ANTICIPATING THE MOMENT
Early on in my life I learned to look forward to birthdays, holidays, and other special events, and, among them, none was more anticipated than my first deer hunt. As a youngster in rural Pennsylvania, I thought everyone in the world hunted whitetails, and I eagerly awaited my first hunt long before I reached legal hunting age. Actually, I guess I knew that there were no whitetails in some parts of the world, because I never saw one on the Saturday morning Tarzan movies. But the world appeared larger when I was a child, and places where whitetails didn't live seemed too far away for me to worry much about. When family and friends spoke of deer hunting, I hung on every word, and there was no better place to listen to deer stories than from the back seat of a car while "spotting" for deer each autumn.
Spotting was sort of like going to a drive-in movie to watch the Discovery Channel, only, unlike going to the drive-in, the car didn't stay in one place for very long. Typically, we piled into a car on a cool fall evening, taking with us snacks, blankets, and, of course, a spotlight that plugged into the cigarette lighter receptacle. With the aid of the powerful light, we slowly cruised rural back roads after dark to look for deer feeding in the fields.
Spotlights came in all shapes and sizes and many were made expressly for deer watchers. I credit a man in Centerville, Pennsylvania with the most inventive design. Using a common aluminum saucepan with a six-inch plastic handle, he secured the five-inch round bulb in the cavity of the pan with electrical tape. He ran the cord through the handle of the pan and mounted a push button switch on the pan wall. The finished product sold for under twenty dollars at many sporting goods stores throughout the area. A stick-on label with the wording "Pennsylvania Buck Light Model "300" 300,000 Candlepower" clearly distinguished it from some newfangled form of cookware.
I suppose, to some, spotting may sound about as exciting as watching paint dry, and white paint at that. But for a young child who didn't need much encouragement where animals were concerned, it was great fun. Each new field held the promise of seeing deer or perhaps a fox or even a bear. When deer were found near the road, the beam from the light illuminated them completely, but only glowing sets of eyes marked the location of deer on distant hillsides. On some nights, we saw more than two hundred deer, which translated into about a hundred complete deer, and another hundred pairs of shining eyes. Although counting eyes was hardly a science, it yielded surprisingly accurate results. Occasionally, the eyes of other animals were mistaken for deer, but with experience we learned to recognize the difference between deer eyes and the eyes of other night animals. Eyes on the move, and near to the ground, often belonged to an opossum or a skunk. Low, stationary eyes sometimes belonged to a bedded deer, but usually turned out to be a stray cat crouching in wait for a mouse. And eyes in trees were seldom counted as deer, unless it was a very slow night. The image of eyes gleaming in the beam of a spotlight, the feeling of the cold night air touching my face through the open car window, while a wool blanket and the car's heater kept the rest of me warm, is still with me.
Finally, the time I had been waiting for arrived. In the spring of 1968, I turned twelve (the legal hunting age in Pennsylvania), and I began to get ready for the upcoming archery deer season. In July, with three months yet to go, I circled the opening day on my calendar and began crossing off the days one at a time. When September arrived, I could hardly contain my excitement. Fortunately, numerous scouting trips and final preparations filled the last few weeks before the hunt.
My best friend, J.C., and his father, Mr. Martin, had introduced me to archery hunting, and, in the process, to a mountain farm just a few miles up the valley from my house. The farm lay at the base of Shade Mountain and boasted a healthy population of white-tailed deer. Here I entered the woods as a deer hunter for the first time.
In the early morning hours of opening day, well before first light, we made our way along a wooded road that led to the back side of the peach orchard. The peach orchard was an abandoned field surrounded by timber with no evidence of peach trees that I could see, but orchards were common in that area. I assumed its name reflected an earlier use of the land. Walking in the dark was not new to me, but I had never before carried a bow and arrow on such a walk. Every small limb that stuck out along the edge of the road seemed to end up pinched between the string and the limb of my recurve bow, and when I managed to keep my bow from snagging branches, my twelve year old feet found those scattered on the forest floor. Mr. Martin surely must have questioned the wisdom of leading two youngsters on their first archery hunt.
Arriving at the backside of the field, J.C. took a stand near the point where several deer trails converged behind the northeast corner of the field. Mr. Martin then helped me into a stand at the opposite end of the field. I climbed the steps to a wooden platform suspended about ten feet off the ground between the trunks of a large tree. Mr. Martin handed up my bow, wished me luck, and moved off to take a stand just behind our positions. Alone in the darkness, I settled into the seat of the stand, rested the recurve bow across my knees, and leaned back against one of the tree trunks. Finally, I was deer hunting, but I was far from settled.
