Missouri Life October 2023

I learned to hunt deer from my friends Aaron and Nate Blough, identical twins from O’Fallon. The way I tell them apart is that Aaron is the good-looking one and Nate is the handsome one … or shoot, maybe it’s the other way around. I can never remember. They own property between De Soto and Potosi, near Washington State Park, and before hunting season officially began, we spent an October day completing what I called “hunting practice.” On that beautiful fall day, I helped clear out brush and cut down small trees near each stand to give us better views. “The stands are all pretty shaggy this year, so we’re spending more time cleaning them up,” Aaron said. “It helps a lot. There’s nothing worse than being out there, and you know there’s a deer. And you don’t have a shot.” Well, there is one thing worse, and that’s knowing there’s a deer, having a shot, but being unprepared to take it, which I learned the hard way.

Snow crunched under my feet. Sleet pelted my face and stung my eyes. I unzipped the deer hunting blind, climbed inside, and found protection, though not warmth. I set down my borrowed rifle and peered out the shooting holes. Covered in snow and cloaked in darkness, the field lacked definition, like a shimmering pond imperfectly reflecting the trees around it. I waited for the sun’s light to clear things up. The dull gray world in front of me slowly evolved to crisp black and white. It was as if I put on my reading glasses and a book’s foggy ink became letters and words. Branches acquired definition, individual trees stood out among the forest, and unknown shapes revealed themselves as stumps. As the visual world came into focus, so did the audial world. I thought of what my friend Tim said when I asked him what he loved about hunting. “It’s the sound of the woods waking up,” he said. “The birds, the squirrels—you can hear everything.” On this morning—a Tuesday in November, amid an uncommonly early winter storm in Washington County—I would add the sound of ice pinging off the roof of the blind, with the occasional cymbal crash when large pieces fell off the tree above me. Once there was enough light to take pictures, I stuck my phone out a viewing hole to snap a few. I looked away from the field to set my phone down. When I looked toward the field again, a doe, broad-shouldered and majestic, stood stock still in the middle of a trail 40 yards from me. I can only guess she came from the woods to the left, but how she got there without me seeing or hearing her was a mystery. She stood broadside, a hunter’s dream. I slowly moved to Although white-tailed deer are prolific throughout Missouri, there’s no guarantee that a rookie hunter will find success. It was cold inside the deer blind where Matt Crossman took his first unsuccessful shot, but he did capture the peaceful, snowy scene.

get my rifle. She saw that, jerked her head toward me as if to say, “Not today,” and bounded directly away before making a sharp left turn into the woods. And thus ended my best chance to get a deer on my first-ever hunting trip. ●●● I could not have picked a better place to start my hunt ing career, both in general (Missouri) and specifically (Washington County). With roughly 1.6 million deer, Missouri’s deer population ranks in the top 10 among all states. With 20 to 35 deer per square mile in most counties, the animals are spread fairly evenly across the state, says Kevyn Wiskirchen, a private-lands deer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. In the last decade or so, Missouri conservation policies have allowed deer populations in the state’s southern third, which is marked by heavily wooded areas such as the Ozarks, to increase and catch up to the rest of Missouri. Deer are “habitat generalists,” Kevyn says, meaning they can live in just about any environment in Missouri, though

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35 / OCTOBER 2023