One friend of my Dad’s was such a man! We’ll call him Mike to protect the innocent. Mike would come down from Kansas City each year to hunt the illusive Whitetail Deer that flourished in the Missouri woods with the worst case of "Buck Fever" I had ever seen.
As a successful businessman Mike had all the best hunting equipment money could buy. Equipment, deer hunting knowledge or desire was not the problem! The problem was every time he came within close proximity of a deer he would absolutely loose his mind and subsequently do things that would boggle the rational intellect.
Every year he would come down days before the season would open and scout the woods for the perfect location and every year he would fail miserably. He would get up before dawn head up into the hills with a song in his heart and a spring in his step. It wouldn’t be long before you would hear…blam…blam…blam, blam, blam! Every time he would come back down to the house with the gun butt dragging the ground. He would inevitably have a sad story to tell about the deer bounding away into the woods almost as if it were laughing at the silly hunter! The familiar white flag of the deer’s tail soon became the mark of failure to Mike!
Being in World War II my Dad had seen enough killing for a lifetime and never really enjoyed hunting but nevertheless being an avid outdoorsman and farmer he new a lot about the whitetail and hated to see his friend fail in his quest year after year after year. Finally Dad had had enough, and over a cup of coffee at the dining room table the night before opening day, he decided to get to the root of the problem by questioning Mike about his hunting techniques. After a few minutes it became apparently clear that Mike indeed suffered from a terminal case of the dreaded "Buck Fever!"
"O.K. Mike, here’s what you’re doing wrong," Dad started out, trying not to laugh at his obviously distraught friend.
Dad then continued to explain to Mike that it was essential to stay calm. He explained that when you are overly excited it is natural to jerk the trigger, which throws off your aim.
"Mike, you have to s-q-u-e-e-z-e the trigger slowly, not jerk it, squeeze it," he would say to Mike very patiently almost as a teacher would to a mentally challenged student.
He assured Dad that he understood and even practiced in the yard for hours, without live ammo, on squeezing the trigger! If my Mother’s concrete deer yard ornaments had been alive they would have been killed over and over that day!
For the first time Mike felt he was truly ready. During the summer Dad had built Mike a tree stand and the plan was to head up to it the next morning before dawn. It had been scouted out as the perfect location on a known deer path and a big buck had even been seen scraping his antlers on the very tree in which the stand was built.
With renewed confidence he headed off into the woods convinced that he would finally be successful. It wasn’t long though before the familiar sounds of multiple gunshots rang out from the hills above the house!
Blam…blam…blam, blam, blam!
As any deer hunter knows, if you weren’t successful with the first shot, your odds of a kill decrease with each succeeding shot. So, it was only a matter of time before we would see Mike emerging from the woods in failure. But, stranger things have happened!
His stride must have been a little slower that day because it seemed like hours before he indeed did emerge from the tree line with the familiar dejected look of disappointment.
"O.K Mike, what happened this time?" Dad questioned his totally distraught friend.
"Well, I did just like you said. I got up there before sun up and was sipping a cup of coffee when along about sunrise I heard a scratching noise. When I looked down, sure enough the biggest buck I had ever seen was scraping his antlers on my tree," he explained reliving the moments in his mind all over again!
The excitement in his voice soon turned to disappointment as he explained what happened next, "I took a deep breath tried to calm down and pointed the gun straight down the side of the tree," he continued.
"I did just like you told me, I s-q-u-e-e-z-e-d the trigger slowly," he said as calm soon turned into frantic in his description of the events.
"I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and I had the damn safely on!"
Mike, thought be it a slow learner, was finally successful in his quest for his taunting prey. A couple of years later he in fact did kill a deer. He dutifully and almost ritualistically field dressed it and hung it up in a tree as Dad had taught him basking in his ultimate triumph as the alpha male of the woods!
He bounded down to the house with the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning asking for Dad to take him back up with the tractor and trailer because he couldn’t drag it out of the woods.
In his mind it was, "The biggest buck he had ever seen!"
So Dad fired up the trusty old Alice-Chalmers tractor and headed up into the woods with his excited friend. It seemed that even in fourth gear the tractor could not go fast enough for Mike. They came around the corner of the field and up into the draw as Mike explained where to go over the noise of the tractor just in time to see a sight that made Mike and Dad freeze in disbelief...
A pack of wild dogs had pulled down the trophy and was in the final moments of chewing it into little pieces right in front of their eyes!
