Reflections on deer hunting: Confessions of a convert

The general white-tailed deer hunting season opens Nov. 1, and for those gung-ho few to whom this means something, it is one of the most anticipated days of the year.

According to a Texas Parks & Wildlife Department-commissioned survey, there are currently over one million Texans who would like to go hunting but have never really had the chance or the opportunity present itself.

Allow me to speak for myself, as I did not come to deer hunting in a conventional fashion, and I belonged to that group of Texans who hit that point where they would like to go deer hunting, but who have no idea where to start or opportunity to get out into the brush. Everything I learned about deer hunting I learned on my own, mostly through direct observation, and second through reading, reading, and more reading. Once I had a rudimentary grasp of deer behavior and hunting tactics, getting into the brush was no problem. I had grown up there.

I was raised a nature-loving country boy on a Cameron County ranch near Bayview that was literally brimming over with wildlife, from big game like deer and wild hog to critters like mountain lions and Texas horned lizards. I was, however, fully a non-hunter - even something of an anti-hunter - with the general perception that deer hunters were vain and bloodthirsty.

Sure, I had a pellet gun when I was little, but I did not fancy that it was something to go out and kill small critters with, particularly after I used that pellet gun to wipe out a grackle that had perched on a palm frond when I was around 8 years old. I did what any mischievous boy with a pellet gun would do and shot it right under the tail feathers. The bird fell, wings fluttering, and came to rest near my feet, eyes open, beak working, looking up at me. It seemed to be gasping for breath, and at that moment I realized I could not undo what I had just done, and the senseless killing deeply distressed me. I did not slay another of God's creatures for years afterward.

At least another seven or eight years after that, when I needed something to go with the can of ranch-style beans two high-school friends and I brought camping, I shot a rabbit and we cooked it up, just sort of guided by instinct, none of us at all experienced with skinning and preparing game for the pot. After that, harvesting the odd rabbit or dove to go with camp supper was simply hunting for the pot as a way to augment our meager stock of food, because carrying cans in backpacks out a mile or more from the ranch house was too hard of work to bother with, and a teenager's belly starts grumbling after devouring a carefully divided portion of beans for supper. Then I was not familiar with military meals in plastic bags with shelf lives of 20 years (and I am glad, looking back, that I was not).

As far as big-game hunting is concerned, read deer, I was an adult convert. At the age of 19, away at the Marine Corps School of Infantry in Camp Pendleton, Calif., I began casually looking over hunting and fishing magazines in my spare time. This nonchalant reading, I think, triggered some sort of primordial provider instinct, in that my first son had been born during the 10-day leave between boot camp and infantry training, and I suddenly and inexplicably had a massive urge to hunt deer.

The following year, 1996, I was out on the ranch, looking for deer, driven by some unconscious motivation that, while alien to me, was impossible to resist. It was not until December 2000 that I took my first buck, at the age of 23. My sons, who were 4- and 3-years-old at the time, were more excited than I was. We made strip after strip of jerked venison using a marinade of sour oranges, slicing off thin strips to hang on stainless steel wire in the sun, and we ground the rest. My wife, Lynette, put it into soups and stews, and we were all fairly thrilled to be eating wild game.

We've been thrilled about wild game ever since, augmenting our groceries and domestic beef with nilgai, wild pork, quail, and, yes, delicious venison.

Outdoors Writer Ben Christensen, an avid deer hunter, can be contacted at bc@riograndeoutdoors.com.