Elmer Award – Ron Zeiler

I’ve been hunting for nearly 45 years, and, for the last 25 years my yearly hunt has been refined just to 4 days each November. A cousin owns a ranch in the very center of Montana, and it is home to elk, mule deer, and my quarry, whitetail deer. I pull my camper the hundred and forty miles to park near the old farm house, and for the next days I hunt during the daylight hours and tie flies after dark.

I always look forward to the time of quiet and relaxation -my very own once a year time away from the busyness of life. For the past couple years Caleb, my now nine year old, has been lobbying hard to tag along with me, and I have resisted, telling him about getting up way before sunrise and sitting for hours in a ground blind waiting for deer to pass.

You see, Caleb is neither an early riser nor one to sit still for minutes let alone hours. Every year he tells me how he’s ready ’cause he’s older and wiser now. Kolby, his eight year old brother and the youngest of my wife, Kathy, and my four children, thinks hunting is “boring”. I don’t know if Caleb had been allowed to watch or listen to too many campaign ads or what, but he began applying pressure to go along hunting way too early this year, just like the candidates, and he was relentless, just like the candidates.

Little did I know that his campaign promises held about the same amount of “take it to the bank” truth as the politicians’. He must have caught me in a weakened state after a barrage of candidate phone calls and ads when all I could think about was getting to the mountains to shoot at something, because I told him he could go — big mistake to give in too early, as I then heard “how many more days till we go” at least twice a day for months.

It did give me plenty of time to impart bits of hunting wisdom in small, easy to digest, bites — little things like the feeding and bedding habits of the deer, to gems like a deer’s eyesight being created by God in such a way that the animal has a hard time seeing you when you are decked out in your new camo clothing, even though you’re wearing 400 square inches of hunter’s blazing orange over the top of it.

He got the idea; however, my wife gave me the raised eyebrow at that one. Just my small contribution to the home school education of our children. He even practiced getting up before the sun……once. Two days before the big trip Caleb comes down with a bad cold, but the momentum of readying for this trip proves too much for the common cold, and we take off anyway. It’s called “cowboying up”.

We left home on a Thursday morning, and I’m certain I saw a smirk on Kolby’s face when we said our good-bys like he knew something I should have known, but didn’t. I’m also fairly sure that after Kathy said “good luck” she muttered “you’re gonna need it” as she turned toward the house. On the drive to the ranch we must have seen a hundred antelope and a hundred and fifty deer and Caleb pointed out each one, sometimes more than once. We have a 22 year old daughter, and she is a talker, but she has nothing over Caleb. About the only time he’s speechless is when I ask him how school went today.

We arrived at our camping spot to find 5 inches of snow, the perfect muffler for walking on fallen leaves and sticks… or so I thought. In the first hundred yards of our first walk together as father and son into the big woods, I knew we were in serious trouble. We might as well have been in the midst of a marching band. Each step he took sounded like he was walking on small bags of potato chips, not only the crunch of the chips, but the pop of the bag.

I gave him “the look” and told him, “From this point on, please imagine all daytime speaking as whispering, you know, the kind you hear on all the hunts seen on the Outdoor Channel, even after the animal has expired.” That stealth is crucial, as the forest is so dense and the brush so thick, the deer can hear you long before you can see them.

I decided we needed to find a trail to set up a blind on, because the only deer we were going to see on this stalk were going to be the deaf ones. No shootable animals came to our blind that night. I nearly had breakfast ready when I woke the lad that second day. Sausage, eggs, hot chocolate, and waffles seemed to be the perfect meal for hunters on that cold November morning.

We were 45 minutes late leaving the camper that morning and worse than that, all he had for breakfast was half a waffle and hot chocolate. Before you feel too sorry for the young feller, know that by 9 am he had cleaned out all the energy bars and fruit snacks from his fanny pack … and mine. The remainder of Friday we stalked the wily whitetail and occasionally put up our ground blind, but all we saw were glimpses of snowy white flags waving goodbye to us.

To be sure, there wasn’t a shortage of deer, just a severe shortage of background noise to cover our noisy approach. Two or three chainsaws or maybe a low flying Blackhawk chopper might have been loud enough to cover our hunt. Just when I would think we were making progress in the stealth arena, Caleb would whisper, “Hey dad, dad.”

Now, remember I told you to consider all daytime conversation a whisper, well Caleb has developed the yellsper. My hearing isn’t exactly acute, so to get my attention from 10 or 15 yards behind me, he would yell his whisper, hence the yellsper, or maybe it’s a whispell. The first 10 or 20 times he did it, I would spin around expecting to see that huge (deaf) buck he’d spotted, only to hear, “Look at that woodpecker, or mouse hole, or deer track, or deer dropping, or who knows what-all.”

