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Buck #56

Hunter:    Chris Lindquist               

Score:     72"

Points:     8 points

Weight:    unknown

Date:        November 1989

Location:  Northern Minnesota

Method:    30-30 lever action

My first hunting party consisted of my two brothers, Matthew and Michael, and my dad Joe.  We would all pack in the pick-up truck and ride up the Caribou Trail early in the morning to our spot.  The time in the truck was precious because I was tired at that time in the morning, and it was warm in the truck; it was just an extension of a warm bed when you hit the snooze button.  

But when the truck pulled to a stop, the woods were densely quiet.  I managed to stimulate the senses in my sleepy body and wake me up for the hunt.  Nobody wants to hunt sleeping. I took the simplest route, just staying on the main trail, while everybody else went into a spot or deerstand in the woods.  The day was just beginning, casting a dull grayness over the forest of large spruce and thick brush.  Soon this forest would be seen in the frosty daylight.  I walked slowly, and stopped, stood still, and walked slow again.  The mode of any good hunter or fisher is repetitive, patient, and methodical.  You must be willing to be so still that your thoughts in your head almost stop, becoming thick ooze.  When you talk to yourself you even speak slowly in your head, sometimes saying the same word every 5 seconds. 

Then suddenly you hear what can only be a deer coming through the brush at a rate which can only tell that he is unaware of my human, with a gun, on opening day.  All the slowness is now extreme rapid mind action, and your finger rests upon the trigger, your rifle abuts your shoulder…waiting.  The buck finally makes it out of the brush onto the trail, broadside; it stops to notice that something just isn’t right.  That would be me standing there with a big gun. BAM!  With my open-sights 30-30, I shot him from about 20 yards away.  He ran to the other side of the trail into the brush.  I could hear him breathing his last heavy breaths.  At that moment I knew that I had become a hunter.