How A Lost Hunting Property Made Me and My Dad Friends

My ears were still ringing when I peered through the new hole in the blind’s shoot-through mesh. The buck I shot dropped in its tracks, and I could see its white underbelly lying in the clover patch. I didn’t have a cell phone back then, so I just sat there shaking until dark, periodically looking through the hole to make sure he was still there. When it came time to leave, I didn’t even walk down to see it. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t. My dad and I got to find my first deer together. It was a great experience we shared and the first one like that since I’d moved in with him a few years prior. That first deer finally helped us break the ice.

Before that season, I’d always tagged along with my dad to deer or rabbit hunt when it was his weekend to have me. I enjoyed going with him and my grandfather every other weekend to their hunting camps, but I wasn’t sold on hunting, not yet anyway. I was more interested in skateboarding and video games then. He and my mom never married, and I lived with her, so I spent most of my time indoors. So it was a bit of a table-turner when I found out I would be leaving town for the woods.

My mother had a growing addiction problem, one that would eventually take her life, and like a responsible parent, my dad stepped in. I kicked and screamed like hell when she broke the news to me one day after she let me skip school. But she didn’t have a choice, and neither did I. As a 10-year-old, I didn’t understand at the time. All I knew was that my dad was taking me away from my mom. I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Those first few years were tough. We didn’t find common ground in much, not until I really started hunting.

When the last minutes of shooting light faded, I unzipped my way out of the blind and walked the cattle trail back to my aunt’s house. The trail wound past a feed shed my grandfather and his brother built. Cows were standing outside it in the dark when I walked past. A few of them scattered while some just stared and bellowed as I propped my gun on the gate post and climbed the fence.

My aunt was under the carport feeding her herd of semi-feral cats when I walked up. She was nearly deaf even with her hearing aids, so she didn’t hear me coming, but when the cats scurried, she turned and yelled, “Get anything?” so I yelled back, “Got a buck!” as I formed a rack with my hands. She smiled and nodded and went back to dropping scraps in the feed bowls. Since I didn’t have a cell phone (cell service hadn’t made it to that part of the county yet anyway), I waited under my aunt’s carport for my dad to arrive from another property, one my grandfather owned.

My great aunt, Donna Sue, lived in a ranch-style house at the end of a long drive lined with old water oaks. She didn’t have any children herself, but she was the understood matriarch of our family. She put both of her brothers and my dad through college. She even paid my stepmother to clean her house weekly. She wasn’t rich, but she saved every penny, and nothing went to waste. We met at her house to celebrate holidays, work in her garden, and hunt. She always sent us home with groceries, which, for better or worse, included Fig Newtons.

She lived in the community of Standing Pine, Mississippi, a few miles east of the Pearl River in Carthage. Leake County isn’t exactly a whitetail destination, at least, that’s what the locals want you to believe. However, her property was a prime example of what unpressured hunting can look like even in a no-name county. That place was a dream for a teenage boy who needed the space to roam. It consisted of cattle pastures, mature hardwood stands, and a few young pine plantations, all interspersed on eighty acres of gently rolling hills. The lack of hunting pressure on neighboring properties made the entire place a honey hole. You could see deer moving at any time of day, even in the middle of a field. Only now do I realize how special that place was.

I shot my first squirrel and deer there. I watched my first longbeard strut, witnessed a fox pounce on a field rat. I learned to hunt from the ground, to blend in with the woods. Once, I sat so still that a hawk landed on a branch directly above my head and gave us both a heart attack. That property gave me the freedom to mess up but more importantly, it taught me how to hunt.

I also wounded and lost a good buck there. My dad and I spent half a day on our hands and knees tracking specks of blood until property lines forced us to give up. A front came through that same day, and the rain washed away any hopes of recovering that buck. Losing that buck stung, but not nearly as bad as it stung when we lost that property.

When my dad’s headlights finally made it down the driveway, I was halfway to his truck before he had a chance to open his door. My eagerness gave me away, and when he finally stepped out he said,

“How big is he?” I again made a rack with my hands, moving them closer and further apart until I settled on what must have been about a 17-inch spread. Not unbelievable, but a heck of a first deer. When I held them up and nodded, he just smiled. “Well, let’s go get him.”

We drove my aunt’s farm truck to the field edge where I’d shot the deer. This particular spot led down to what we called the sand bottom. The sand bottom made a small finger that split two hardwood ridges, and we planted it in oats and clover every year. It was a consistently reliable spot where we killed numerous bucks and always saw a pile of deer.

A few years later, in that very spot, I was climbing a tree when the bottom straps of my climber broke and the platform plummeted to the ground. I’d made it about twelve feet when this happened. Luckily, I was still tethered to the tree. Rather than abandon that spot, I decided to stick it out. I pressed my way up and wiggled into the seat, making sure my harness was snug to the tree. It wasn’t the safest decision. I certainly don’t recommend doing this, but I made the most of the situation and ended up shooting a buck that same evening.

