Veteran's Hunt

Well, I took the old Springfield out of the soft, cloth carrying case, shouldered it, and drew on the wall clock in the bathroom, and felt the same heft and awkward wrist grip that I had felt in the box stand a few days before. I could still feel just a hint of the thrill I'd had as I did so. It was nice to revisit.


If you remember, I had mentioned this old rifle--not my oldest--a few weeks ago here, http://dumbasscarpenter.blogspot.com/2010/11/veterans-day.html, so I won't rehash what I wrote then, but when I picked it up again to hunt, I was serious. I intended to do it right, and I intended to do it well.


Having squandered my free time between work and hunting with silly things like the holidays and family time, I didn't have a lot of time to "work up" a pet load for the Springfield and had to resort to just buying (gasp) factory ammunition and hoping for good performance at the range.


The brand I was gonna buy was a no-brainer since the rifle was a Remington made Springfield. And from experience, I knew the '06's I own like heavier bullets, so I settled on their 165 grain, yellow and green box--most "affordable" (not cheap mind you) cartridges and headed to the club. I hadn't checked zero on this rifle in a couple of years, and I had never fired this store-bought ammo in it at all, so, I had to check it.

Basking in the sun at the range.

Of course, I hauled ass up to the range in a hurry. I had duck hunted that morning, and was going to carry this rifle with a friend to the same fish farm made famous by J.B. Irving and those spot and stalk duck hunts (more on that later perhaps). So I threw the benchrest and bag on the bench, set up my spotting scope, and got started.

Remington Core Lokt Ammunition

I was ready to stretch the old veteran out. I had only previously shot at 8.5" X 11" sheets of paper without ever thinking of shooting at game, and taking a cue from trying to get my kids to shoot well, I made a target that is easy to see at one hundred yards and fun to shoot. And since it was just a few days before Christmas, and visions of expensive iPod Fourth Gen with 8 gigabyte memories were dancing in my head (and stressing me out), there was only one choice.

Santa before induction into brett's training.

Someone, a jolly ol', no-iPod-making-then-giving-it-away-for-free elf, was gonna catch hell. The first shot I fired was high and to the right, and then thankfully, the next shot was as well, which meant I felt confident enough to move the rear sight by twisting the adjustment knob thus making the sight move the direction I wanted the bullet to go. I fired one more, and bingo. I killed Santa.

The two high and right were shot before twisting the rear sight left.

I fired three more, all into the 6 7/8" plate, and felt I had enough accuracy at 100 yards to do in any giant buck, doe, coyote, Nazi or zombie that showed its ugly face. Again, I didn't have the time to develop a cartridge that would shoot an even tighter group in this rifle, though next year, that might be different.


I also decided to limit my shots inside 100 yards. The one shot I took at the Santa I stapled out at 200 yards was six inches low and a tad to the right. Easy to compensate for I suppose, but frankly, I had no idea if I could even see a brown deer out at 200 yards without a scope, but I had an idea of what the rifle could do...or rather, what I could do with the rifle. 

The one time I flipped the rear ladder-sight up to try it at 200 yards, I never even hit the blueprint I had stapled up behind Santa...so that option was out. A while back I had traded the original front sight for a taller one from a demilled ROTC parade rifle and I'm sure that messed up the paring of the front and rear sight. Rest assured I'll be tweaking that as well so perhaps I could drop a deer at two hundred plus yards with it knowing my cartridge trajectory inside and out. After all, the rear sight's calibrated for out to 2700 yards!


Well for the first Veteran's hunt I returned to the pond where I had seen two small bucks eating acorns out of the sand during muzzleloader season. And seeing acorns still on the ground, even after a snow and hard-freezing mornings, I felt pretty confident I'd see deer. So I slipped in, sat down and waited. My buddy Brian C. came along but hunted elsewhere on the property.

First hunt with a Veteran. Cocked but not locked.

The row of trees was hundred or so yards off and so I was set. But I didn't see any deer! In fact, I'll tell you something else, when the sun dips down behind the trees in the afternoon, your hunt is over. Well mine is, yours may not be if you're 12 years old and have 20/20 vision. The law, "half hour after sunset", doesn't apply to WWII veterans with wafer-thin front sights preceded by shallow-cut rear sights that are tough to see even in broad daylight. 


So the first hunt was a bust. Brian and I walked out chatting. He had at least seen a deer or two, though he didn't shoot, and he did say, "You're the man if you can get one with open sights." Which goes to show you what a rarity it is these days to carry a rifle afield without a scope, and for me, that was part of the point.


The next Veteran's hunt, just up the brier patch from the little pond, was another afternoon hunt but heaped in snow...and wind, lots of cold wind. I would have liked to say it was a pleasant passing of time, but it was not. I walked out actually glad I didn't shoot because I would have died trying to get a harvested deer out of there that day needing to drag it over the snowy, muddy roads too soft for a truck  for about half a mile.


So, I would have to wait for a different venue, down by The Miller Beer River (also known as The Dan) for a third attempt,  but, as the old adage/saying or wishful-thinking goes, the third time is a charm.


That morning in Draper, NC, we gathered before the hunt. Some were putting on more clothes, a couple were eating biscuits, but we were all murmuring to each other the way people do when speaking before dawn, as if to not wake someone sleeping behind the next bush. 


