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| Alberta Hanson 1950s with Uncle Maurice's pet deer |
A couple of weekends ago, my
great niece Karra and great nephew Andrew Hanson went deer hunting for the very
first time under the new Wisconsin rules that set aside one weekend for 10-12
year old hunters. They both had just finished Hunter’s Safety Training. Although
their hunt was successful, it pointed up a serious problem with the Hunter’s
Safety program that teaches kids how to hunt.
They used their uncle Colby’s
nice deer hunting stand on our rye fields along the Old River Road. This
area is the edge of the farming areas to the east and the sand barrens woods to
the left. The woods are a bedroom community for deer who commute nightly
to the corn, beans and alfalfa fields on the east side of the River Road,
returning each dawn to the oak and jackpine woods and prairie remnants on the
west.
They had wonderful luck!
Andrew shot a nice 8 point in the morning and Karra a slightly larger 9
point in the evening. My brother Marvin, their grandpa, said “they did
everything right—good accurate shots, carefully placed and safely done.
The Hunter Safety classes had them prepared for ‘harvesting a deer.’”
Harvesting a deer is the
euphemism perpetrated by the DNR and sportsmen’s clubs for shooting or killing
a deer. It is like saying a person “went to eternal rest” when you meant
he died. To me it brings up an image of running a huge combine driving
through the meadows scooping up deer with a big front reel and spewing out
packaged meat and mounted horns on the backside. To “set the harvest”
each year the DNR and Sportsmen convene death panels to argue the numbers.
Marvin is an old time hunter
and butchers (rather than processes) his own deer and did his grandchildren’s too. “They charge
$70-80 for skinning and cutting up a deer that in the end might only have 40
lbs of meat. And they keep the hide too!” He can skin and cut up a
deer in just a few hours including running it through his big motorized
hamburger grinder. “I know I get my own deer back. At the meat
markets they probably mix ones with those that hung out so long they are rotten
with yours!”
Well, Everett and I drove
over to look at the two deer shot by the first two hunters in the 6th
generation of the family to hunt deer in Wisconsin. Great Grandpa
Hanson, who came here from Sweden, was thrilled to find that he was allowed to
hunt deer—that they didn’t all belong to the king or nobles in America.
He borrowed his brother-in-law’s Civil War Spencer repeater Carbine for
his first hunt in the 1870s. Deer herds were increasing rapidly after
loggers opened up the great white pine forests and left conditions that favored
deer. By the time Dad was a kid in the 1920s, they had mostly disappeared from
over hunting.
Andrew and Karra were helping
Grandpa Marvin and their dad, Brandon, unload the deer onto the butchering
table, having registered it at Stop-a-Sec in Cushing when Ev and I got there.
“t is a little too warm to
keep them more than a day before we cut them up,” said Marvin. They each
had a very nice young buck; 1.5 years estimated Ev, looking at size, condition
and teeth.
“Andrew, tell us about
shooting your first deer,” I encouraged him.
“He came out of the woods
onto the edge of the field. I took one shot and he fell down and died,
“said Andrew shyly looking at his feet. Uncle Everett and I waited for
him to continue.
“Where did you hit him?” I
prompted to get him going. “Neck,” he replied. And that was it.
No more story, no more details; the whole story as far as he was
concerned. Everett and I were shocked.
“Didn’t they teach you in
Hunter’s Training that the most important part about shooting a deer is the
story? My gosh, you gotta do better than that to be a Hanson! You
know, a year from now the meat will be all gone; the rack of horns will be
gathering dust on the wall, and all that will be left is your story.”
It suddenly occurred to us
that the Hunter training folks who harvest deer with rubber gloves and ear
protectors and put on a medical mask to gut them out might also have sanitized
the “Hunting Story” out of the process too!
Long after Parkinson’s
disease had robbed my Dad of his ability to hunt, he still participated by
telling the stories of hunts of his own and his Dad and Grandpa and Uncles,
some more than a century old. If you haven’t learned how to tell a good
story, by golly, you might as well go to a hunting preserve where they lead an
elk out of the pen, place a pail of feed in front of him and take off the rope
and let you harvest him.
I don’t blame the Hunter
Safety people totally. My brother Marvin is sadly lacking in imagination
too; sort of a stick to the facts kind of guy; not able to tell a story with
texture, flavor, color, embellishment, etc. You know that kind of guy; he
likes a perfectly mowed lawn, nails and screws sorted as to size and stored all
facing the same direction, and the packages of meat in the freezer all labeled
as to type, date, with photos of the individual deer on the wrapping paper.
Now, Everett and I learned
from experts. We first watched our Hanson great uncles sit around the
parlor at Grandpa’s and crack wise. Grandpa got too old to hunt but continued
telling stories over Thanksgiving dinner. They knew how to tell
stories and passed along ones they heard from their Dad too. They knew
that good stories grew a little each year as tidbits from other stories got
merged into one. My Dad and his 5
brothers continued the tradition; Uncles Maurice, Lloyd, Chauncey, Glenn,
Erv, Ralph, and Alvin, all could spin an engrossing story of a particular hunt
(successful or unsuccessful made little difference in the quality of the
story).
