On Trails (21 page)

Walker's system was simple. White-tailed deer love acorns, particularly those of the white oak, so he tried to locate a white oak near trampled vegetation and fresh deer droppings. He would then situate himself in a tree about twenty yards away and twenty feet in the air and just wait. “You can just about bet your bottom dollar that within so many hours there's going to be a deer coming to that tree,” he said.

“But how do you find that tree?” I asked.

“You have to
walk your ass off,
” he replied.

We stopped at a tree with a ladder bolted to its trunk, a favorite hunting spot of Walker's. Off to the right, a clear pathway skirted around a shallow swamp; Walker preferred this spot because the swamp forced the deer to converge here. Above us protruded a steel bench just barely large enough to hold two men. Walker had chosen to start us off in a permanent tree stand—as opposed to the portable one he usually used, which was essentially a folding chair with steel teeth—because he was worried I would fall and break my neck fumbling with the contraption in the dark. Once we were both up on the bench, Walker strapped his arrows to the right side of the tree and his bow to the left side. Then he strapped me to the tree, via a nylon shoulder harness. I bristled, slightly, at his lack of confidence in me—the bench had a
railing
,
after all. Thirty minutes later, I began to nod off, and the strap snapped taut, halting my forward tumble.

We sat for a few hours. The air warmed. The blue leaves grew teal, then green. Wood ducks creaked like old chairs amid the shushing and sighing of distant traffic. From time to time, he tried to summon his prey, almost shamanically, by clacking a pair of antlers against each other and manipulating a small canister, called a “doe bleat,” which produced a sound like a remorseful cat. This technique is widespread across hunting cultures: The Penobscot Indians of Maine, for exam
ple, used cones of birch bark to mimic the amorous call of the cow moose, while Ainu hunters in Japan used a device made of wood and fish skin to imitate the cries of lost fawns.

Nothing appeared.

After four hours, Walker began packing up.

“Well, we made a good shot at it, but we didn't see shit,” Walker said. “You always spend a lot more time waiting than you do shooting, that's for sure.”

On our walk out, Walker pointed out more signs: hoofprints in soft mud; a field of clover; a big brown hole in the ground, the rocks around it crusted with dried salt. Deer should have been flocking to this area, but they weren't. Walker's hunch was that they were napping, because they had been grazing all night under the full moon. “When it's a full moon, deer tend to move in the middle of the night and the middle of the day,” he said. “It's just a kind of rhythm they go through.”

After lunch, we went on a hike in Bankhead National Forest. We were joined by Walker's friend Charles Borden. Beneath his gray beard, Borden had the jarringly youthful smile of a dentist. Like Walker, he wore big leather boots and a T-shirt tucked into his blue jeans. Unlike Walker, he had a black pistol strapped to his leather belt. Behind him trailed a German shepherd named Jojo. He and Walker both carried stout wooden walking sticks as they stomped through the woods, as much to sweep away spiderwebs as for balance.

The two men walked with their eyes pointed toward the ground, like hens searching for seed. Every time Walker found an acorn, he would call out: “Aikerns!” Intermittently, he would bend down to pick one up, crack the shell between his teeth, and inspect the flesh of the nut. A healthy acorn was white and smooth. (Walker handed me one to eat; it tasted like an astringent macadamia.) Sometimes, though, the nut was “faulty,” bored through with wormy black holes. Deer can smell faulty acorns.

When Walker found an area with a particular density of acorns, he would glance up, looking for an ideal tree to climb. The trick, he said, was to find a tree that was downwind of the acorn pile, then to climb above the deer's field of vision, preferably concealed by a neighboring tree's lower branches. The two men moved on, looking down, then looking up.

We followed a deer trail that wended gracefully down through the hilly land. One clever hunting method, Borden pointed out, was to find a particularly thick area, then clear a small meadow and a series of paths leading to it, like the spokes of a wheel. The hunter hides near the hub of the spokes, hijacking the animal's trail-following instinct.

