Deer Camp: Lessons in Language Etymology Occasioned by Shot Placement. →[More:]"shoot the lights out"
"lights n. lungs of an animal"

John and Alan are a couple of my better individual clients, with whom I share some personal interests. We went deer hunting on a private reserve up in southwest Georgia (near Ichawaynochaway Creek) this past weekend. It had been years since either John or I had gone deer hunting, and Alan had never been.

Our party was allowed 2 does and a buck, and we'd agreed to give Alan the primary shot at the buck, if he could get one, under the direction of our guide Boyd. On the second day, he got his shot on a decent 8 pointer, a little after sun up. He was shooting a .243 Weatherby Mark V Synthetic with a Bushnell scope that I lent him, on what was about a 70 yard shot, down from a tree level blind, as the buck stepped out of scrub pine cover, quartering towards the blind. Perhaps, the round was tipped in flight by brush. We found a bit of blood sign near the target area, but it was foamy, which is generally evidence you've caused the animal to cough blood, but those kind of hits usually allow the deer to run, looking for cover in which to lay up.

"I really thought I shot his lights out," said Alan, an avid golfer, still in the throes of buck fever, as I joined the three of them, already looking for blood trail at the hit area. As a new shooter, I knew Alan probably believed his sight picture entirely, not realizing that his own breathing could have easily caused him to "pull" his shot slightly. But, as I say, it's possible his round was tipped by brush, given his shot trajectory, too. John and Boyd had both seen the buck break back into cover, to the right, after being hit, but I, farthest away and looking elsewhere, had missed everything but the sound of the shot.

"Not quite," said Boyd, flatly, knowing what was ahead, and searching ground intently, methodically.

Alan, trying to take Boyd's laconic comment as some kind of compliment, wanted to follow John and Boyd's sight heading immediately, but there wasn't much blood trail in the immediate area, and tracking a wounded animal can just make that kind of situation worse. Best thing to do in that situation is to stay quiet or retreat, let the animal find cover, and then go find it, when it's weakened, which is what we did. And even after we started tracking again, we found very little trail, and had to cover ground 2 and 3 times in some places, and circle a lot. He sure didn't run straight, and it took us over 5 hours to find him, finally, in a thicket of muscadine vines, over 3/8 of a mile from where he was hit.

So we had plenty of time to quietly explain differences in etymology of a commonly used word like "lights" to a new deer hunter. In Boyd's world, had Alan literally shot the deer's "lights" (lungs) out, the buck would have dropped with a lot of bloody froth from his nostrils within a few yards of where the shot found him. Instead, for whatever reason, Alan missed a drop shot by more than a foot, and we were lucky to find the animal, after a tough, 4 man search. Still, not the worst first shot from a new hunter I've ever seen, and certianly not the worst Boyd has seen, but it must get old, being Boyd, and watching new guys not quite make shots, and then have to walk down their kills.

But every job has its sucky bits. And Boyd does get paid to go hunting 50 to 60 days a year, counting turkey, deer and game bird seasons.

After we drug the carcass out of the thicket, got it on the 4 wheeler, hauled it back to the lodge, and did the management tag, we field dressed it. We skinned for a head mount, removed the head, and packed the whole thing in ice, pending Alan's decision to have a trophy mount made. Whether he'll want to spend the $600+ for a mount, I don't know. Alan might never go deer hunting again, after all that. John was pretty vivid about tracing the shot path through the carcass with Alan as we gutted it, and Alan looked more than a little green. It might not have been his fault, if his round was tipped by brush, but it was a nearly a gut shot, just nicking the last floating rib, a splinter of which was the only thing that could have damaged the lung, given the mushroom's subsequent deflection towards the flank.

But other than that, we had a good time, and one that will be remembered. I, for one, am sore as hell, stiff, achy and tired, from all the physical exercise. John took a nice 95 pound doe on Monday, with a clean 50 yard head shot from an old lever action .30-30 Winchester using only blade sights, and I sat around on wet ground some, propped back against tree stumps, in camo tarped ground blinds, with my slug gun, looking for a second doe, but none broke cover in range. You could really see the ravages of this summer's drought on the land, even though it rained a bit, Saturday night, while we were there.

Beyond the hunting, we drank too much whisky, and ate too much red meat, and too much bacon and too many sorghum drenched butter biscuits. We watched a little rain-blurred satellite football in the evenings, and stepped out, in the let ups of the rain, for cigars, in cold Georgia late fall nights.