Anyway, Everett and I have
our work cut out for us. There are already 15 members of the Hanson 6th
generation aged .5 to 14, all sorely in need of storytelling training.
With Hunter’s Safety people abdicating this primary function, I guess it
is up to us to take over.
I have made an outline for
telling a decent deer hunting story. Most of the points are necessary and
should be expanded where possible. 1. Selecting the Gun 2.
Choosing the hunt site 3. The preparations 4. The
stealthy walk to the stand 5. The weather 6. The anticipation and
false alarms and the adverse conditions 7. I see the deer 8.
Shooting the deer 9. The death scene 10. The drag 11.
Statements of false modesty or a moral.
I include my own first kill
story as an example. It is very much abbreviated so that it will fit into
this column. The story told aloud is what my neighbor George calls a
2-beer tale.
Back in ’59, when I was 12, I
bought my first deer-hunting license. I had tagged along with Dad and older
brother Marvin at times the two previous years and was ready to try it myself.
The starting gun for all of us Hansons of my generation was Grandpa’s old
38-40 Winchester, fondly nicknamed “the pumpkin slinger.” It shot a small shell that looked like a bloated 22 short. It threw a big chunk
of lead a short distance before dropping precipitously. It held 15 shells
and had a smooth well-worn lever action. You could lay down a pattern of
lead that, with luck, a deer might stumble into.
1959 was one of those years where the
Conservation Department was trying to let the deer herd grow a little.
Back in the ‘50s, deer were rare in NW Wisconsin. Every piece of
land was heavily pastured by farmers and deer were hunted heavily and never
seemed to get any surplus at all. Shooting a deer (bucks only then) was a
true achievement requiring a lot of luck and skill. That year, the season
north of Hwy 70 was nine days but only from Thanksgiving on around Cushing.
Dad decided we would hunt the first day in the Kohler Peet Swamps north
of Grantsburg where there was public land.
Saturday dawned bitterly cold
with wind and 22 below on the farm. We helped Dad milk the cows early and were
finished well before first light. We had long underwear that we wore all
winter and rubber buckle boots to wear over our lace up leather shoes. We
put on two pairs of underwear; two pairs of wool socks, mittens with liners,
our wool dull red caps and a thin red coat over our heaviest old coat. This
was before the days of blaze orange, so we were red only from the waist up.
Dad took some matches “we will start a fire if we get too cold.”
We got out of the green ’51 Chev
along the road somewhere in woods north of Grantsburg just as dawn was
breaking. Cars lined the road. We uncased our guns, walked, the snow
squeaking cold, into the woods. We finally found a knoll that seemed to be away
from other hunters.
Two hours into the hunt, it was
light; we hadn’t seen anything, but my toes had long ago abandoned
communication with the rest of me. It was really cold! “Get a some dry
twigs and birch bark and let’s start a fire,” Dad finally said. In a few
minutes, we had a small fire going; a few minutes later a nice one. Of
course, it takes just as long to unthaw your toes as it did to freeze them due
to the layers that the heat needs to go through.
Thirty minutes later as
we huddled around the fire, a couple of shots rang out nearby. “If a buck
comes through, we will have to drop him here or the next hunter will surely get
him,” Dad counseled as we brought our guns up to alert. Four deer
came trotting up through the woods from the direction of the shots. “The
front one is a buck,” whispered Dad, giving us the OK to open fire.
I think we each shot the first shot
simultaneously. The big buck continued forward through brush still 100 yards
away. I shot six more times; Marvin 3, and Dad once. The buck fell,
but started to get up, so I pumped a couple more shots into him in the head
area. We rushed down and found him dead; a very nice 12 point
buck. We looked and there were holes in his neck, head; front leg, back leg,
hoof and a few miscellaneous nicks. “Well ventilated” joked Dad.
The deer had a bunch of smaller prongs
around the base of the big horns that we decided made him an 18 pointer.
We drug him up near the fire and Dad showed us how to gut him out
(Andrew says you “field dress” a deer now a days).
“We need to tag him,”
said Dad, “I think we all shot him, so whose tag should we use? I don’t want to
use mine so I can keep on hunting.”
Marvin agreed with Dad, and so they
turned to me. “You used the most lead! It can be your first deer.”
Years later, we sat around
on the porch room where the mounted horns hung at home and each remembered and
told the story of the “Big deer from Grantsburg.” Each of us had our own
version of the story. We can spend at least 10 minutes remembering how cold it
was; another 10 minutes on how terrible the 38-40 gun was; 10 minutes trying to place
where the Kohler Peet swamp was; and end up arguing whether the heater in the
51 Chev was any good.
“You know,
now-a-days they tell you not to eat venison because of the splinters of lead
that might be in it. They say it messes up your brain and lowers your IQ.
I bet that Grantsburg buck was full of lead,” said Everett staring at the
big old set of horns on the wall at Mom’s place last week. “Maybe that
explains why we put those horns on the bicycle in place of the handlebars the
next summer, and why we didn’t realize how dangerous it was to drive around
with your belly 5 inches from 18 wicked deer prongs,” he mused.
