Content warning: this piece contains descriptions and visuals of deer hunting. Skip this post if that’s not your thing.
In celebration of my piece that appeared in the PA Game News November 2023, titled “2 Bucks, 1 Year: Everything legal of course",” I thought I’d write a piece about a hunting tradition of mine that probably isn’t exciting enough for hunting magazines to publish, but has become something fun and fulfilling for me.
This is a story of how I started shooting deer near by back deck.
It was an October morning in 2021, and I was tired.
I was grinding coffee for my French press (as God intended: drip is for heathens) when I paused to look out the window. Not far any particular reason. The late October foliage smoldered, but the sun hadn’t risen enough to reveal the best of its color yet. Plus, my eyes had that just-emerged-from-sleep bleariness that makes everything fuzzy around the edges.
I saw deer. Two deer. No, three. They strolled just off the deck at the edge of the woods, picking at the autumn’s finale: bright goldenrod and pale aster.
Our homestead is adjacent to Pennsylvania state game lands, public land that holds many critters. And several of them had just decided to use our two acres on the dewy October morning.
In the back room, my wife nursed our months-old daughter, the source of our joy and our exhaustion. I was barefoot, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and an old sweater. And I hadn’t had a sip of coffee yet. It seemed like exactly the wrong time to try and fill a tag.
Without saying anything to my wife, I hustled down the stairs. Maybe my judgment was impaired by the sleeplessness of being a first-time father, or I had a roaring case of buck fever going on. In any case, I lunged for the crossbow that I’d stowed in the basement out of laziness after an unsuccessful hunt. Laziness had turned into a chance to capitalize on opportunity.
I was going to make a play at one of the deer. And I was going to do it while wearing my pajamas.
By the time I’d slipped into my muck boots and cocked back the crossbow, I had no idea if the deer had roamed on. They appeared to be moving westward across the treeline, busy browsing for food. Recreating the deer’s trajectory in my mind, I slowed at the corner of the house and peeked around. The deer weren’t where I’d seen them minutes prior. They also hadn’t moved westward after all. Then where? Had they melted into the woods?
I’ll be the first to tell you that deer can be gray ghosts. While dry and cold weather conditions make every footfall of a deer sound like breaking glass, many times in the treestand I have turned around to find that a deer has walked right up on me without a sound.
Maybe I’d run outside in my pajamas for nothing.
I took a few careful steps out from the corner of the house. The dew in the grass and leaves dampened the sound of my footfalls. A lucky thing. It was a good morning to stalk. And then I saw the rear end of the antlerless deer rounding the corner of the deck, the handrail of the stairs blocking my shot. My heart slammed in my chest, as it always does when a deer comes close when I’m on the hunt - when I stop feeling that way, I’ll put away my weapons for good.
I moved as quickly, and as quietly, as I could. I needed to get an angle around the deck to make a good shot. But I needed to do it without alerting the prey. Deer have the ability to rotate their ears toward any sound. Their eyesight picks up movement absurdly well.
I told myself, in the moment, that I knew my yard better than any deer knew my yard. I still believe that.
He ultimately saw me. But I’d raised my crossbow to my shoulder by the time he swung his head around to take a casual look. I let the bolt go. I heard two noises: the sound of the bolt hitting flesh, and the sound of the bolt hitting the shed. The deer I’d shot took off into the woods, leaping his way through our Solomon’s seal plants. To my left, two deer scrambled out their escape through the autumnal undergrowth. I hadn’t even known they were nearby.
I stood with my heart hammering. I did not hear anything further. It was as if the woods had swallowed the three deer and left me with nothing by the sound of the fall breeze in the quickly-disrobing trees.
The doubt crept in. When it comes to archery hunting, death is not instantaneous for your prey. You will follow some kind of blood trail for most lethal and all non-lethal shots. The deer taking off wasn’t unexpected, but I just wasn’t sure. I found the arrow next to the shed, cleaned of blood. It did smell like flesh, but I did not see any sign of hair. I hadn’t missed the shot, but the arrow didn’t tell a story like other arrows I had fired off: ideally, you want to see blood and lots of it on the arrow, on the ground, on the leaves.
