Lessons learned from a friend

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Nov. 14, 2003
I saw the Neshoba County deer a split second before Ben saw it. I was sitting to his right in his dome-like camouflaged blind and the deer walked into view from the right. I was watching out the right hand opening while Ben faced straight ahead with his crossbow resting in the zippered opening in front of him.
The big doe continued on a path that would lead her close to the outer limit of the effective range of Ben's crossbow. He is crossbow eligible because of a physical condition.
Ben McDonald is one of my favorite hunting partners. I think the reason has a lot to do with how seriously he takes the sport and his attention to the details. Both of us get a lot of enjoyment out of intricacies like finding and analyzing sign, knowing our weapons, their loads and how they perform, understanding game animals and their habits and putting together hunting strategies. When Ben is hunting, he concentrates one hundred percent on the business of pursuing that particular quarry.
For a guy just 18 years of age, his single-mindedness and dedication are remarkable. Perhaps these traits are reasons why he often surprises me with knowledge on some aspect of hunting that either took me decades to gain or that I have never attained at all.
Hunting talk
Ben's hunting insight makes him very interesting to talk with. We sometimes talk on the phone about some item of hunting equipment or current deer movements or why wild turkeys are behaving a certain way. I speak with him as if he were my contemporary someone with many decades of hunting experience because he is knowledgeable on seemingly every topic we discuss.
In short, I am always learning something from Ben that energizes me. Like a lot of devoted hunters, I get excited about a new slant on an old tactic or trying out something new that really works. On our deer hunt last week, Ben introduced me to hunting from a pop-up ground blind.
I had seen many television hunting shows where hunters, especially archers, used these blinds successfully. My interest had been piqued. In the back of my mind, I wanted to try one. Ben will tell you how excited I got when we arrived at his blind, even while we were unzipping its door and windows. The thing fascinated me. I want one.
We relaxed in lawn chairs inside the blind and felt as hidden as a bunny in a brush pile. Yet the two of us could see everything within 180 degrees of our hiding place back in the vines and trees inside a fence line that bordered the pasture where the doe was walking.
Earlier in the afternoon, Ben had looked through the lens of my Bushnell range finder and learned that the tree line on the far side of the little neck of the pasture we were watching was just over 40 yards distant, farther than his self-imposed limit of 30 yards. His crossbow might be effective all the way across the opening, but with his usual wise judgement, rare in so young a hunter, Ben set a reasonable limit for his weapon. And I watched while he followed his rule with calm resolve.
Decision time
The deer moved in front of us, staying closer to the opposite tree line than to our side. Ben was ready with his crossbow. But the doe skirted the trees just ten yards from them, so we knew she was a bit more than 30 yards distant. My partner never leveled the bow on her and she shortly entered the woods. "A little too far," one of us whispered. "She was a big doe," said Ben with emphasis that characterized an unusually large deer.
As the evening light continued to fade, two dim figures emerged from the woods. The doe had returned with a somewhat smaller companion. They were still too far for a shot.
When it became almost too dark for Ben to see a deer through his red dot sight, a buck stepped to the edge of the far woods. Ben saw him but I was not positioned to get a look. I dared not move, though I probably could have done so without spooking the buck. Ben could make out at least six points on the buck, but the cautious deer never completely emerged from the trees. He soon faded into the darkness. We got no shot that evening.
The two of us stayed until black dark, whispering a review of what we had happily witnessed. Even as Ben led me out of the black woods, he had not a single grumble about the deer being barely out of range. Instead he pointed out another of his stands with a flashlight beam and talked of past and future hunts.
I felt a little sheepish when I recalled all the times that I had whined about bad luck when the deer hadn't cooperated. Ben had given me another lesson, this one about simply enjoying the close encounters. Instead of griping, Ben was chattering about the next hunt. My young friend has got it right. And he is helping me get there.