You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  A BOWHUNTING OBSESSION

  I found the only other guy at the party who wasn’t wearing a tie. Pretty soon we were talking bass and trout, ducks and doves. It wasn’t long before he was telling me about bowhunting for whitetails. “Any dolt with a scope and a rail to rest his rifle on can shoot a deer at three hundred yards,” he insisted, swirling the bourbon in his glass. “Shooting one that’s so close you can see his whiskers . . . now that’s a different deal.”

  A little orange flare arced up in a dark cave in my brain. You could do this, it signaled.

  “You don’t need a bow named after nuclear weapons, military aircraft, or Clint Eastwood characters,” my newfound friend continued, slowly reeling me in. “If it has the word turbo in it, pass. Any compound out there has the power to turn a monster whitetail into chipped venison.”

  Thus began my descent into bowhunting obsession.

  The next week, after asking around, I settled on a PSE Nova, an entry-level one-cam. I went out and promptly began burying arrows in the back lawn. It was humbling to watch a thirty-inch shaft disappear so fast you couldn’t be sure you’d really owned that particular arrow in the first place. Then I discovered that I’d stored my bow upside down before tightening the sight pins. I fiddled with them, worked my way back to twenty yards, and began smacking the target consistently.

  “Hooked” would be an understatement. I was filleted, battered, and deep-fried. It was like having a rifle with a silencer on it. My bag target actually shuddered under the impact of every shot. I loved the feeling of stored energy in the bow’s limbs as the let-off kicked in, the Zen of relaxed strength, the way you maintain form and look the arrow home after it has sprung from the bow. Soon I’d worn a path from the back deck to the target. In my dreams, every branch in the forest turned into antlers.

  To shoot at thirty yards, I had to improvise. Cranking open the little casement window in my office, standing with my right heel touching the back wall and shooting over my computer just about did it. I noticed that the neighbors stopped inviting us to cookouts. Now it was mid-August. I figured one hundred arrows a day would make me lethal by the start of deer season in October.

  What I was turning into became clear the morning I scared the bejesus out of the UPS man. By this time I had taken to replicating field conditions as closely as I could for my morning fifty. A rickety stool atop the picnic table on the back deck got me near-tree-stand height. I wore my fleece camo parka in 85-degree heat, a full-face Scent-Lok hood, with binoculars and a grunt tube slung around my neck. I was an unlikely centaur: deer slayer above the waist; the white hairy legs, gym shorts, and bedroom slippers of the suburban male below.

  UPS drivers witness a wider daily range of aberrant human behavior than your average psych ward nurse. Weird doesn’t particularly faze them. But the eyes of the guy in the brown uniform and clipboard told me that he had never seen anything like the Ninja of North Arlington.

  “Okay if I just, uh, leave this one on the front porch?” he asked in the overly friendly voice you use on lost children and muggers. He was holding a tiny box of broadheads and keeping the fence between us in case he had to duck and cover.

  At times like this, explanations just make you look crazier. “Sure,” I told him. I made a gesture of conciliation with my right hand, which still had a string release on it.

  Opening day found me sixteen feet up a tree on a ridge overlooking a stream crossing. I was wearing rubber boots, camo everything, a charcoal-activated suit, scent killer, and fall masking scent. As light filled the woods, I rattled hard for thirty seconds and watched as a doe and still-dappled fawn came running to see who was new to the neighborhood. She sniffed and stomped. Something was off; she just couldn’t tell what. My heart was trying to jackhammer its way out of my chest.

  Two weeks later a spike buck came in to the same sound and was actually sniffing at the doe-in-estrus scent on the boot pads I’d left on a screw-in step. What I didn’t have was a shot. I waited, my heart again trying to make a prison break. The deer drifted away, taking the woodiest possible route. At twenty yards he turned his shoulder, and I let one go. The arrow clattered harmlessly against the limbs I hadn’t seen, and he trotted off to another appointment. I was disconsolate for days.

