As a wife and mother, there are many things in my world that make me crazy. Hardwood floor cracks infused with glitter. Dogs who feast out of the cat litter box. The endless barrage of questions, like “I’m bored…what can we do now? Where can we go? Who can we see?”
But lately, there is a whole new reason why I’m out of my tree. If only my husband would do the same.
Before I explain, I have to tell you the nice part of this story, which will leave my THS friends’ jaws dropping: Doug quit drinking. As of December 14 last year, he hasn’t had so much as a sip of beer. It has been immeasurably good for our family, but as you can imagine, it has left a void in his life.
How does a man fill the space in his heart—one that was once filled with bright, golden spring and summer ales, bold, rich fall and winter lagers, each with their own complexity of flavors and aromas, their intense, malt flavors tempered with a blend of carefully selected spices? (Yes. That was a conglomerate of every beer label ever made.)
Why, with deer slaying, of course.
To understand the irony of this new passion, consider a conversation the two of us had in our early years of marriage, while we gazed at a majestic herd of deer traversing through our backyard. Graceful, white-tailed does with three spotted fawn were delicately chewing the greenery from our densely wooded wetlands, which afford us breath-taking glimpses of the wildlife right from our back porch.
“How could anyone shoot a deer?” he asked, barely blinking, for fear it would scare them all away.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “Especially when there’s a Stop & Shop stocked with meat not even two miles away.”
“I can see it if we were starving,” he added, shaking his head. “But even then…I still don’t know if I could pull the trigger.”
Fast forward ten years later. He’s standing in the middle of our kitchen clad head to toe in camo, black war paint smeared across his face, crossbow tied to his back, purchased long before any zombie-slaying sex symbol made it famous.
He is on a mission. Last year, the critter cam picked up a fourteen-point buck right in our backyard. He wants its head hanging from our mudroom, and he wants to make coat racks out of its antlers. He knows any fourteen-point buck must be old and its venison tough—and so he vows to make a lifetime supply of deer jerky.
He looks for the buck every time he passes a window. He talks about him whenever there’s a moment’s silence. He stares out, starry-eyed, into the distance, and I know exactly what he’s thinking.
He is preparing for another day of sitting up in a tree stand—for four- to five-hour stretches—waiting for his trophy buck to make an appearance.
“Today’s the day,” he declares while spritzing hunting scent eliminator all over his clothes. “This is the rut. This is when they all get stupid,” he explains.
And explains. And explains. And explains.
He tells me, in detail, about how during the “rut,” a buck goes on an orgy-crazed frenzy, jumping every doe in sight, dueling other bucks to the end—so crazed with testosterone that it tosses all its inhibitions and good deer sense to the wind—making it a prime target for hunting.
I don’t want to hear a word of it. I am cursed with a little affliction known as hypersensitivity. A little anecdote from not too long ago might help illustrate just how much.
I was at a Fourth of July day picnic at my parents’ house, sitting peacefully by myself, when a wasp landed on the picnic table.
There was a bottle of orange soda nearby, and a few droplets had leaked from the bottle onto the table. The wasp positioned itself by a soda drop, lowered its beaklike mandible and sucked, till the drop disappeared. I watched up close, fascinated, until every last orange bead disappeared. If I had two seconds longer, I might have held out my finger and waited for him to perch on it.
Suddenly, BAM! My father came out of nowhere and whacked it with a badminton racket.
“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.
He stared.
“It’s a wasp,” he said. “It was going to sting you.”
“It was just minding its own business! It was drinking orange soda!” I wailed.
Doug came over to witness the tail end of the commotion. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“She’s mad cause I killed a wasp,” my dad shrugged.
“A wasp? What are you, intellectually challenged?” he sputtered (although not so politically correctly).
I didn’t sleep for three days.
As you can see, “hypersensitive” is an understatement. The way I see it, all creatures in this world have the right to be here. If a wasp can move me to tears, you can imagine how I’d feel about the execution of a deer.
“But you eat meat,” Doug argued. “Blah blah slaughterhouses with horrendous living conditions blah blah overpopulation blah blah automobile accidents caused by deer blah blah spiritual blah one with nature blah blah important for my sobriety.”
