It is opening day of deer season in northeast Oregon. A cabin neighbor and his cohorts recently returned from an all-day hunt in the rugged slopes above the Umatilla River. Curiosity has got the best of me. Darkness settles when I wander down the lane to see how they fared. The night air is still except for the crunch of my shoes on gravel and the intermittent call of crickets. Wood smoke from our chimney trails across the top of maple trees whose leaves have not yet turned gold.

I haven’t hunted deer in over 40 years, yet fleeting memory of the experience remains locked in my senses. The awakening of a new day: first light filtering through wispy clouds, hillside shrubs ablaze with a kaleidoscope of fall colors, earthy odor of frost-bit leaves, my ears and eyes tuned to subtle sound and movement.

October visits to this same group of hunters has led to more than one good story. One tale involved a large black bear that went one down after a bullet from a 300 H&H Magnum plowed a furrow across its back. The bear did not remain down, however, which led to much drama before it was tracked and finished off with a kill shot. “It had about six inches of fur, ten inches of fat, and ten inches of muscle over its back,” Leonard shared. “The first shot, with a .30-06 Springfield, dead-center on the neck, missed everything vital.”

Another time, Leonard put the crosshairs of his scope on a large buck from 400 yards away and pulled the trigger. The buck immediately dropped to the ground while the sound of the bullet carried across the canyon. “The experience seemed surreal,” he remarked, “until I recalled how bullets discharged from a modern rifle travel more than twice the speed of sound.”

My father did not hunt. The only gun in our household was a German Ruger he hid in a bedroom closet following his patriotic stint in World War II. Although I grew up surrounded by a community of deer hunters, I did not carry a long-barreled rifle until after Nancy and I married. My first deer hunt took place in the juniper and sagebrush country of central Oregon with a next-door neighbor who professed, “We always fill our tags.” The only other expedition of my brief deer-hunting career occurred a few years later in the open farmland and brush-lined draws of the Blue Mountain foothills. This time with a friend from work and his father. Both of my hunts involved borrowed rifles with peep-sights. Neither experience led to a clean shot at a buck. When it comes to eating venison, I have since relied on friends who might pass on year-old backstrap or burger wrapped in butcher’s paper. Albeit, my preference is for deer sausage and pepperoni.

Shadowed forms moved across the next-door cabin’s kitchen window. The front yard appeared as a used RV lot. Wedged in place behind a strung-wire fence was a 20-foot travel trailer, popup tent, camper, and four full-size pickup trucks. I stepped up to the screened-in front porch, knocked to announce my presence, and entered a warm kitchen to be greeted by smiles from familiar faces whose names I had not committed to memory. One camo-clothed man sat on a worn couch with a plate of food in his lap. Three other hunters rested their backsides in hardback chairs, a can of Coors Light in hand. Another small group gathered around a small kitchen table and the ancient wood cookstove.

“Want a beer?” someone asked.

“Thanks, but mooching a beer is not the purpose of this visit,” I replied. “I mooched one yesterday before you all showed up. I’d like to know if your deer hunting was more successful than my most recent day of salmon fishing. Of course, there was only one of me after a salmon and eight of you have been chasing deer.”

“We got one,” Leonard said.

“I didn’t see anything hanging from a tree,” I replied.

“We debone them in the field now. Less weight to haul off the hill and gives us the opportunity to remove any bloodshot meat.”

“Who was the deadeye who shot it?”

Leonard’s brother-in-law stepped forward with a sly grin, half-made sandwich in his hand. Along with Leonard, Laury has hunted the steep hills and brushy draws around the cabin for over five decades. While some hunters had come and gone, sons, grandsons, and close family friends gathered together every year during deer season to keep the fall tradition alive.

“My hearing ain’t so good and I can’t wrestle steers like I used to, but I can still shoot straight,” Laury said with a proud smile.

A few guffaws followed when someone mumbled from the back of the room, “He failed to mention a few other things he is no longer good at.”

“What’s the strategy for tomorrow?” I asked.

“We’re trying to figure it out,” Leonard replied, nodding to the sole female companion in the group who was quietly studying a topographic map that had been spread out across the width of the kitchen table.

That’s when Leonard’s grandson blurted, “A different place.”

 “We used to hunt McDougall,” another veteran of the hunt explained, “but there’s a bunch of new “No Trespassing” signs.”

“I can relate,” I said. “My favorite stretch of the Walla Walla River got posted two years ago. I can no longer fish for steelhead in a place I have visited for over forty years.”

Mother Nature had also changed their approach to hunting. As Leonard explained, “We usually spend one day climbing and the next one climbing down from the top. However, the flood of 2020 wiped out an access road which has led to an extra half hour drive to the top.”

“Any encounters with a cougar?” I asked, hoping to glean more adventure from their day in the nearby foothills.

“Not this year. We have seen several up close, but their main goal is always to get away from us.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a beer?” someone asked.

            “I’m good,” I replied, trying not to stare at the open container of home-made chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen table. “Did you see any other bucks?”

            “Five more,” someone answered.

            “One might have been a doe,” someone else added.

            “Why did you pass on a shot?” I asked.

            “They were too small,” Leonard’s grandson chimed in.

            “They will look bigger by the end of the week,” I said.

            Having passed out all the advice I felt qualified to share, I left the tired but congenial group and wove my way past the scattered collection of vehicles in the driveway. It was a new moon night but stars had not yet appeared to show off their shine. Curiosity satisfied, I stumbled down the pitch-black lane on uneven ground, guided to our cabin by the front porch light.