Deer Hunting with Mom

    I was putting our big game tags up last night and one of the Kaibab deer tags fell to the floor. I always put them in the gun safe just in case. I picked it up and couldn’t help but reminisce about the last Kaibab hunt.

     It was the fall of 1992. Geno and I had drawn buck tags. Mom and Dad didn’t. One of the best things about an outdoor family is that everyone who can, goes hunting.  The kill is only a small portion of a hunting trip so even if you don’t pull the trigger you still get to go hunting. That year Mom and Dad went up early and set up camp for us. We rolled in late Thursday night and met them at Jacob’s Lake. They were waiting in their pickup when we pulled beside.
     Geno called out to Dad teasing. “Who’s that beside you?”

     “Squirrel killer.” Dad replied.

     Turned out that she had shot some squirrels earlier that day and made squirrel stew. The camping trailer was warm and cozy when we got to camp. This was better service than any paid guide could have provided. Geno and I just needed to do our part by getting the venison. First day was miserable. It rained and sleeted and hailed. We spent most of the day in the camping trailer playing cards, eating squirrel stew and planning. Mom suggested a “battle of the sexes” approach.

     The saying goes, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait.” Someone who spent a lot of time in this corner of Arizona probably said it first. The second morning was cold but the skies were blue. We took both trucks to the area we had planned to hunt. As per Mom’s plan, the men were in one truck, the women in the other. At a fork in the road we separated. Mom and I went left and the men went right.

     Something happened to Mom at that fork. Her personality changed. She became a competitor. Not the jump over the tennis court net and shake your hand kind of competitor. She became the slobber-faced linebacker in a playoff football game.

     “You know, we have to get the first deer.” I was bluntly informed. “We can’t let the men show us up.”  

      Now, this was some serious pressure and it was coming from my own mother! We parked the truck and began our hunt. Ten minutes later a nice buck jumped up. I took the shot and made a clean miss.

      “Damn.” She said. “Our hunt could have been over!” A phrase that I heard at least a thousand times that morning. (O.K. maybe only a hundred.)

     We spotted several more deer that morning but none of them had horns. It was fun hunting with mom, a very patient hunter. She learned to hunt eastern whitetail in the woods of Western Pennsylvania. She would walk very slow for a short distance and then stop and wait and look for what seemed like a long time. 

     “Every time you take a step there is a new view.” she counseled.  The mom that I knew and loved so well was coming back.

     We found a good spot overlooking a side hill and stopped to eat lunch. We had finished and were ready to continue walking when we heard a rifle fire.

     “Let’s wait a little bit.” Mom said. So we waited about ten more minutes with mom looking through the field glasses. Pretty soon she said, “Oh Linda, look!”

     Sure enough, silhouetted on the opposite side hill I saw a herd of deer coming toward us. I reached down and gave my variable scope a twist in order to scope out the herd. Soon they were slowing down and directly across. I had picked out the buck in the herd and was waiting for a good shot.  There was a doe behind him and I didn’t want to take any chances on a “twofer”. She finally stepped clear and I squeezed the trigger.  I saw the bullet hit. I KNEW that it was a good shot. He turned with the rest of the herd and ran up and over the side hill. 

     Suddenly, competitor mom was back. “You missed again!” she hissed.

      We argued all the way up that hill. I held my ground as best I could.  I kept telling her that I saw the bullet hit but by the time we walked to where the deer stood I was beginning to doubt my own eyes. She pointed out triumphantly that there was no blood. Then we crested the hill.

     “Which way did they go when they topped?“ I asked her.

     She pointed to the right and there was my buck. Dead as a doornail about 100 yards away. We then realized what had happened. There were two bucks in that herd. She was looking through the glasses at a smaller one.

     We field dressed our deer together and joked about how it would be nice if the guys would show up now. My real mom had returned. Just as we finished,  (I think that our husbands were watching us from behind a tree.) the guys showed up and helped us take it to the truck.

    The next day she was with Geno when he killed his buck. It turned out to be my last deer hunt with Mom. She died unexpectedly in December of 1994, two months short of her 59^th birthday.

     I picked up the tag and put it in the safe. I was closing the heavy door when I saw Mom's 7 mag. It has been redone with a new stock to fit me. "O.K. Mom." I told it. "I won't miss."

Linda Dightmon

Team AZOD