In the next moments, I slowly came to my feet to test if such a motion made the platform creak, and I drew my bow several times to make sure the flexing limbs did not touch the surrounding tree branches. Eventually, I ran out of active things to do and I rested on the seat of the stand once more. The wind made it difficult to hear and constantly moving branches played tricks on my vision. The darkness seemed like it would last forever. Then without warning, as the wind subsided just a bit, I heard the sound of footsteps in the leaves. My heart raced, and my fingers tensed against the bowstring as my eyes strained to make out the form of a deer moving just a few feet from the base of my stand. The wind and the darkness kept me from seeing the deer until it was right below me, and even then it appeared more like an apparition than a deer. The deer never broke its stride, and I lost sight of its movements within a few seconds. Even the sound of its footsteps disappeared as the wind gusted again. I had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in my head, but I had always imagined the deer coming after daylight, not while it was still too dark to release an arrow. I sat there cursing my luck. The deer had been so close, and yet completely out of reach. Eventually, daylight came, but no more deer passed by my stand that morning.
There were many more hunts and deer sightings that first season, but I never released an arrow. At first, taking a deer was the main reason for being afield, but as time passed it was no longer the measure of a successful day or season. In my first few years as a hunter, I did not actually take a deer, but I did begin to understand that hunting was really about looking forward to what the natural world had to offer me on any given day. Watching the bobcat stalk a grouse near the base of the tree I occupied, seeing the large black bear materialize at the edge of the laurel thicket for just a moment then silently disappear in the direction from which it had come, coming eye to eye with the chickadee attempting to land on my bowstring, tasted as sweet as the marinated venison loin that often graced our table.
Eventually, even my appetite for venison was replaced with a hunger to see more of the natural world and the camera became my excuse for spending even more time afield. Photographing animals was also about looking forward to what the natural world had to offer, with one important difference. The constant sense of anticipation that I had associated with my earliest experiences in the deer woods was still with me, but just witnessing animal behavior was no longer enough. Now I had to anticipate those moments if I was going to be ready to record them on film. So my awareness of what was happening around me intensified. New discoveries were no longer just unrelated events for my amusement, but often became clues as to what was about to happen next. Each discovery built on the one before and enabled me to see even more.
***
My search for deer began near the small finger of trees that extends into the pasture at the south end of Hyatt Lane just west of the intersection of Hyatt Lane and the Loop Road. Although the afternoons were still often quite warm, the coolness of the early morning hours hinted that fall was just around the corner. The shroud of mist that hovered in the air blended the hues of the distant grass and tree line into delicate shades of green.
A lone buck fed in the small nook of pasture that touches the loop road just west of the finger of trees. His antlers were fully developed, and only remnants of his reddish summer coat were still visible. He was intent upon feeding, like a squirrel gathering the last acorns of autumn. Then suddenly he changed. Lifting his head he stared east just for a moment, and then began to move. His steps were deliberate; his eyes no longer searched the ground for the next mouthful of grass.
I lifted my eye from the viewfinder and glanced toward the tree line ahead of him. Immediately, his intentions became evident. I swung the camera ahead of his progress and rotated the lens in its tripod collar in preparation for recording what I was about to witness. The viewfinder came to rest on the edge of the tree line where a clump of branches hung out over the pasture. As I positioned the branches near the top of the frame the deer's body entered my field of view.
Once under the branches, he used his front legs to propel his head and antlers upward. Balancing on his rear legs, he rubbed his head among the foliage releasing pheromones from the glands on his forehead and near his eyes. His shoulders were relaxed, his front legs limply dangled before him. Briefly he touched his front legs to the earth, reared upward again, and continued his marking. Marking the branches took only a few moments. Then he returned to the pasture and resumed feeding, although less intensely. After a few more mouthfuls of grass, he crossed the loop road and vanished into the forest.
The few moments between the time I had recognized what the deer was about to do and the time that he did it were the difference between successfully capturing the image and missing it completely. I suspect it was not any one element that caused the proverbial light to go on, but rather a combination of the deer's movements and seeing the overhanging branches that so clearly forecast his intentions. On numerous occasions, I had observed deer rearing up on their hind legs to pluck tender leaves from high branches, to mark their territory, and to flail at other deer with their front feet. Each of these discoveries added to my increasingly longer list of what deer might do. This list of possibilities is ever present in my mind waiting to connect what I am seeing, with what I have seen before and preparing me to make new discoveries. As I exercise an expectant attitude, the natural world unveils itself.
