The Meat Doe

For the author, taking wild game out of the woods is the ultimate, and noblest,trophy.

- T. Edward Nickens

SHE STEPPED OUT in the open, right where I thought she would. A mature doe, maybe 130 pounds. A 45-yard shot would drop her in the middle of the logging road, and I could drive the truck all the way in. Wouldn’t have to drag her an inch. It was exactly what I’d come for, exactly how I’d planned it. The perfect meat doe. As easy as it gets.

Except I wasn’t quite ready. Like a greenhorn, I had leaned my gun against the wrong corner of the ground blind, and I was seated too far back to rest the rifle on the shooting rail. The blind’s net walls broke up my silhouette, but I still had to move like molasses to get the rifle up and into position. Then, as I eased the gun to my shoulder, a yearling doe stepped out from the woods, feeding beside Mama. 

Ugh. 

That was the last thing I wanted to see. I’ve never cared for shooting a doe with offspring nearby. I don’t harbor any Bambi-hued perspectives on the familial connections of whitetail deer, and that young doe was a good 5 months old—long since weaned and able to make it on her own. It’s simply a choice I’ve made, one of those myriad, and often inscrutable, factors we all calculate when deciding whether or not to pull the trigger. But I was at the right place at the right time for a very specific reason. I go to the deer woods to escape, for camaraderie with pals and family, to stay connected to a primal web that reaches back to the cave paintings at Lascaux. And there are times when I go to the woods with only one thing in mind. Meat.