  Then my hot spot turned cold. Despair made me reckless. I rattled, grunted, and bleated to excess. I lit deer-luring incense sticks and watched them turn to ash. I sprinkled Deer CoCain on the ground. I wondered briefly about real cocaine. I bought several rounds of doe-in-estrus pee for every buck in the house. No gimmick was too stupid for me to buy. If someone had marketed an Ole Buckster Fart Tube, I’d have ordered two. Some nights back home I’d set up candles by my target and fling arrows out of my office while the rest of the world slept.

  The strain was beginning to show in the blue hollows under my eyes. My wife held my hands in her lap one night. “You’re sick,” Jane said tenderly.

  “I know,” I replied.

  I moved my stand to a trail intersection deeper in the woods. I bought a second stand and put it up along a small bench on a gentle hillside. Forget those articles about how a fixed stand can be set up quietly in twenty minutes and hunted the same day. My personal best was ninety minutes. And it sounded like a Bon Jovi concert.

  Thirty of the forty days of bow season were now gone. I bit the bullet and moved my stands again. I chained one twenty yards in from a fence line at a crossing where I’d found tiny tufts of hair on the top wire. The other I relocated off to one side of a saddle between my original ridge and its brother.

  The dawns and dusks were getting colder. Four days before the end of the season, I spied at a great distance a doe scampering through the leaves. A larger shape, with its head lowered, was tailing her. There was a moment when something that looked like antler caught the slanting afternoon light, but I couldn’t be sure.

  On the last day of the season, I got to my saddle stand at 2 p.m., climbed up, clipped in, and slowly pulled my bow up. My heart wasn’t in it, but I knew I’d kick myself for the rest of the year if I didn’t finish it out.

  I grunted and rattled. About three thirty, the deer began to appear. A doe came cautiously into view, so well camouflaged that if I took my eyes off her for a moment, I wouldn’t be able to find her again until she moved. Two more does came straight up the saddle, trailed by a four-pointer with his head down. My heart dropped the clutch and floored it. They were forty yards out. I rose slowly to my feet, and my stand squeaked. The deer snorted, stomped, and jumped three long lengths away, then stood. I concentrated on taking fast shallow breaths and didn’t look directly at them.

  The first doe began feeding again. Then another buck, this one sporting five points, appeared and began trailing her downwind. They did figure eights through the trees for forty-five minutes. As dusk fell, she led him toward my tree. I drew and held. A minute later he turned broadside. I put my pin on his shoulder and released.

  The two deer jumped once, then trotted off into the dark woods. I heard hooves clatter on stone. I waited fifteen minutes, climbed down with a flashlight in my mouth, and found my bloody arrow nine steps from the base of the tree. Thirty yards away, where I’d heard the clatter, lay the five-point buck. It took me an hour to drag him forty yards.

  The guy at the slaughterhouse guessed his weight at 180. “That’s a big buck,” he said.

  It occurred to me that I’d shot six thousand arrows to hear that one sentence. It was worth it.

  THE WAITING

  During the last weeks of the pre-rut, bucks get together in bachelor herds to click antlers and size each other up before the madness of mating season sets in. Bowhunters have a similar instinct, but to a different end. In this neck of the woods, they meet at Hoffman’s, a low-slung brick building next to the Buckland Farm Market out on Route 29. On the last Saturday before the season opens, it would be difficult to prove that a bow is the sile
nt way to hunt. Auto body shops are quieter. Both saws are in use, milling carbon and aluminum shafts to order. Dave Hoffman hasn’t had a moment in the past three hours to get over to the VCR by the worn sofa in the corner, so it’s blaring Monster Bucks, Volume IV for the third time today. And through the door to the twenty-yard range comes the guh-fwack! of archers who can’t resist one last chronograph or paper check. It’s not that their speed or alignment has changed in the three days since their last check; they just don’t know what else to do. As Tom Petty sang, the waiting is the hardest part.