Humans are not alone in our ability to exploit the trails of our prey. Many other predators do too: Bobcats crouch in ambush beside game trails; blind snakes can sniff out the pheromone trails of termites; and tiny predatory mites trace the silk trails of two-spotted spider mites. So-called highwaymen beetles, which can recognize the pheromone trails of ants, lie in wait for ants to march past so they can steal their cargo, while green woodpeckers will lay their long sticky tongues across ant trails and simply wait for their meal to be delivered. For most animals, I had come to learn, the ability to make and follow trails provides an evolutionary advantage, until a predator evolves to wield their own trails against them.

Walker paced in circles around an oak tree, looking for signs. “Aikerns . . . Aikerns . . .” he said to himself, periodically cracking one of the shells between his teeth. As boys, he and Borden had spent much of their free time walking these woods. Both were worried about the fact that their grandchildren wouldn't have the same upbringing. “When you're living in a rural area, and hunting and hiking and staying in the woods, you develop an intimate familiarity with the environment,” Borden said. “It gives you a different perspective, because you see the myriad forms of life, and you are able to relate, because you are a part of that. You are not something separate.”

+

In the afternoon, Walker brought me to his new favorite hunting spot, in a different part of Bankhead. It was ideal: the ground was well pawed and showered with acorns. It also bordered a small cleared field, which was good, because deer tend to prefer the edge habitats between fields and forests. Walker guided me to the tree he had picked out for me, a tall oak, and began rigging up a device called a tree stand, which resembled the unholy offspring of a folding chair and a pair of crampons. It consisted of two halves, a seat and a footrest, both of which were secured to the tree with a cable that looped around the tree trunk. Each half bore a set of metal teeth that dug into the bark. I attached my harness to the tree and strapped my feet into the footrest. Following Walker's instructions, I began to inchworm up the trunk, first lifting the footrest, tilting my feet back so the teeth bit into the bark, then lifting the top half. Each time I leaned on my elbows to lift my feet, there was an alarming moment when the footrest unclenched from the bark and my feet were suddenly dangling over ten, fifteen, twenty feet of air.

When I'd reached the right height, I cinched both halves of the tree stand to the trunk, folded down the padded seat, and secured my harness. By the time I had finished, I looked up to find Walker already sitting high up in a tree thirty yards away, balaclava pulled down over his face, utterly serene, like a green ninja.

The day slowly undid itself. The air cooled again. Greens blued. Oak toads cheeped, and a coyote let out a neurotic whine. Acorns hailed down onto the ground below. No deer appeared, though. Hunting, I learned, is primarily a battle against boredom. I stared so long into the woods that I began to hallucinate deer out of logs; every falling acorn sounded like a branch snapping under hoof.

Walker sat patiently, his head raptored forward, peering. When a branch fell, his head swiveled and locked in on the source of the sound, then slowly, silently, turned back to center. After a time, he
began pulling off beech leaves and letting them flutter to the ground to test the wind. Then he pulled out his cell phone and began texting people, perhaps to relay the non-news. Finally, he began folding up his tree stand and preparing to descend, so I did the same.

In the following days, we fell into a pattern. Each morning we would rise before dawn and return to this hunting spot, where we'd left the tree stands the night before. Around noon, we'd scout for new hunting sites, with an eye for tall white oaks and a confluence of deer trails. And in the afternoon, we'd climb back up our trees and wait.

After three days, we still hadn't gotten close to shooting a deer. As we were driving back from the forest around noon, I asked Walker what he thought goes on in a deer's head. “Well, I ain't in a damn deer's head, but basically what's in their head is feeding, sleeping, and fucking. Same things in everybody else's head,” he said. Just then a buck stepped out into the middle of the forest service road about forty yards ahead. The buck's wide eyes and swiveling ears were tuned to our truck, but he stood frozen. Walker stopped the truck and reached for his door handle, saying that he'd “shoot the shit out of it” in the middle of the road if he got the chance. But then he noticed the buck's antlers. They were two stubby prongs. The buck, he explained, was too young to legally shoot. He eased the truck forward to see if we could snap a good picture, but the buck dashed off. After it was gone, we got out of the truck to inspect its tracks, which were accompanied by those of three other deer. Their trail passed through a narrow opening in a laurel thicket, which Walker called a “pinch point.”

