While studying sites and scheduling dates for spring turkey hunts with family and friends, I can’t shake bad memories of November’s gun deer season and their impact on my plans.
The nine-day season was nearing its final hour Dec. 1 when I passed up a fork-horned buck and shot a doe. Those two deer, and the doe’s two fawns and a yearling doe, had been milling about a wooded hilltop 50 yards away while working toward a picked cornfield.
I felt satisfied while descending my host’s treestand. After gathering my gear, I walked a few yards, stepped over a single-strand fence crossing a tractor trail in the woods, and found the dead doe 50 yards from where my copper bullet struck her chest.
My satisfaction soon died.
While sending a text message seeking help with the doe, my onX Hunt waypoint showed I wasn’t on my host’s property. I enlarged the map, thinking it would show me standing where I belonged. Nope. It only magnified my error.
Treading on someone’s land without permission causes trouble for more people than just the trespasser and landowner. And it seldom ends happily. This doe, though healthy in appearance and legally shot, tested positive for chronic wasting disease. — Patrick Durkin photos
Suddenly I felt like “Wrong Way Marshall,” a memory dating to childhood. In October 1964, the Minnesota Vikings’ Jim Marshall — a two-time Pro Bowl defensive end — picked up a 49ers fumble, lumbered 66 yards to the end zone, and threw the ball in celebration, assuming he scored a touchdown.
Unfortunately, Marshall never heard his coaches and teammates yelling that he was running the wrong way. Imagine his shock and humiliation when the referees signaled a safety, awarding San Francisco 2 points.
Groan. I felt his shame.
The aerial photo and red property lines on my smartphone’s map showed me standing about 100 yards west of my host’s treestand and 50 yards north of his adjoining lease. Though I had never hunted this site before, I had it in my head that my host controlled the entire hilltop woods and cornfield. I conceded the onX Hunt app, not me, was right. The doe had stood, fled and died on another man’s land.
Four hours later, I still had my doe, but plenty of trouble. The neighbor was mad. I was awaiting a call from a sheriff’s deputy. And I felt certain a trespassing citation awaited.
I had no defense, and didn’t deny anything after my phone rang. I told the polite deputy I screwed up and blamed no one. I’d been stupid and complacent, and I didn’t fault the landowner for filing the complaint after seeing a cell-cam photo of some old goat (me) treading on his land.
My lone shot, though fired downward into earth and brush behind the doe, legally killed a publicly owned natural resource. Still, it angered the man. He couldn’t know my bullet was safely placed, with virtually no chance of ricochet. All he knew was the blast sounded too close, and soon after a stranger breached his boundary.
So much for my long life hitherto unblemished by a hunting or trespassing citation. Although no court deems it a defense, this thought by an unknown 1800s humorist explains my mess: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Three months later, I still regret my trespass, even though the district attorney dismissed the citation and the judge closed the case Feb. 27. I could’ve saved myself tons of guilt, and many people much annoyance, had I simply double-checked the property lines with my iPhone app while shivering nearly three hours in that treestand. Even earlier that day, I could’ve requested tips and details about the site from friends directing me there.
Nuance matters, after all. Take that single-strand wire across the tractor trail. I shouldn’t have assumed it was my host’s gate between the woods and his leased cornfield, and therefore OK to cross. It was my responsibility to know that boundary and which landowners share it.
As the onX Hunt app easily shows, ownership information is public, whether the person lives on the property, in town, or a city two time zones away. Therefore, it’s worth adding neighbors’ names and possibly contact information to your phone’s directory when hunting public or private parcels.
Further, trespassing isn’t just about you. Besides insulting a neighbor, intrusions complicate life for your hosts and their other hunting guests. They’re now burdened with the distrust you spawned across the fence.
That stain is even bigger for outsiders like me. Locals, and even off-site landowners, often resent outsiders’ mere presence. “You ain’t from around here, are you?” You don't know their ancestors or neighborhood, let alone their nuanced views on village budgets, school-building referendums, or even antlerless deer quotas.
Fair or not, they typically blame outsiders for littering their roadsides, shooting their road signs, and poaching their big bucks, wild ginseng and morel mushrooms. Outsiders never knew their dad, grandma, cousin Bill or long-dead locals whose names identify the backroads. Speaking of names, we also never heard that the late town chair smoked Salems while gutting trout, but only if the Cenex sold out of Newports.
We can’t google local lore and rural knowledge, nor can we reduce such subtleties to smartphone data to help us dodge potential traps. So, if you’re wading a trout stream and step ashore to get past a toppled willow, don’t pause to cast. Get both feet back into the creek and resume fishing. For all you know, the last guy testing the state’s water-access law in that spot detoured uphill to swipe the neighbor’s morels or golden oysters.
Likewise, be respectful when floodwaters swamp someone’s lowlands. Wisconsinites can walk nearly anywhere as long as our boots stay wet and we don’t damage property. But once those waters recede, you can’t return, even this afternoon.
Except when flooded, property boundaries are fixed and seldom falter. And they’re usually visible, whether marked by fenceposts or red onX lines. Sure, GPS-based boundaries can stray from fence lines marked decades ago by surveyors applying precise science, but it’s seldom by much.
That basic trust in science and technology further confirmed my violation during deer season’s final hour. The facts were clear, as was my red-faced guilt.
And you know what else? The doe I shot and took home that night tested positive for chronic wasting disease.
Somehow, being denied the pleasure of that venison, heart and liver seems right and proper punishment.
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