Monday, November 18, 1963 The Frances Hubbard Diaries

November 18, 1963

Monday cloudy but warm, 62.  LaVerne shot a deer in the am.  Carol, Clifton and I went down to see. I washed and hung clothes outside.

Comment: Deer season and LaVerne has got his. Deer season was a big deal in our family. If it started on a school day, we would stay home from school to hunt, as would many of our high school friends. It started at dawn and shortly after, shotguns could be heard going off all through the hills. Schoharie County was shotgun country, supposedly because there were too many people around and the powers that were, thought rifles, with their much longer range, were too dangerous to fire in that area. Following is an account of how and when I shot my first deer when I was fourteen and my last deer when I was forty and and why I have not hunted anything since the last one...:

My First And My Last Deer

I shot my first deer when I was fourteen and my last deer when I was about forty.

On the first day of deer season, the year I was fourteen, after doing the chores in the morning, my Dad and I went deer hunting in the woods south of the road.  The first day of the season was quite an event, with “city people” driving all the back roads asking for permission to hunt and a lot of the local boys staying home from school to hunt.

We walked down the road to the end of Dad’s property where Earl’s gravel bank started and,  after we had reached the southern-most boundary fence of the property, started “driving” the woods toward the east

I was about fifteen feet from the boundary fence and Dad was about fifty feet away.  We were out of sight of one another in the woods.  Dad was carrying a 12 gauge double barrel and I was carrying a 16 gauge Mossberg bolt action with a three shot internal clip with a vented choke on the barrel.  The choke could be twisted to decrease or increase the size of the shot pattern when using bird shot but since I was using deer slugs, it was in the normal 16 gauge position.

We had been in the woods moving carefully east for just a short time when I heard something to my left and a doe skittered out of the woods and stood broadside looking at me.  It was doe season so I didn’t have to worry about looking for horns.

I had been in a pretty good “ready” position for hunting and only had the raise the shot gun slightly to get a bead and fire, hitting the deer just behind the front shoulder.  She bolted and ran about 20 yards and dropped, dead.

Dad had heard the shot and came running up.  He had a  hunting knife and he dropped to his knees and quickly slit the deer’s throat to let it bleed out then rolled the deer on it’s back and slit it from brisket to tail very carefully so as not to cut the guts, then rolled out the guts on the forest floor.  He cut out the liver and heart and left them in the carcass.

I can’t remember clearly how we got the deer out of the woods and have several memories of various deer being loaded on the back of the tractor and being hauled and also of one being dragged out by it’s hind legs.  I do remember however, Dad cutting a hole in the deer’s hind legs behind the Achilles tendons then placing each end of a heavy pointed stick in both the holes, then wrapping a rope around the stick in the middle and hoisting the deer up into the tree on the lawn by this stick.  We left the deer there the rest of the day to “stiffen” up, then took it inside the house in the dining room during the night so the animals could not get to it.  The next day we skinned it and Dad finished cutting up the deer.

I had hit the deer in the heart and the slug left a groove the whole length of the heart but it still manager to bolt about 60 feet before it died.  Since I was only fourteen and was not eligible for a deer hunting license until I was 16, Dad “tagged” the deer with his doe license.

Shooting that deer was kinda like a right of passage and since I was only fourteen, it drew a lot of attention from family and friends although we tried to keep it quiet because it really was illegal.  I had no regrets and was rather proud of my accomplishment even though it had all been the result of dumb luck.

My last deer was another matter.  Again, it was doe season and my brother David, had a doe permit that he wanted to fill.  I can’t remember the occasion but again, we were “driving” the woods on the state land above David’s camp.  Again I was hunting without a license.

I was moving east, following the course of a stone wall from about twenty feet away.  I carried a 20 gauge double barrel that I had bought from the “city people” who had bought the Swartz place on the cross road.  It was a sweet little gun with carrying strap and I had become pretty good at hitting beer cans and bottles that us boys would sometimes throw in the air and shoot at with bird shot.

I looked to my right and saw a deer running slowly, than faster along the other side of the stonewall.  It ran out of sight for a moment, then reappeared running faster, then leaped the stone wall toward my side.  I had been following the deer with my gun ready, waiting for a shot and just as it reached the middle of the jump,  I fired.  I hit the deer in the front shoulders, through the heart,  and it’s momentum carried it across the wall where it crumpled into a heap.

It was a beautiful young “spike horn” buck in prime condition.  By then, I’d been a “city guy” for awhile, not hunting things for probably fifteen years, mostly because it was too much trouble.

I looked down at that wonderful creature and with a great sense of self disgust,  asked myself why in hell I had just done that.  I never went hunting for anything again.

I've finally figured out why I felt so bad and it is this:  That deer was, at that time, the final, individual point of millions of years of evolution.  It's ancestors lived through ice ages, meteor impacts, endless hunts by human and pre-humans, all sorts of carnivorous predators and I, with a lucky snap shot had ended that deer's glorious lineage with a completely senseless and uncaring act.