One of the guys asked me off hand, "What're you shooting?" and I replied jokingly, "Deer." I hesitated to mention the Vet, so I followed up with, "A 30-06," and said it boldly enough that he didn't ask anything else, only chuckling at the deer comment. He's one of those one rifle guys...how do they survive with just one?


After those quiet "hello's" followed by the "good luck's" I was off to the stand of all stands on the property. It overlooks the edge of a text book flood plain created by the Dan River. And beyond the tangles and thickets before it, there's a vast corn field until the tree-lined banks of the river. Naturally, by this time, the corn's cut and gone, and what the combine left behind was buried under our white Christmas!


So the short scrub trees with bits of green on them down below were all the deer had to eat this particular morning. And I watched in the growing light, deer after deer march past, but just out of the comfort-zone range I had set for myself. On another note, the law that says legal shooting time starts 30 minutes before sunrise also was not meant for a 44 year old pair of eyes shooting over a 68 year old rifle.


By the time the sun was high enough to see well, the mini-migration had ceased. I began to think I had sat in the freezing cold wind for nothing. Then, about 400 yards distant I saw two deer strike out of the thicket and start to cross the corn towards the river--pure suicide usually. Stark brown against blazing white snow, the two deer sauntered across. In fact, it was so strange, that I watched through the binoculars to see what they were up to and where they were going.


Then I caught movement out to my left, and dropped the twins and saw a huge doe crossing an old logging road about 100 yards away. She made no sound, and I hustled for the rifle, and I shouldered the Vet and drew a bead on a moving flank, and then she was gone! I missed my shot. My moment had just walked right by without even looking my way. I missed my shot! I missed the whole reason I was out there because had I watched two deer a quarter of a mile away!

She walked through at the top of that "road."

I couldn't believe it. I cussed out loud and waved my arms, even posted to facebook. I had blown it. And I almost, in my anger, decided to get down and give chase, but of course I didn't. Instead, I munched on a biscuit, watched a buddy 700 yards away shoot at and miss (I would find out later) a coyote, and thus refused to get down out of the box stand until I saw more deer.


I had to wait along time.


But again, a little further away, another deer walked into view in front of the stand. She was slowly walking by herself, and I thought she was a small buck at first (again) but I checked through the binoculars and could see she was what I call a normal-sized doe. I mean, it was 9:30 AM, which is late for these corn-thieving deer to be up and about, so I told myself, "It's a doe, and you gotta make it happen."


I threw the rifle up and worked at getting on target, but she was so tiny behind the front sight that I felt like I lost her every time I drew down on her. Not because she was small, but because she was over 100 yards away, and I had open sights. I am used to killing magnified deer, by God, not life-sized reality deer. 

So I locked in on her, held the cheek weld and the sling taunt, and had her shoulder zeroed, and couldn't do it. Suddenly I had forgotten the confidence shooting Santa had given me and couldn't pull the two-stage trigger through that second stage! 


Amazingly, she stood there looking ahead, holding broadside while I hemmed and hawed and, after some deep breaths, I locked in the rifle solidly, hid her shoulder behind the front sight, held my breath and fought the flinch, and slipped past that second stage and shot the Veteran's deer.


She didn't jump, she didn't fall. She "R-U-N-O-F-T" at a great rate of speed.


"Fuck!" I thought, "I missed!"


I racked the empty case out, and unlike the obsessed reloader I've become, I paid nary attention to its trajectory, but watched my deer bound perpendicularly to me through the tangles and readied myself for what was going to be a publicly loud second shot--the kind I don't like. But as I watched, she slowed, faltered, and then fell over kicking, already gone. We had her.

The old Veteran had spoken, and had done what it was built to do. And I, along with my buddies, helped it along. When the doe fell, I felt as if I she were my first deer. It felt that fresh and amazing to kill something the same way hunters did when they wore knickers, calf-high, lace-up linesmen boots, and red plaid Woolrich jackets and carried Winchester Model 54's and  '03 Springfields and Enfields, and funny little Remingtons called the Model 30 Express.


And of course, The veteran rifle also carries with it the terrible history of War--an indescribable mix of death, maiming, mud, mayhem and horror that we can only imagine, probably, barely. Part of the reason I wanted to use the Vet was to also cleanse it of that history and give it another? Perhaps let it do its work for good, that is, the maintenance of a healthy population of deer in the wild who, left to their own devices (including a panache for breeding) would soon overrun us, and themselves.


Hmm, now about that funny looking Remington...I happen to have one laying around here somewhere, and I need to take it hunting.


Post script,


The last day of the season, which is usually the first day of the year, I took that funny-looking Model 30 hunting in the drizzle. Since it too has open sights, I carried it along for the morning hunt, and even though I had been "busted" sitting in the stand by a little spike buck, I was shocked to see a doe trek up out of the thickets along the edge of the gas lines mid morning and stop.


She was looking down the gas line, at, I would realize later, Brian's orange hat up in his stand. But she gave me opportunity, which I took quickly, and, though I didn't know it, this was the last shot at deer I would fire for the 2010-2011 hunting season. 

I hunted that evening in the rain, but only listened as a friend shot his last deer of the year (with one of my rifles and home made ammo) and counted myself lucky and happy and ready to go home and forget all the work until I get the itch again...oh...usually sometime mid summer.