Breaking the silence

While throughout my childhood and youth, my father and I hunted birds and rabbits, I never had gone deer hunting because it required taking several days away from our family business and my father was reluctant to do that. Because of that, and some other variables, it wasn’t until I moved to Plainview, Texas as an adult that I would get to go on my first deer hunt.

That turned out to be on some public hunting land at Lake Meredith, north of Amarillo, Texas. Me and a buddy, Michael, decided that we would camp out there the night before opening day and then hike to a predetermined spot and set up in some brush and see what came our way. We had scouted the area thoroughly over the preceding days and were confident that we had found a good spot.

We decided that we would get up early, while it was still dark and move to our spots before sunup. We would carry some apples with us to eat once we were in place. With that thought in mind, we set the alarms and went to sleep in our respective vehicles. With the buzzing of the alarms, we got up, hosed ourselves down with some spray to hide our human scents, gathered up our apples and rifles and headed down the trail.

Soon we were at our spots, and I positioned myself behind one mesquite bush while Michael set up about 100 feet away behind another. It was a clear, crisp morning and as we set there in the dark, I pulled out my apple and took a bite, only to discover that when there are no other sounds, crunching an apple can be deafening. The sound of that first bite seemed to echo through the canyons and I could hear Michael laughing and then biting into his own apple.

I pretty much figured that by the time we were done eating, we had scared off anything within several miles. Still, we sat there and watched the late autumn morning break, complete with birds simultaneously bursting into song just as the sun came up. It was a great experience, but unfortunately, our hunt wasn’t successful. Since we were both getting hungry, eventually we decided to hike back to the vehicles and go into town for a real breakfast . . . in an environment where we could be as noisy as we wanted to be when chewing our food.

Richard Porter