.
I feel sorry for myself. This is turning into the worst deer camp ever. Wah, wah.
Just then, a shot thunders from just up the power line.
Not 10 minutes earlier, I had seen the flashlight of my 21-year-old nephew, Logan, bouncing through the woods and had chuckled to myself.
Not known for his ability to rise early, he would be lucky to be in his stand before shooting light.
And then the shot.
Good lord! How could he be shooting already! Had he accidentally discharged his rifle?
No. Turns out he did exactly what he set out to do: Locate where deer would be traveling and shoot a buck at close range.
He had picked the spot the day before, pointing out to his dad and me where deer often cross the power line.
Logan had started coming to deer camp when he was 16. He had seen deer, but never gotten a shot.
Now, he has climbed into his treestand only minutes before hearing a rustling in the leaves on the other side of the power line.
He has chambered only one round in his Remington 30-06, the same rifle his father had used for his first buck.
Here they come, just where he thought they might. He peers into the gauzy light and sees one of the deer has antlers.
"This is it!" he remembers thinking. He aims and fires. That quick and he has his first buck.
That quick and I go from feeling misery to elation. Logan, who in old deer camp movies we had watched the night before was squealing at age 4 as a cousin sang "Pop Goes the Weasel," is now one of us.
I imagine the accomplishment Logan must be feeling. I know the moment will forever be a part of him, as my first deer is.
I know his dad would have heard the shot and was wondering if it could have been that of his son.
Logan wasn't sure how to field dress the deer and didn't want to botch it. So he started dragging the deer whole back to his family's cabin along the Lost River.
Logan's quick score buoyed the other three of us perched in tree stands on our property or the George Washington National Forest across the river.
But the unrelenting rain begins taking its toll as the morning wanes and no deer appear to be moving.
I am unfortunately positioned under a branch high in the tree that sends a constant parade of drips onto my hood. I feel like I am being waterboarded.
I like to stay on stand all of opening day, but I have not seen a deer since first light and am so demoralized I walk to my brother's cabin for a lunch break.
Munching on cheese and crackers, I glance out the big picture window to the river. A movement catches my eye. I can see a head swimming in the pool toward rapids.
I figure it is a beaver but as it swims into the shallows I am astonished to see that it is an otter. The creature slides down a chute in the water in act of pure playfulness.
My spirit rejuvenated, I head back into the rain.
My brother Trent passes on a spike buck in the afternoon, the only deer any of us see. But the night belongs to Logan and that is enough.
Day two is clear and warm — too warm. The hunters in these parts already are grumbling that unrelentingly warm days have prevented many deer from entering the rut and moving much.
All I know is I'm not seeing deer. Nor are my two brothers.
That afternoon, Brett and I change tactics and wade the river to climb Breakneck Ridge, a climb as arduous as the name implies, but to a place that has yielded some nice bucks in the past.
Brett is almost to the top when he jumps a buck. He fires at the running deer and thinks he hits it. He fires again and is ready to pull the trigger for a third shot when a blast rumbles from just below him.
The eight-pointer tumbles into a heap.
Another hunter who is contentedly eating a lunch of crackers when startled by Brett's shot recovers and lets loose with the shot that apparently brings the buck down.
The two hunters converge for one of hunting's oldest dilemmas: Who has rights to the buck? The hunter who first hit the deer or the one who delivered the fatal blow?
Though Brett later confirms that he had hit the deer and he suspects the deer was about to fall, he says it was a no-brainer.
"You know, he was the last to shoot it. End of story," he tells me later.
It was a mature philosophy and if you believe in karma, perhaps that is why not an hour later a four-pointer pops over the top of the mountain and gives Brett an easy shot.
Brett radios the news to me, while I'm trying to make sense of the parade of shots from my treestand just a couple benches away.
Not 15 minutes later, a deer on a mountainside trail presents me with a good shot. I take it, thinking it is a doe. Only when I start to field-dress the deer do I realize it is a young buck with one 21-w-inch spike.
It still qualifies as an antlerless deer but I wish I had seen the spike. I wouldn't have shot it, preferring instead to see it next year as a four-pointer or more.
Anyway, a day that began deer-less suddenly had produced three bucks in two hours — all just after lunch, supposedly the least active time of day for deer.
Content, we drag our deer down the mountain and lock arms to drag the deer across the swollen river.
The next day, on Thanksgiving eve, as dusk descends, my other brother, Trent, is rewarded for his hard hunting when a four-pointer chasing two does cavorts in front of him.
We have gone four for four, a first at the Crable deer camp.
My miserable cold, the long spates of empty woods, all forgotten.
You just never know about hunting. That's why I love it so.
acrable@lnpnews.com
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