Since the day time temps were in the high 40s, the snow was nearly gone by Saturday morning — it was kind of like my patience…getting mighty thin. Each mornings’ routine was just like the first day, other than I began the wakeup process earlier so we were able to get in the field at a respectable time. Caleb still wasn’t able to eat that early, but at least he was dressed and somewhat functioning on time.

By noon Saturday I was ready to pack it in. We’d seen lots of deer but always on the run. I remember muttering a prayer something like, ” Lord give me patience and give it to me NOW.” If Caleb hadn’t told me how much he was enjoying this trip, I would have been on the road home by dark. As I related some of this story to a friend, he said that someday Caleb would look back on those 4 days and realize how hard it had been for his dad and what sacrifices he had made for his son….yeah, like that’ll ever happen.

Caleb picked out our evening stand and we were set up and waiting about an hour and a half before sundown. After 10 minutes sitting back to back so as to view twice as much territory, I heard a snap, snap, snap. I turned to see that he had spent the first 10 minutes collecting twigs about pencil size and now he planned to break them into the shortest length possible. “The look” put an end to that but a few minutes later came a thumping.

He had used one of his twigs to dig a hole around a tree root and was using a rock to beat on it. I had used “the look” so many times my face was cramping; however, I was able to squeeze out another. I pulled out a cough drop for him, and sure enough as soon as he started sucking on it, he started coughing. It seemed as if I never heard a sneeze, cough, or throat clearing as we were stompin’ ..I mean sneaking through the woods, only when we had settled into a good hiding spot.

Finally deer started moving, and then he didn’t move a muscle. Three minutes before legal shooting ended, I dropped a nice doe and Caleb held the flashlight as I dressed her out. I thought he’d be a bit squeamish, but we had a biology lesson right there in the dark woods of Montana and I even enjoyed it. OK, the pressure was off — we hadn’t been skunked; however, we still had another tag to fill.

Sunday morning I let Caleb guide the hunt. We’d been over lots of great deer habitat, and I had shown him dozens of trails, scrapes, and rubs the last few days, so it was time to see what he had learned. The most important thing he learned was to pack more energy bars and fruit snacks in his pack. He did a good job planning the stalk and we did see several waving white tails. About 10 am he decided we should set up a stand, and he picked a good spot.

He had picked a 4 foot square between some trees and shrubs close to the intersection of two trails. I thought he had been listening and learning to have picked this perfect stand, but no, he said he was just tired and hungry and needed to stop a while. As we prepared to settle in, Caleb was first to notice a pile of deer droppings smack in the center of our sitting area.

I just kicked the pile away and plopped down while he kind of circled around like a dog on a blanket before easing into his seat. He commented how fresh those droppings were and I asked him how he knew they were fresh. “By the way they look,” he replied. As he turned to look for deer, I slipped two Milk Duds out of a box in my pocket and set them on a leaf near his leg. I brought them for this specific purpose, and he had no clue I had them.

I told him unless he saw steam, a visual couldn’t tell him how fresh those pellets were. I picked one up, all the while explaining how to squeeze it, and if liquid dripped out, it was really fresh, and if it only crushed easily, it was somewhat fresh, but to really know positively how fresh it is, you need to taste it, and I popped it into my mouth. His mouth dropped open, and his eyes grew to the size of tennis balls.

I said, “That wasn’t very fresh, now you try,” and I handed him the other Milk Dud. At first he just stared at me; then he squeezed it. I told him he didn’t need to put it all in his mouth; just bite off a little piece. He never took his eyes off mine as he ever so slowly moved his hand toward his mouth. “Go ahead, just try it once so you’ll know,” I coaxed. With his lips pulled back so as not to touch it and his teeth barely opened enough to bite, he nipped off a tiny piece of chocolate.

I couldn’t stand it any longer, I burst out laughing and he knew he had been scammed. After he quit laughing, the little bugger ate all the rest of my Duds. I’d like to say that moment made the whole trip worth it, but it didn’t — close but not quite. We sat in that blind an hour or so, and no deer came by, possibly due to the frequent giggles we let slip. We hiked back to the camper, and as we were eating lunch, Caleb spotted a half dozen does feeding across the field we were parked by.

I stepped out of the camper and shot one when she came in range. The Lord promised not to test us beyond what we can bare. Tags filled, we headed home. Caleb recounted nearly every moment of the hunting trip like I hadn’t been there. He is already planning next year’s hunt and how he is going to convince his younger brother, Kolby, that it was so much fun, he should come along.

I should have the book of Job memorized by then. He was practicing the Milk Dud routine to use on Kolby, but the story has been told too many times for him not to know. It’s been several weeks since that long weekend, and you know what I think about most? How many more chances will I have to spend time like that with my kids? We talked about many things in those four days (did I mention I didn’t tie even one fly that trip?) and one was, children are a gift from God but Godly children are a blessing.

Thanks Lord, I am blessed.