Took down my second deer of the season last Saturday. Like my first deer, I shot it with my 12-gauge at Cornell Plantations' Lick Brook Conservation Area. It was a small doe. I contemplated not shooting it due to its size, but it was the first day of the newly-minted antlerless season in Tompkins County and, well, the deer was antlerless. So when the deer offered a quartering-away shot at 40 yards (ironically, the upper end of my range with that gun), I leveled the sight and squeezed the trigger. I expected the deer to drop instantly, but it just hobbled quickly over the hill, leading me to believe I had made a poor shot.
The land isn't but twenty acres, and I worried a bad shot would have me tracking a deer across property boundaries, which would involve a long process of contacting landowners to gain access to their land. The standard wait time before you start tracking is twenty minutes and then possibly longer once you see the blood and determine the quality of the shot. At the twenty-minute mark, I started creeping slowly toward the deer. I figured there was a possibility of a jump shot once I crested the hill, but as I did so the deer lay dead not more than 15 yards from where it stood when I took the shot.
I have heard the popular reaction of people who approach near spiritual heights at this moment, thanking the deer for all that it will bring them and all that nature has brought them and the opportunity to share such a special moment with loved ones and yadayadayada. I call bullshit. The only feeling I've felt these past two deer is pure utter sadness and guilt--the kind of guilt that makes you sick, not puking sick like that kid up in Alaska did when he shot that moose in that movie, but sick enough to make you feel dirty.
It was smaller than I had originally thought, maybe eighty pounds undressed. A kid, not yet a year old. Even it's facial features looked youthful. I had justified the shot on the basis that it was an antlerless season, and that the objective of such a season is to obviously take an antlerless deer to reduce the herd. It also fulfilled a Cornell's requirement to harvest an antlerless deer. And now, all I could think was what a miserable excuse that was to take a life and how I would never shoot a deer just to fulfill a requirement again. But what's done was done. So I got out my knife, slit open the belly, and started tugging and slicing at organs.
With the guts out, she couldn't have weighed but sixty pounds. If not for the fear of getting shot, I would have just slung her on my shoulder and carried her out. I dragged her by the front legs, her head pinned backward by the forward motion, bouncing on and off rocks and slight undulations in the ground. At one point, her head got stuck between two small trees and rather than bend down to free it-- I simply gave her legs a good clean jerk and she popped free. As I approached the truck, a pair of hikers pulled up. They obviously saw that I had a deer, but I didn't want to drag her into the lot with them there. It's just a tough sight for non-hunters to take in. So I retrieved a tarp from the truck, wrapped her in it, and carried her the remaining ten yards to the truck. It was a fitting end--me heaving loaded body bag into the back of my truck, mildly embarrassed and ashamed.
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