Life Sketches by Terry Berkson
A Buck Between Friends
I was a late starter at deer hunting because I moved back to Brooklyn just before I turned 16. It was while in the Army and reading Hemingway and Faulkner that I got the bug to hunt whitetails on Panther Mountain with my old friend Gerard in Richfield Springs. He took it upon himself to teach me everything he knew. “I’ll make a hunter out of you,” he’d say as a smile pulled a broken nose to the side of his face. But for five years I hunted 10 days each season without filling a tag.
I always went home with plenty of venison and hunting stories—but they were other men’s stories about other men’s deer. Even though I enjoyed the camaraderie of each fruitless year, I yearned to have my own tale to tell. So, again on opening day, I waited next to a fat beech, hoping my story would come along. A pair of does filtered through and then they were gone.
Hours later, I spotted a dark-coated deer far below, well out of shotgun range. I ducked behind the tree. When I looked again, the deer was gone. I scanned the woods without seeing anything. Then I spotted the deer a little closer to my stand. I thought there were antlers, but in the wet morning light they seemed to fade like thinning smoke. When I looked again it was about 200 yards below, and it was definitely a buck. He was coming toward me slowly, stopping along the way to browse, then raising his head and cocking his ears and smelling the air.
