Family Deer Hunt Expands to the Next Generation

   I took my daughter Leah deer hunting for the first time on opening day of the November 1991 gun season.

   She was 6, and sat beside me until about 9 a.m., when she hissed “Deer!” and pointed out a doe and two fawns bounding downhill behind me. The doe paused in the valley after clearing the creek, apparently deciding whether to jump a barbed-wire fence between her and a cut cornfield.

   That pause gave me time to fire my 7mm-08 Remington Mountain Rifle. The doe leaped back across the creek, circled 20 yards uphill toward us, and toppled. After helping me dress the doe and prop open its chest to cool, Leah walked back to my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse to warm up.

   For some reason, I never wrote about that hunt, which ended Sunday morning with my Uncle Terry shooting his biggest whitetail as Leah and I pushed the fencelines on the farm’s northern and western borders. After dragging the buck downhill to his barn and rushing off to Mass with Aunt Mona, Uncle Terry returned home and insisted Leah accompany him to the deer-registration station 5 miles away, near Hill Point.

   When other hunters and spectators drifted over to admire his buck of a lifetime, Uncle Terry took little credit. He told everyone he wouldn’t have gotten the buck if Leah hadn’t pushed the buck his way.

Left, Patrick Durkin’s grandson, Eddie Morse, 7, poses by a buck rub on opening day of November’s deer season. Right, Durkin’s daughter Leah, then 6, hunted deer for the first time in November 1991 with her great-uncle, Terry Durkin. — Patrick Durkin photos

   We’ll never forget his gracious praise, and we’ll never know if Leah and I did anything to send that buck into his sights. The buck had followed a doe up a draw from the east an hour after Leah and I crossed the draw’s base a quarter-mile below. When Uncle Terry shot, Leah and I were on the farm’s western border in the opposite direction.

   But that’s how Uncle Terry played things. Though he enjoyed hunting and seldom missed a shot, he never claimed prowess in either.

   I thought of Leah’s first deer season two weeks ago while sitting in a treestand alongside my grandson, Eddie Morse, age 7. Leah was sitting in her own treestand about a quarter-mile to the north with her son, Lleyton, age 9. We were hunting a Chippewa County farm 13 miles from Eddie’s home in Eau Claire, invited there by family friends Barb and Emily Krumenauer.

   As Eddie and I awaited dawn, I pulled out my iPhone and smiled at a brightly colored chart showing the shooting hours for Wisconsin’s gun-deer season. Emily’s niece Jana had color-coded the daily shooting times, and shared her chart via a group text message. Jana’s attention to detail impressed me. Given the farm’s location, we simply added 16 minutes to the chart’s times to determine when we could shoot.

   I leaned over and told Eddie, “Ten minutes until the season starts.”

   A minute later, Eddie whispered, “How long till we can shoot?”

   “Be patient. We might be here awhile.”

After the hunt, Patrick Durkin and his grandson cut up and packaged a doe killed on the season’s final afternoon.

   The appointed time soon passed. I was happy to see Eddie never stopped scanning the surrounding woods. He was battling a persistent cough, so I hung a buck-grunt tube around his neck and stuffed several cherry-flavored cough-drops into his pocket.

   “If you need to cough, clamp your lips onto the tube so it’s not so loud,” I said. “Then give a couple of soft grunt calls. Maybe you’ll fool any deer that’s nearby.”

   Before we could test his cough-muffling technique, Eddie spotted something at the edge of a cut cornfield 100 yards away.

   “A deer! A deer!”

   Judging by the deer’s blocky front quarters and steer-like hind quarters, I told Eddie it was likely a buck. My binoculars confirmed it. When the deer took a line that would send it far wide of us, I told Eddie to call a few times with his grunt tube. Instead of altering its path, the buck vanished deeper into the woods.

   Another deer passed through the woods to our east about 8:30 a.m., never offering a shot or revealing its sex. Eddie’s feet felt fully frozen by 9 a.m., so we climbed down, walked to the field’s edge and moved slowly until Eddie’s feet warmed. Then we sat, watched and listened an hour before heading to Barb Krumenauer’s kitchen for coffee and snacks.

   Emily and Jana reported no action near their treestand across the road, and Leah and Lleyton reported similar luck where they sat. We all heard the same few shots near and far, but none of us lifted our rifles from our laps.

   After raiding Barb’s chips, cookies, coffee and hot chocolate, we headed back to our stands by early afternoon. During our hike, Eddie spotted an impressive rub 100 yards into the woods. He posed beside it for a photo with the Model 94 Winchester I inherited from my late friend Tom Heberlein.

   I told Eddie, “You’ll hear that name a lot in the years ahead.” He shrugged, taking my word for it.

   Eddie spotted our third deer an hour later, not far from where the buck disappeared at first light. This was a yearling doe, however, and it briefly looked like it might come our way. Eddie suppressed a squeal as I lifted my rifle and pivoted into position. The excitement faded when the doe straightened its route and headed toward Leah and Lleyton. They saw the doe minutes later, but it never offered a shot.

   In fact, our group didn’t fire once until Emily and I teamed up Nov. 30, the following Sunday, to hunt the season’s final afternoon. She pushed a doe toward my tripod stand, where I shot as it crossed an opening 50 yards away.

   Eddie came over to my house after school the next day to help skin and cut up the doe. He asked good questions and pitched into his tasks. As we cleaned up three hours later, Eddie filled a plastic sled with snow, pulled it inside the garage, and spread the snow atop deer blood pooled on the floor.

   And after he finished shoveling the stained snow out the door and into the lawn, he asked a parting question that didn’t surprise me.

   “How much are you paying me for this?”