A Dusty Tires Short Story

By Dusty Tires

I spent four hours last Saturday doing what to some might seem a paradoxical activity – sitting out in the cold winter woods hunting for something I really had no special desire to be hunting.

I went deer hunting with some old friends, at their invitation, because I hadn’t seen them for a long time. Complete transparency: I am no hunter. I totally lack skill or even much interest in the sport. I went because I wanted to see them and spend time with them, and going hunting seemed about the only thing we all did together anymore. We grew up together from the times of junior high school, and it seemed this remnant gathering was nearly all we had left.

I did shoot one deer, a long time ago. It was a lucky shot when I was out with these same friends, and I figured that would be the end of it – that I had finally bagged my deer. I hoped my one friend, who is extremely enthusiastic about hunting, would quit bugging me about when I was going to shoot a deer. That didn’t end it though.

Let me explain. I have no problems with hunting, and I support the rights of people to bear firearms safely and responsibly, and to harvest game legally and safely. If it were not for hunters and motor vehicles, deer would have no predators at all.

In fact, I’ve killed more deer (two) with a motor vehicle than I have hunting. That’s the main reason I want to see deer harvested and support the rights of people to hunt them. They cause so much damage and potential injury to people in vehicles, not to mention their gardens and farms.

So, I was out in the woods that Saturday, in temperatures that ranged from about 12 degrees to around the mid-20s, sitting on a wooded, snowy hillside overlooking a creek bed. If it hadn’t been for the gunshots echoing through the hills in every direction, it would have been a peaceful scene. In the first two hours that morning that I sat out, I counted a total of 34 shots fired. It sounded like a war zone at times, and I expected shells to be zipping over my head at any moment.

After a while, my feet, hands and face got just too cold to endure the outdoors any longer, and after standing up and pacing a bit, I made my way back down the hillside, across the half-frozen creek, and back up to my friend’s warm house. I knew that as soon as I stood up from the foldup stool and began moving, any chance of surprising a deer was lost, but I really didn’t care. My only regret in doing this was that I didn’t want to scare game away from those hunters who did care.

I find that my reasonable limit for sitting in the cold, staying still and alone in the woods in mid-winter is about two hours, even with plenty of winter clothing on, including insulated coveralls, two pairs of gloves and two pairs of socks. But since I had no great desire to shoot a deer, I had no great motivation to continue getting colder.

The whole reason I had come out hunting was to be with my friends, but both were stationed alone on other hillsides, waiting out of sight and out of earshot. There wasn’t much togetherness in that. The camaraderie would come later, when we regrouped indoors to warm up, to watch football, to eat, to talk about what we saw, or what we didn’t see, and to poke fun at each other.

No one shot a deer that morning, although our host, upon whose property we were hunting, saw four deer, shot three times and missed with all three shotgun slugs. My other friend, like me, saw nothing.

After we warmed up and ate some lunch, we put our cold-weather gear back on and went out – me rather reluctantly. Although I had just purchased the insulated coveralls the evening before, my hands, feet and face got cold after a short time. I figured that after I had gotten cold once and then warmed back up, it would take even less time to get uncomfortably cold again. I set up my camouflage stool up a bit closer to the house than before, though it was still overlooking the same stream bed I had scanned that morning.

The afternoon was a bit warmer, though still cold, but I accomplished my goal of another two-hour stint without any problem. It was quieter too. With the leaves off the trees, it was not hard to see things moving in the wooded landscape. I saw no deer, but I did see an opossum waddling around foraging for food, and a small hawk or falcon that briefly alighted in the trees high above me. The raptor scanned things carefully for a few moments, and then flew off. I figured these animals were both hunting as well.

I was content with seeing that much wildlife. Both animals were of the sort you don’t see unless you sit in the woods and stay still and observant, something I’m not accustomed to doing. I should do it more often. I wish I had seen a deer, just to have been able to attempt to reduce the population a bit and make the highways that much safer for driving. But it didn’t turn out that way.

My host did shoot a deer after I had gone inside. He made a fine shot right through its heart. As the afternoon turned to dusk, we helped him hang it from a tree. He skinned it and we went inside to eat dinner while we waited for the carcass to cool before taking the meat off the critter. He promised me some venison burger, which is fine with me. I enjoy a good spicy venison chili or a tender marinated tenderloin steak. By the way, a “critter” by my definition is any wild animal, pesky or not, and preferably one that tastes good.

The unexpected part was that I found I did enjoy the solitude in the middle of a busy holiday season. Sitting out in the winter woods was cold, sure enough, and time seemed to pass slowly out there, but it did have its rewards.

Sitting there in the cold forced me to stop and do little but look at God’s handiwork of nature, to listen, to keep my eyes open and observe. Although I was cold, my heart was glad. What I looked out upon was good.

The experience I didn’t want to do when I started makes me want to get out again, off my normal schedule, and go hunting again – or at least to sit out in the winter woods and enjoy watching nature. That’s as long as I know where the other hunters are, so I don’t have to worry about keeping my head down.

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