  Dave is talking to a guy in overalls and muddy boots who has brought in his two little boys and an ancient, pre-camo Bear Kodiak compound that creaks mightily on its way to full draw. He buried his last arrow in a tree and needs more, only he doesn’t know the length or size. “I killed a squirrel and a groundhog with it,” he says. “After I get me a deer, I’ll buy a good bow. Got to get my money’s worth out of her first.” He slaps his checkbook against his leg and laughs uproariously. It’s a farmer’s joke.

  Dave’s prices are competitive with the catalogs, especially when you consider the cost of shipping and the agony of waiting for the truck to show up. And the store’s policies are pretty straightforward. Dave services what he sells. And there’s a gentleman’s agreement that you can shoot all afternoon at his targets in the back as long as you buy something. A set of field points qualifies. A hand-lettered sign lists his services: Three shots with the chronograph: $1. Fletching: $1.50 per arrow. Our stories: Free. Listen to your stories: $25.

  Nine months a year, Hoffman’s is quieter than a plaid-carpet warehouse. In August, things start to pick up a little. By September, bemusement seems to steal into the glass eyes of the deer, bear, and boar mounted on the wall, as guys who’ve been on the fence all summer about a new bow suddenly teeter into gotta-have-it land. By the first of October, vehicles are ringing the entrance two deep as hunters decide they need more broadheads, new servings, maybe a fifth tree stand. Mostly, of course, they just want to rub shoulders with fellow hunters.

  Two guys are standing with their arms crossed and big hard-shell bow cases at their feet, waiting for a word with Dave. They plant their feet and remain motionless, as if rehearsing for the woods. One finally looks at the other. “Pumped?” he asks.

  The other guy’s body goes slack as he exhales a breath that’s been building up all summer. “Shoot, man. So itchy I can hardly sleep. Shot all the video deer I can stand. I want to get up in a tree.”

  The discussion ranges from expanding broadheads (not as durable as fixed blades, but they fly just like field points and cut an awful big hole in a deer), releases (ball bearings eat up your serving faster than calipers or a bar, but you can’t beat them for smooth), and Scent-Lok camo (“Buddy of mine nailed an eight-pointer last year that came in downwind of his stand to a rattle bag and just stood there, bellerin’”).

  There’s also the problem of what to do about the lack of mast this year. The first guy is targeting a stand of persimmon trees. The other’s working a pokeberry patch where he’s seen some purple droppings. “Tell you what,” the first guy says. “Let’s shoot three while we’re waiting.” They nod at the guys behind them in line to reserve their places, open their cases on the floor, and adjourn to the range to settle their nerves.

  Dave Hoffman took up a bow twenty-five years ago, when he was a section foreman in a coal mine in West Virginia. “There were so many guys with seniority that you couldn’t get any vacation during rifle season,” he says. He started off on a secondhand Jennings compound. First time out, he shot twice over a doe at about twenty-five yards. “When I paced it off, it turned out she was twelve yards away,” he remembers. “That’s how stoked on adrenaline I was. But, man, was I hooked.” It took him four years to get his first deer, with that same Jennings. He no longer shoots it, but can’t bring himself to sell it.

  For Dave, the quintessential story of what keeps bowhunters battling the odds isn’t about success. It’s about deer-induced meltdown, the epiphany of failure that all true hunters know firsthand. “I was watching a buddy up in a tree stand nearby when a big buck wandered in. You should have seen this old boy shake. He drew an arrow back all of two inches, held for ten seconds, then let it clatter down out of the tree, sending the buck running. Later, I asked him how far away the deer was when he shot. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. I asked him if he came to full draw. ‘I don’t know.’ I asked if the deer was walking or had stopped. ‘I don’t know.’ It was like talking to somebody who’d just been hit by a truck.”

  Dave smiles broadly. “See, that’s what I love about bowhunting.”

  Dave greets the next customer and starts ringing up Bright Eyes fluorescent thumbtacks, a half dozen arrows, and a camouflage rattling bag. As they wait for the electronic go-ahead from the credit card company, the guy confesses that the waiting is making him crazy. “Me, too,” Dave says happily. “Just like everybody else.”

