First Hunt

Young bowhunters learn what they owe their quarry.

by Travis Stewart

Photography by Bruce Kluckhohn

The seven young hunters from John Glenn Archery Club started the 2002 bow season perfectly. After months spent learning the fundamentals of archery, hunting ethics, and wildlife management, these city kids were ready to go.

The students, parent chaperones, and I gathered at the middle-school parking lot on Friday afternoon. Then we drove about 28 miles to cabins in the 1,200-acre Wilder Forest, where we had earned permission to hunt by putting in long hours brushing trails, stacking firewood, and fixing fences during the summer.

The next morning the hunters dressed in the dark and headed down the trail like a wagon train. We were going to hunt in a mixed hardwood forest bordered by cornfields and high-grass pasture. The landscape and the cool, overcast morning set the stage for the students to experience bowhunting at its best.

I dropped the students off one by one at 12-foot ladder stands. I enjoyed watching the erratic line of figures, flashlights in hand, making their way through the gray light that hinted of the coming day. They reminded me of my brothers and me being led by our father on our first hunt.

Sense of the World

I’m a science teacher at John Glenn Middle School in Maplewood. As a farm kid, I spent most of my free time in the woods. Stump shooting, hunting, and exploring were the ways I learned about my world. I never imagined I would some day be teaching in an urban school district, where many students get their sense of the world through paint ball, video games, or other virtual activities. These activities rarely help children define the relationships that connect them to the natural world. The students believe that food comes from the grocery store and heat comes from the furnace–notions Aldo Leopold, father of modern conservation, warned against.

My conviction that children need to get involved in activities that foster conservation and expose them to the cycles of life led me to create the John Glenn Archery Club. I received support from the North Country Bowhunters Chapter of the Safari Club, Bwana Archery of Little Canada, the Footed Shaft of Rochester, and other groups.

For club members who wanted to try bowhunting, I taught the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources— sponsored bowhunter education class. The course introduced them to ethical practices, wildlife management, and the public’s perception of hunting. They learned hunting skills and the expectations bowhunters place on themselves as they represent the hunting community. This weekend at Wilder was the culmination of the archery club experience–a chance for these youths to put into action what they had learned.

Real Hunt

Shortly after all seven hunters were settled in their stands, our real hunting adventure began. Adam, a dark-haired 14-year-old who had been shaking the sleep from his eyes when I left him at his stand earlier that morning, took a broadside shot on a doe at 10 yards. As he had been instructed, Adam noted the location of the deer as it sprinted out of sight. Then he waited for the deer to either die or bed down. After about 30 minutes, Adam returned to the cabin for help.

The archers and I assembled at the cabin, then hiked to the place from which hunting stories would be spun for years to come. As we hiked, the young hunters asked Adam to tell and retell the events that led up to the shot. They all wanted to see the site where the first shot had been taken.

I stopped the group 50 yards short of the stand and instructed Adam to walk ahead with a strip of orange flagging tape and tie it to a branch hanging over the spot where the doe had been standing when shot. With a second piece of tape, Adam marked the last place he had seen the doe as it ran away.

Now the young hunters would begin to develop their tracking skills. We organized ourselves into four groups. The first group would track the deer on the trail. The second would stay at the last sign. The other two groups would advance on either side as scouts for more signs of the wounded deer. I instructed everyone not to walk on any tracks, blood, feces, or other sign because we might need to backtrack. Then we began the most important part of the hunt–to track until we either found the deer or lost all sign. That is what we, as hunters, owe our quarry.

Follow the Trail

The trail was easy to follow at first. Big drops were abundant, and a few small areas of sprays were found. I could feel the tension build in the students; it was all I could do to keep them focused on their tasks.

As with many arrowed deer I had tracked, the doe probably had no idea what had hit her. Her surprise was indicated by the 50-yard-diameter circle she made downwind. She had stopped behind a deadfall with a good vantage point of the area where she had been hit, probably to look for the source of her confusion.

I gathered the group at this point and explained why the shooter should stay silent and still for at least 30 minutes after the shot. The doe had circled and watched the place where she had been hit. If she had heard or seen Adam, she might have run farther, making tracking much more difficult.