As my dad crept the truck down the hill the buck came into view. He edged closer and threw the column shifter in park. Dad then pulled a can of Copenhagen from his jacket pocket and started packing it.

“Son,” my dad said with a straight face, “I don’t think that’s your deer.”

What? I was stunned. No, that deer definitely dropped in its tracks. I had watched it lie there for a good twenty minutes before returning to my aunt’s. If that wasn’t my deer, then where did this one come from? My dad finished packing his lip, wiping leftover grains on his pants when he said, “Yeah, that one’s not nearly as big as the one you showed me.” He couldn’t even finish the sentence before he lost it.

The author with his first deer.

After he had a good laugh, we finally got out and walked over to my deer. My dad was right. That basket rack was nowhere near the size I’d shown him with my hands. The amount of ground shrinkage that occurred was comical, and even I couldn’t help but laugh. We loaded up the deer, took a few photos on a disposable camera, and thanked Donna Sue for letting us hunt, but not before she loaded us down with a few grocery bags from the Piggly Wiggly.

I remember latching the gate in her driveway before we left her house. I stood at the back of the truck as it sat idling and looked at that deer in the bed. At that point in my life, my dad and I didn’t get along much. That basket rack changed that.

Throughout high school, Donna Sue’s place became a sort of retreat. It seemed the antidote to the misfortune that occurred in my life during those years. I’d lose a friend who drowned a few springs later. My mother’s addiction continued to spiral. Sometimes she’d go on benders that lasted weeks. Other times, she’d no-show for those awkward weekend pickups that divorced parents do at gas stations. When that happened, my dad would immediately plan for us to hunt or at least get outside. He didn’t often know what to say or how to say it, but that’s the beauty of hunting—you don’t have to say much.

Me and dad still butted heads, but we grew closer during that time while my mother and I simultaneously drifted apart. He wasn’t trying to supplant her as the favorite parent, but he could tell I needed some direction. Hunting was his way of giving me that.

I basically had the property to myself for a lot of our hunts. My dad hunted down the road at another property my grandfather bought in the 60s for nearly nothing. It kept me out of his hunting spots but gave me room to roam. Even though the hunting was generally better at Donna Sue’s property, he let me have the run of the place. I think it was his way of giving me space.

Several years later, my aunt’s health took a rapid and unexpected decline, and in May of 2012 she died. Her brother, my great uncle, would end up inheriting her property, and he made his intentions clear—he was going to sell it. He wasn’t a hunter and didn’t need the property, nor did he want the upkeep. He held true to his word and sold it the following year. I don’t blame him—not now at least. But that didn’t make it any easier for me, my dad, or my grandfather to stomach at the time.

My dad and I tossed around the idea of getting hunting permission from the new owners, but they wasted no time on the property. Just months after it sold, the new owners demolished the feed shed my grandfather built and replaced it with a brand new house. They also bulldozed the shack where my great-grandmother gave birth to her children—where my grandfather and his siblings grew up. In some way, I think those changes gave us immediate closure. It became something unfamiliar overnight.

I remember the following hunting season hit like a sack of bricks. We had another hunting property nearly twice the size, but the surrounding hunting pressure made it tough. Neither of us tagged a buck that year. On top of that, my aunt’s had served as our camp house. Instead of having a place to nap or sit by the fireplace, we’d spend the time between morning and evening sits in the cab of my dad’s truck. We talked about everything between those sits. We’d recap what we heard or saw during that morning’s hunt, or where we thought we could make habitat improvements. Of course, we’d bitch about the neighbors and lack of deer.

Dad would often tell me hunting stories from his childhood, divulge family history, and ask about my plans after college. Those talks in the truck cab became the highlight of our hunting trips. He did a great job of making the most out of our hunting situation. Eventually, we stopped bringing up Donna Sue’s.

Losing that piece of ground stung, but I guess it worked out. I started exploring public lands, my dad and I spent a lot more time hunting together. In some ways, it felt necessary, like pruning or burning. Our last season there, I killed one of my biggest bucks to date. Dad and I followed the blood trail until it trickled out. Eventually, we both glassed him up at the same time and let out a big “woooo!” when we saw him piled up in a patch of pine saplings.

Leaving a place like that on a high note beats watching it slowly decline or become something else entirely. I guess that applies to loved ones, too. Loss is inevitable, but like hunting, you just sort of keep going even when you don’t want to or it doesn’t make sense. Things usually work out for the best that way, especially when you least expect it. I think that’s what dad kept trying to tell me, lugging me around in his truck all those years, even if he didn’t know how to say it.

Feature image via Matt Hansen Photography.