A friend once cautioned that if you want to hunt only with people who hunt like you, eventually you’ll end up hunting alone. I hunt alone a lot. Not because I dislike companionship, but because I favor self-determination.
One cold night in December, I lay bivouacked in a clearing along the oxbow bend of a blackwater creek, sated on leftover stew, watching my breath mingle with smoke from a neatly laid fire. The horns of Taurus stood proud, Aldeberan shining like a red jewel in the bull’s right eye.
Earlier that evening I had sat in a tall ladder stand overlooking a second-year clear-cut more suitable to bean-field snipers than to a guy who just wants to pong a freezer fatty at 30 paces so he can go back to bowhunting. Six does had wandered out at 200 yards, and I’d been content to watch them weave amongst the overgrown slash piles and broom straw, trying to will them into range of my gauzy old 3 x 9 scope.
By morning, I planned to hunt my bow stand in a flooded hardwood bottom, and this was the first year I’d started regularly carrying a cell phone on stand. In the past, carrying a mobile phone had seemed antithetical to hunting with a traditional bow. But several years earlier, one uncomfortable night spent in a Rocky Mountain snowstorm had begun to change my mind about technology in the backcountry, and eventually in mere tree-stand hunts among lowland hardwoods. Simply as a matter of safety.
Truth be told, though, I’m a rather conflicted Luddite—as intrigued by smartphone apps and tablet devices as I am by sinew-backed bows and bow-drill fires. At times this is difficult ground to hold, leaving me feeling dislocated somewhere between the age group whose world goes gray without a device in hand, and the generation who still thinks a phone is for calling someone.
With the creek as my headboard, black water gouged at its sandy banks. A meteor raged overhead. My fire began to die with the final volley of barred owls trading insults across the creek, and a pack of coyotes sang into the next county. Dew coated the top of my sleeping bag as I rolled out of the downy cocoon, then reached for my cell phone. I checked my coverage, tapped a photo of the dying fire, and sent it to my brother in Montana, telling him how good it felt to get away.
It’s the last weekend of the season, and my hunting partner is texting me. Says he is staring at eight deer across another recent clear-cut. You know, the kind of self-inflicted wound we weren’t supposed to bear once everyone got laptops and 64-gigabyte smartphones. But what the hell; the deer don’t seem to mind. The more we cut, the more they thrive on the leafy green browse and ragged hardwood edges.
I’ve potted only one doe this season and badly want to put up another. The cut in question is about a half mile down a piney wood road, and I briefly consider climbing off stand and still-hunting in that direction. But the thought of reading a text message that gives me this advantage welds me to the stand. Every half hour, my phone vibrates with another text from another someone somewhere telling me how many deer they’ve seen. As much as I don’t want to like these digital interludes, the fact is I do like them—with the same guilty pleasure as bingewatching Netflix or eating fudge.
This phenomenon of deer-stand texting started in earnest the previous year, but this past season the habit seemed to blow up, as they say. When I killed a doe two weeks earlier, I made a world-class tracking job that involved truck headlights, a fading headlamp, one handheld flashlight, and a Coleman lantern with greasy tinfoil wrapped around the bulb for reflection. It was some of the best blood trailing I’d ever done. And what did I do when I found her?
Honor the animal with a final sprig of browse, its letzebissen? Build a fire and sharpen a stick? No. I took a photo and pinged five folks in my network. So now it’s the last week of the season, and I don’t have to take notes, because, well, who needs a tattered old Moleskine and trusty pen when one can just whisper into his voice-memo app? Who needs to commit to memory that which can be memorialized in 30 frames per second?
The hunt is from a classic southern box stand along the remote stretches of a major rural power line. Behind me, a vast swamp hides God-knows-what critters. In the foreground, two 100-foot steel towers support miles of high-voltage cable. At times, it’s hard to tell whether I’m hearing the chirring of swamp frogs or electricity zinging through the wires.
One by one, turkey vultures alight on Georgia Power’s broad metal shoulders, each incoming bird sending his neighbor hopping in protest down the tower beams. Against a pewter sky, their black masses look like images from a Poe poem. Or at least that’s what I tell my phone.
It’s getting toward evening. The deer should start moving soon. I’ve checked my last text, recorded my last memo, suffered my final disconnection. It’s the killing hour, and long past time to hang up and hunt.