I went back inside and told my wife and daughter what had just happened. “Daddy got a deer!” my wife said to our infant. This was not true, I said. I had, in fact, nothing except one less arrow. My wife was much more confident in my shot than I was, bless her heart.
Wanting to give the animal time to expire, I texted friends asking for advice. The consensus was to give it time. That also gave me time to think through all the possibilities. Of success. Of failure. Of the strange things we do in our pajamas.
Seeing deer in the yard wasn’t an accident. It was a happy proof of concept. My wife Sarah and I, beyond cultivating a food forest, had also been cultivating what we called a “Meat Garden,” a portion of the yard set aside to attract wildlife for harvest.
This came in part at the advice of one of my hunting mentors. When I told him about all the remote locations I hunted, the long hikes in the dark and the hardship, he asked, “Why not hunt your property?” I told him that the deer didn’t really visit the yard and he shrugged and told me that I could be surprised. He was right.
One attractant was to install a watering hole in the rear corner of the yard. This consisted of a plastic animal waterer that you’d find on a farm, but set about two inches below the soil line out in the woods. I’d carted water out to it in my Indian pump to fill it the first time, and rainwater did the maintaining. Over the years, I’d taken pictures of deer visiting the watering hole, including a doe with three fawns and a short-lived piebald buck that I am sure expired from natural causes (piebald deer tend to have short lives due to various physical handicaps resulting from their condition.)
While the deer I’d taken a shot on in October of 2021 hadn’t been near the watering hole or the bramble, I am certain he knew the watering hole. It was the only water for several hundred yards in any direction.
Over the years, we’d also cultivated a significant bramble around that area out of neglect, and also by chance. When land behind our house changed hands, areas that had been mowed went to bramble and part of our land followed suit. That meant cover for critters like the deer.
For fun, I placed an old toilet in the woods near the watering hole. Out of hunting season, I put a salt lick and some corn inside and amused myself by taking game camera pictures of the deer and other varmints eating from it. A falling tree smashed the toilet to bits one day, which is just as well because I learned after the fact that salt licks can encourage the spread of disease among deer. I got a few priceless shots though.
But I digress.
When work wrapped up, I made a careful stalk to where the deer had run that morning, crossbow in hand in case I needed to finish the job. I took every step slowly, in case the deer was gutshot. A gutshot deer is a dead deer walking, but can take days to expire and often has enough energy to run itself ragged getting away from you.
The blood trail told me as little as the arrow. I found a single drop and then nothing, with some disturbed leaves acting as the only trail into the woods. I was despairing, sure that I had lost the deer or, perhaps, fully missed it with my shot.
Or worse. Injuring an animal but not killing is always a risk, and always horrible.
I took another step. Then another. I was beginning to crest the hill when I saw the white belly. The deer was another ten yards ahead. It was dead. The “pajama buck” turned out to be a button buck whose antlers hadn’t emerged yet. The bolt had taken it through the heart. The deer had likely died in less than a minute, perhaps less than 30 seconds. There’s no more ethical shot out there.
As I told people later, I had “harvested a deer in my pajamas.” Then, I’d follow it with the dad joke: “I was the one wearing my pajamas, I did not shoot a deer that had stolen my pajamas.”
I have turned the “pajama buck” into an annual event. In 2022, I ran outside at 7:30AM and took a shot on another button buck, making a quick harvest.
This year, in 2023, I took a small doe from the ground close to that same watering hole. This became an exciting next step in the Meat Garden concept. My plan is to set up a tiny ground blind near the watering hole, a sort of “fort” made of sticks and stones that me and the kids can huddle in to hunt the bounty of Penn’s woods. It’s hard to get kids interested in the things you’re interested in, so giving them an easy place to hunt that has a reasonable chance of success should be a good way to get a lifetime hunting buddy.
All of this is truly great, a source of quality red meat that I harvest and, in some cases, butcher myself (a subject for another post.)
But I do ask myself if this is truly hunting. Is it hunting if I am wearing pajamas? Is it hunting if action happens a few feet from my back deck? I haven’t decided on that yet. In the meantime, I’ll continue to glance out the window come fall, and maybe wear socks to bed so my toes don’t get cold when I have to run outside come morning.
I enjoyed this one. But you're right, it wouldn't go over well with the public.