The trackers examined two dark puddles of blood, one on each side of the tracks leading up to this spot. It had been a pass-through shot, which leaves a clear trail and thus means easier tracking.

We found places where the deer had run through the brush, leaving blood on branches on both sides of the path. From these clues, we were piecing together a movie in our mind’s eye of what had happened after the shot.

The blood also provided evidence of where the arrow had struck the deer. If it had hit heart or lungs, the blood would be bright red and foamy, and the deer would die soon. Instead, it was dark and thick and had stomach contents in it. As we stopped to talk over this new evidence, Adam grew more concerned. The best we could hope was that the arrow had pierced the liver or severed a large artery so the deer would not suffer long.

As we moved on and found more clues, we revised our vision of what had happened. The trail began to get sparse. Drops were now 10 yards apart and the size of small peas, instead of a yard apart and the size of quarters.

As we crested a hill in a long pasture, the tracks seemed to lead to a pine row about 50 yards ahead. I decided we should stop and let the animal lie down and die. After two and a half hours of tracking, we returned to the cabin.

Continuing Pursuit

During lunch we compared opinions about what had happened and what to do next.

The students reminded one another of the things they had learned and the skills they had practiced earlier. I tried to be a silent observer, only giving advice when I saw an obvious error in judgment or wanted to remind them of a technique or clue they might have overlooked.

The final decision was to track the deer until we found it where it had bedded down, we lost the blood trail, or we found it dead. We reassembled where we had marked the last sign of blood with orange flagging tape, and began to make our way down the trail again.

The young hunters found drops of blood on the underside of leaves, on single blades of grass, soaked into dry sand. After three more hours of tracking, we had covered only 300 more yards. The students were surprised by the twists, turns, backtracks, and generally haphazard trail the deer had made.

With so many people in such close quarters, I was afraid the trail might be damaged or erased if the deer made some more fancy maneuvers. We stopped and discussed the matter. We had committed five and a half hours to our quarry so far.

We decided Adam, one parent, and Katie, our best tracker, should keep tracking it. They had a good chance of finding the doe with Katie on her trail. Katie seemed to be able to sense where the next sign was going to be found, sometimes 30 yards from the last sign.

The tracking threesome fared better than I had expected. They tracked the doe into a wooded area about 80 yards wide. When they neared the far side, the doe jumped, stood, watched them for about two seconds, and bounded off. They marked the place where she bedded and returned to the cabin to gear up and hunt with the rest of us. The threesome had put in another hour and a half of tracking.

Live the Code

That night we discussed what to do about tracking the next morning. A few of the students expressed frustration and a desire to give up. Before I could respond, the rest of the hunters started talking about how we needed to follow up to show respect for the doe, to serve the hunting community with pride, and to exemplify the hunter’s code of ethics–the rules we follow that go beyond the legal guidelines.

As I sat and listened, I got chills up my spine. It made me proud to be a part of these young hunters’ first season. All my preparation, time away from home, and money out of pocket seemed worthwhile when I heard young hunters voice opinions to one another about respect, the code, and the responsibility we should all take toward hunting and life in general.

I thought about all those who had questioned the purpose of this youth archery hunt and doubted the life lessons it could teach. If they could have been there, they would have been inspired by the thoughts and actions of those young people. Now the students understood firsthand the need to respect the animal, the patience it takes to make the right shot, and the commitment they make as they release an arrow.

We tracked the next morning for another two hours. We lost the trail and finally had to admit we would not find this deer. Altogether we had spent more than eight hours tracking.

The experience stirred up an age-old philosophy in the hearts and minds of those young hunters. It is a philosophy that should be developed in hunters and nonhunters alike. Three decades ago a man named Fred Bear helped rekindle the sense of deep respect and fellowship that bowhunting offers. This woodsman urged others to "live the code." On this amazing weekend, these students started to develop and live a code of ethics that will stay with them as they become part of the bowhunting community.

Seventh-grade science teacher Travis Stewart created an archery program to help teach students to be responsible, ethical hunters who serve their community.