To be fair, I’m sure he had some valid points. But the whole time he was talking, all I pictured was sitting by the window with my children sipping hot chocolate, our tranquility shattered by Bambi’s great-great grandfather’s bloody corpse collapsing in the pristine newly fallen snow.
Equally offensive is that since our addition has been complete, I have been keeping a “to do” list for Doug on the kitchen counter. Whenever a handyman-type task needs tending to, I add it to his list. Tasks include building shelves in our mudroom, painting a bedroom, adding another rack to my closet, and putting doorknobs on all the new doors. The list is now so long that I have renamed it his “to do scroll.” Until the scroll gets shorter, this damsel will forever be in distress.
The scroll now reaches from one end of the house to another—and still he sits, breaking bread with the squirrels, up in tree in below-freezing temperatures, as early as four in the morning. Meanwhile, I can’t even sit still for five minutes without some dirty dish beckoning me from the sink or dryer full of clothes screaming that they’re about to get wrinkly.
On Christmas Eve he was just clumping back in the house in his Arctic muck boots and fur-lined trapper hat as I doled out a plate of cookies and oatmeal reindeer food. “Why don’t you just set up your stand on the rooftop?” I scoffed. “You might be able to pick off all nine of them in one fell swoop!”
He stared for a moment. I swear I heard a light bulb click above his head.
“The rooftop…why didn’t I think of that?” he gushed. “That would give me a clear bird’s eye view a mile long. And I’d be so far away from the woods, they wouldn’t even pick up my scent!”
And just like that, I went from intellectually challenged to Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt.
When he comes home each late morning, he lists all the creatures that entered his bullseye—does and fawns galore, young four-point bucks, foxes, coyotes, hawks, and a hummingbird that, he joyfully recounted, hovered two inches away from his face. He never pulls the trigger, because there is only one creature he has on his hit list. But as for that fourteen-point buck, the only shot he ever gets is via critter cam.
The below picture was snapped just fifteen minutes before Doug made it up his tree one particularly ambitious morning.
“I’m gonna get that son of a bitch,” he swore after he reviewed the footage. “You realize what’s happening, right?” he added to no one in particular. “He waits for me. He watches me through the window, laughing at me. He watches me put on all my camo. He watches me as I pile on all those layers. He watches me put the broad tip on my arrow and cock the crossbow. And he laughs. Well, we’ll see who wins this little showdown. We’ll see!”
Today marks the last day of deer hunting season, and the clock is ticking in his ears louder than my biological clock did when I was twenty-nine with no boyfriend in sight. He purchased “The Art of War” to contemplate new tactics to outsmart his deer. If he sleeps or eats, I don’t see it. You think I am kidding, or at the very least, exaggerating. I assure you, I am not.
They say it’s when we’re nearing the light at the end of the tunnel that our patience escapes us. This morning, as I watched him gather his layers from the mudroom, littered with coats and shoes that have no racks or shelves, I finally cracked.
“This is beyond ridiculous,” I berated. “You are up in one tree waiting for one deer to cross one spot in one moment every day. You’re wasting your time. There’s too much to be done around here for you to be sitting in trees!”
“But once I get my buck, I won’t need to sit up in the tree anymore,” he reasoned. “I’ll take him to the taxidermist, and I won’t feel the need to take anything else. After I get my buck, I’m done!”
I paused for a thoughtful moment.
“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me after you get this buck, you’ll never feel the need to sit in a tree for five hours again? Never, for as long as you live?”
“I can’t see why I would,” he said.
I thought of Bambi and Thumper romping through the forest.
I looked at the chaos in my mudroom.
In my mind, I watched Bambi shed his spots and grow his first set of antlers after his first spring.
I thought of all the doors upstairs with no doorknobs. I thought of shampoo bottles, towels and cold medicine tossed haphazardly in a closet with no shelves.
Please join hands with me today and pray to the deer gods that he gets that son of a bitch. Mama needs coat racks. And some new closet shelves.