  IT’S A BASS WORLD AFTER ALL

  There is no place the nation’s 20 million bass anglers would rather be than out fishing. Except in winter, of course, when we sink into our Barcaloungers like hibernating mud turtles to watch TV bass-fishing shows until the ice melts. Or when it’s a blazing 96 degrees out there with air quality in the lethal-only-if-inhaled range, when I personally prefer to retire to a cool room to read my latest issue of Bassmaster. Come to think of it, there’s an awful lot of the time when the great outdoors would be better if it were indoors. Which may be why there’s Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World in Springfield, Missouri.

  The single biggest tourist attraction in the Show-Me State is not the Ozark Mountains, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or one of the theaters in Branson where Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando croon their ancient hits to packed houses. It’s this megastore, a retail theme park of Disneyan proportions dedicated to the pursuit of America’s favorite game fish, Micropterus salmoides, the largemouth bass. Four million people a year push through these doors. When my wife, Jane, drops me off while she goes to visit friends in this, her hometown, she asks when she should pick me up.

  “As late as you can,” I answer.

  “Okay,” she says. “Seven. Right here. And don’t buy anything you can’t fit on the plane.”

  It was the bass that gave Johnny Morris, Outdoor World’s creator, his leg up in the world. And he has never forgotten it. Morris started out in a corner of his father’s liquor store on this very spot in Springfield, selling lures and bait to men who had stopped in for beer and ice on their way to bass-fish one of the nearby lakes. In 1974 he sent out his first Bass Pro Shops catalog. This year he’ll be sending out 40 million, listing 30,000 items and fighting archrival Cabela’s for the No. 2 catalog ranking. (L.L.Bean is No. 1 in the country). Morris has already opened other Bass Pro Shops megastores in Georgia and Illinois, and a specialty saltwater flyfishing store in Florida. Four more Outdoor Worlds—in Nashville, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, and Grapevine, Texas—are scheduled to open by 2000. Not far from here is another successful Morris project, Big Cedar Lodge, a resort with a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course and a ten-thousand-acre nature park stocked with elk and bison. But he’s still primarily in the bass business.

  Outdoor World is an ever-expanding work in progress—200,000 square feet at the moment, with plans to increase to 300,000 this year. Naturally, it houses the world’s largest fishing department: a forest of high-modulus graphite fishing rods flanking aisles displaying more than seven thousand lures, 3-D electronic fish finders, and one-piece aluminum reels with LCD line counters.

  But while fishing is Outdoor World’s foundation, there have been some whopping big add-ons. The store has, to name a few, sections devoted to archery, black-powder firearms, flyfishing, knives, and sporting optics. You can buy golf clubs, ladies’ wildlife jewelry, or a deer rifle you may sight in at the indoor range right behind the gun counter. You can buy a canoe or a $30,000 bass
boat that will do zero to 60 mph so fast you think you’re in a rocket sled. You can buy chaps that will stand up to a rattlesnake’s fangs or a four-hundred-dollar Nautica leather jacket or Orvis luggage.

  At Hemingway’s Restaurant, you can see the skiff that legendary guide Bonefish Willie used to take the great writer fishing in Florida, watch the pink and blue fish parade back and forth in the thirty-thousand-gallon saltwater tank behind the bar, and sip a Monsoon, a fruity concoction containing six shots of booze served in a glass the size of a goldfish bowl. There’s a wildlife museum, a free knife-sharpening service, and the Tall Tales Barber Shop, where they’ll not only cut your hair but use a tuft of it to make you up a special Hair Trigger fishing lure.

  Outdoor World casts a wide net. Good ol’ boys in pickups mix with older bus tourists wearing nylon jackets that proclaim them to be Tulsa Keenagers. Minivans outnumber trucks in the parking lot 3:1. Like other intensely American phenomena, Outdoor World has an appeal that extends beyond national boundaries. Bass clubs from as far away as Japan and Zimbabwe have made the hajj here. Heck, George W. Bush has been here so many times the help doesn’t even get excited anymore.