“See, we fucked up,” Walker said. “Deer are probably moving in the middle of the day.” By then, this observation had begun to rankle. Every afternoon, Walker would note that we had missed the deer because they were grazing under the full moon, but then every morning he would drag me out of bed before dawn. “It's hard to condition yourself to change your habits,” he admitted. “So I guess we get in a rut just about as bad as the deer do.”

+

The following day, we awoke again at dawn. We sat for hours, watching the leaves fall. When the sun was high, Walker let out a soft whistle to get my attention. A buck had appeared on the far side of the plowed field. It was a creamy brown, with a white belly and slender legs. It began picking its way toward us along the edge of the field, nibbling the grass.

When the buck was forty yards away, Walker rose to his feet and reached for his bow. If things had gone according to plan, he would have notched an arrow, attached his trigger release, drawn the string back in one fluid motion, and held it at full draw for a few seconds as he lined up the shot. He might have let out a little sound—
Ert!
—to startle the buck and freeze it in its tracks. Then, with a slow constriction of his back muscles, he would have pulled back gently on the trigger until the string released and the arrow leaped silently from the bow, flying at 350 feet per second. It would have slipped in behind the deer's ribs, the arrowhead expanding to cut a two-inch “blood hole” through the vital organs. The buck would have looked startled, then hurt, and begun to limp off into the woods. Rather than following it, Walker would have sat back down and waited for at least an hour; a wounded deer that feels pursued will walk, sometimes for miles, until it falls dead, whereas an unhurried deer will usually lie down within a hundred yards from where it was shot.

Once Walker traced the blood trail to the deer, he would have pulled apart its front legs and cut a small incision beneath the sternum. Then he would have slipped a finger into the hole to push the stomach aside, being careful not to puncture it. (Deer stomachs tend to bloat quickly. “If you cut it too deep and pierce the stomach,” Walker warned me, “it will go
FSHH!
and you get shit and chewed-up food all over you.”) Wiggling his finger to open a slot for the knife to
run, he would have slipped the knife in and cut all the way down to the tail, opened up the chest, cut loose the esophagus and trachea, sliced down each side of the diaphragm, and rolled the guts out onto the ground, where they'd be left for the buzzards to eat. After having cut a hole through the septum of the buck's nose, he would have threaded a stick through it, like a bull's nose ring, and dragged the body snout-first back to his truck.

From there, Walker would drive the dead buck to a special shop for butchering. Years ago, he used to stay up all night butchering his own deer in his backyard with a fine-toothed saw. (“My girls could tell you horror stories about me hanging deer on their swing set,” he said.) He would carve the tenderloin into steaks, hand-grind the shoulder into hamburger patties, barbecue the ribs, and save the spine for stew. But that required an enormous amount of time and work, and Walker ultimately succumbed to the gravitational pull of modern convenience. Now, he took the deer to a special butcher called a processor, who usually threw away things like the spine. (“They do it as quick as they can to make money,” he said. “And you
let
them do it like they want to do it so you can
pay
the least amount of money.”) Since Walker already had a deer in his freezer, he would have given the meat away to his daughters or his neighbors.

At least, that is what
would
have happened—if all had gone according to plan. What happened instead was that, as the buck approached, Walker lowered his bow. “Too young,” he whispered. He raised two fingers above his head to indicate that it was the same buck with the Y-shaped horns from the day before. Catching our scent, the buck stiffened, then, after a calculated pause, changed direction and walked in a wide arc around us. Perched up in his tree, Walker's eyes followed it for twenty minutes, as it slipped in and out of shafts of sunlight, appearing and disappearing, passing through the trees at a halting pace. Small and distant, the buck paused, glowing, one last time, and then was gone.

+

Compared to the hunting techniques of Native Americans in the past, Walker's technique was relatively primitive. To better stalk their prey, the Powhatan of the early seventeenth century elaborately disguised themselves as bucks. John Smith described the process in detail: the hunter stuck his arm through a slit in a deer hide while holding a stuffed deer head, “the hornes, head, eies, eares, and every part as arteficially counterfeited as they can devise,” Smith wrote. “Thus shrowding his body in the skinne, by stalking he approacheth the Deare, creeping on the ground from one tree to another” until he was within range of a clear shot.