The Good Ole Days – My First Deer Hunt

By James H. Cagle

I had recently turned sixteen and had bought my first deer-hunting rifle. It was a lever-action Winchester model 94 in the .30-30 caliber. It wasn’t my first gun. I had been given a .22 bolt action rifle by my Dad when I was twelve that he bought when he was a teenager. I had shot many squirrels with the .22. I learned to “bark” the squirrel, which is shooting the trunk of the tree next to the squirrels head. This “barking” caused a temporary concussion to the squirrel and made him fall from the tree so you could dispatch him in a way without damaging the meat. And I still have this .22 at the time of this writing.

I was able to buy the .30-30 with some money I made from working in tobacco. The farmer who employed my sisters and I for several summers, along with all the other hired help, had not been fairly paying us according to the IRS after their investigation. So we were all called to the farm one day to be paid what the farmer owed us. My payment was two-hundred and fifty dollars. With my money I went to Woolworths and bought my rifle having my older brother-in-law sign for it.

My Dad hunted mostly squirrel and rabbit. Several of my uncles were bird hunters. But none that I knew of had ever hunted deer. So I began hunting without any advice from a former or current deer hunter in my family. I did have a book on deer hunting. I don’t remember the author or if it was a book I bought or found or had been given to me.  The book was about big game hunting and had a section in it about hunting whitetail deer in the south. I read about how to identify their tracks and where, during rutting season, the buck would make a scrape on the ground and a rub on a small tree to leave his scent to attract a doe for mating. I read about what they ate and where they would bed-down and how they would travel from where they bedded down to their feeding areas. I learned how you must hunt downwind from them and should hunt from a blind or a tree stand. I read about all the lures and attractants used to draw them in close for the kill. I even read the section on how to field dress the deer and how to best cook its meat.

I was sixteen and didn’t fully grasp all the advice and instructions and didn’t have the money to buy anything to aid me in my hunt. I thought if I did the same as I did when I went squirrel hunting I would do alright. When I went squirrel hunting, whether in the morning or late evening, I just put myself in a good spot where I would likely see some squirrels and stayed still waiting for them to come along so I could shoot them.

Not long after hunting season began, I bought my license and went deer hunting. It was on the first Saturday after hunting season opened. I had no camouflage clothing or hunting boots, and I don’t think a hunter had to wear a florescent orange vest when hunting at that time.

I think it was about the middle of the day when I picked up my rifle and headed for the woods. I walked through the field behind our house and then entered the woods. I knew the area well because my brothers and I spent a lot of time romping through the woods and exploring the swamps and old logging roads. I entered the woods and found the old familiar logging road that was made when the loggers cut timber out of the forest some ten years earlier. The logging road had become overgrown with bushes that were as tall as me. But it was a lot easier to travel than getting in the underbrush that was off the road. I traveled the road and then stepped into a fire break that was grown up with brush as well, but it led me to the spot where I had already decided that I was going to hunt.

The spot I picked was about a mile from my house. It was off to one side of the logging road and beside a cypress head that had a fire break running alongside it. I didn’t know at the time, but later knew, that this spot was the ideal spot and would have been approved by the experts who hunted deer and wrote books about their hunts. The woods were full of palmettos and tall gall berry bushes and scrub oak. They were too high for me to see over and sight a deer. There were some small oak trees scattered around but none were where I needed them to be. I looked around until I found a small pine tree with some lower branches that I could climb up into, that, when I was in it, I could see over on the fire break and down the logging road. The pine tree was about as big around as a basketball and it had a fork in it about seven feet up and a limb jutting out below the fork that I could rest my feet on.

No one hunted anywhere near this area. So the deer were not use to anyone being in the woods other than my brothers and I. But this was the first time one of us was there to hunt them and hopefully kill one and take it home.

I got settled in my tree and started watching the woods around me. As a sixteen year old I had no problem sitting in the fork of the tree. But I did have the impatience of a sixteen year old. I knew that just like when hunting squirrels I had to be still and wait. When hunting squirrels, I sat very still through the pre-dawn darkness and listened to the squirrels beginning to move through the trees. If I moved even a little at first light, the squirrels would be alerted and leave the area and it would take another while of being very still before they would return.

So I stayed very still in my tree and watched for deer. I heard my first deer before I saw it. I heard it bleat. The bleat of a deer sounds, at least to me, exactly like the bleat of a goat. When I heard the deer bleat I thought it was a goat that I was hearing. And this was likely because one of our neighbors raised goats and I just thought I was hearing one of their goats that had gotten out of the pen and made its way into the wilderness.

But as I looked up to see goats, I discovered that it was a deer bleating. There were two deer coming down the fire break in front of me and to my right. There was a doe being followed by a buck. I didn’t know how many points there were to the buck’s antlers. I just saw that he had a big “rack.”

They both stopped about one-hundred yards from where I was in the tree. They probably sensed my presence and stopped to figure out what it was they smelled. When they stopped I took aim and shot the buck in the chest area as the deer book I read had instructed. My shot was good and the buck fell on the spot as the doe ran away.

I went to the buck and shot him again to make sure he was dead. I had a long walk back to the house to get my Dad to help me retrieve the buck and I wanted to make sure he would be there when I got back.

It was beginning to get late in the afternoon when I made my way back to the house. I told my Dad I had shot a deer and he, along with several of my brothers and sisters, followed me back to the woods to get the deer.

When I got back to the place where I thought I shot my deer he wasn’t there. My Dad said he might not have been killed and when I walked away from him he got up and ran off into the woods. But I was sure the deer was dead. I shot him twice and waited after I shot him to make sure he was dead. I also saw a pool of blood on the ground under him so I knew he was dead.

I found the tree I shot the deer from and went to it and then walked out to where I remembered shooting the deer and there he was in the fire break where I left him. We then carried the deer a while and then drug it until we finally got it to the house.

I didn’t know how to skin a deer other than what I read in the book and my dad didn’t know how either. We called some friends that lived down the road who had shot and skinned many deer.

When they saw my deer they said that I had shot a trophy. It had a perfect set of antlers with eight points and it weighed two-hundred and fifty pounds. They sawed the antlers out of the skull with a hack saw and I have kept them ever since. The meat sectioned and put in the freezer and the family ate of it for a good long while.

I have been deer hunting a number of times since and have shot some nice sized bucks, but I have not shot one as big as my first buck.