(Note to alert readers: You are very much welcome here. It seems ironic that, when I was a professional typist with high scores on speed and accuracy, the early Toshiba Satellite laptops demonstrated conclusively how much even I could benefit from having the right sort of keyboard...and now I have a new Toshiba Satellite, with two keyboards, a built-in one that makes accurate typing impossible for me and a plug-in one that makes it very difficult. Google automatically checks for spelling and grammar. No computer program catches everything. If you spot a typo, please mention it in the comments. You will be thanked and your blog will be visited.)
Title: Treestand Strategies and Techniques
Author: Gene & Barry Wensel
Date: 1997
Publisher; North American Hunting Club
ISBN: 0-91-4697-92-7
Length: 180 pages plus 7-page index
Illustrations: full-color photos
Quote: “If there’s anything that will test your patience and your convictions about your own hunting abilities, it’s sitting ina cramped, uncomfortable, possibly cold, possibly buggy treestand. Yet if your goal is to take a buck, a really big buck, then no other hunting technique turns the odds in your favor like stand hunting.”
The thing this book does not tell me about deer hunting is why. It’s full of credible “how,” but not “why.” In fact it’s sort of self-defeating. (I got several of my books from other people, yes.) When I look at gorgeous close-up pictures of deer, I’m not a sentimental little girl from the city. I know I’m looking at animals who are more panic-prone than they are “gentle,” who don’t eat meat but who can easily slice your skin and break your bones with their cute little hooves, and they will, too, in defense of their “right” to eat all the low-growing fruit and new wood in your orchard, if you don’t make them run from you. If you get close enough to see a big buck deer (an adult male) in this detail, in real life, something is wrong. Deer can get rabies; they can get chronic wasting disease, which is similar to mad cow disease. If they let you look into their big brown eyes, in real life, at best they’re somebody’s spoiled pets who may want to fight for the title to the orchard; more likely they have some sort of horrible disease, no longer care what happens to them, and can spread that disease to you. Also they carry the kind of ticks that carry Lyme Disease. Deer are bad news and if you normally see them bounding away when you shout at them, it’s easy to keep this fact in mind. But when I look at the pictures in this book, I think, oh dear, deer are such cute, lovable-looking animals. In pictures, they are.
Deer are normally deathly afraid of humans. This is as it should be. If they weren’t afraid of humans they’d be likely to trample our children and grandmothers. They’re wary of fire, which is a good reason to light one every day or two. They think we, and our clothes, and our hair, smell disgusting, which is a good reason to hang laundry to dry on the fence around the orchard and scatter hair clippings around the boundary.
Or if you get angry enough at these pests you can just shoot them. It’s legal to shoot adult male deer in autumn. Population counts determine the length of buck hunting season and may determine the amount of deer you can legally “harvest” from year to year. People who are old enough to rationalize that chronic wasting disease takes several years to develop say that deer taste good when they’re cooked the right way. So I can see why people might want to shoot deer...but not why they’d want to shoot deer after reading a book full of pictures of the biggest, fastest, sassiest deer.
Male White-Tailed Deer, the species that are native to most of North America, are called bucks. They’re smart, tough, bold, wiry, and fast. I’ve seen cases of pure, dumb buck luck, as when one amoral man moved into a law-abiding neighborhood, where the big buck would still run away if you stamped and shouted at him but would stand and watch you pass by on the road, ten yards away, while he grazed in the woods. As an old (by deer standards) “trophy” buck, he knew he could be as annoying as he wanted to be up to the second week of November, when he would lead the way to what are locally called “the higher elevations.” One day the amoral man saw the big buck watching the man’s truck roll by. He stepped on the foot brake and shot out the window. By the time he’d opened the door the buck had rolled down the hillside, dead, and was lying right at his door. But that kind of thing happens once in a neighborhood in a generation. Female deer, the does, don’t stick close to the males or have any reason to miss them, but in some way they warn their sons. Deer don’t stand in the woods and watch people pass by any more.
Buck hunters go to all sorts of ridiculous lengths to shoot a buck with a particularly attractive “rack” of antlers. There are competitions for the biggest buck and the most interesting antlers. Hunters get to keep and eat the venison, give it to people they owe favors, or donate it to local food banks. So otherwise rational men spend days freezing or sweating, hiding behind trees, sometimes avoiding human company and soaking their boots in bottled deer urine to disguise their human odor, clutching rifles or bows, watching for another chance to kill a wary buck.
In their eagerness they often shoot does, and have been known to shoot stray cows, or dogs, or one another, by mistake. They couldn’t get a proper look but they shot in the direction of a good-sized animal crunching through the leaves and hoped it was a deer. “Wear loud colors, and talk or sing as you walk, so as not to be mistaken for deer,” Dad used to warn my brother and me. Orange, chartreuse, and cobalt blue are considered the best loud colors to wear for this purpose, as many hunters don’t see red as a bright color. Somewhere my brother got hold of a construction worker’s orange hard hat, a useful thing to wear in the woods just in case a careless hunter, fleeing deer, or gust of wind sends a dead tree limb in your direction. Many people resent needing to wear such ugly things in the woods, and therefore resent hunters, and carry on about what a bad thing hunting is.
The trouble with those people is that I suspect, if they ever became hungry, most of them would be the first to crave red meat and the first to pound on the door of anyone who had preserved any primitive hunting skills, demanding a share of his venison.
So, for those who want to preserve primitive hunting skills, here is a book by two brothers who have devoted a lot of time to the most attractive kind of primitive hunting, watching for deer in “stands” ten or fifteen feet up a tree. Their inner children of the past were ten-year-olds whose “wound” was not getting to spend enough time in tree forts. (To that part I can relate.) The Wensels admit that “there is no big secret,” that “how you hunt...isn’t nearly so important as where you hunt,” but they’ve shot a lot of bucks and had a lot of fun in their adult-sized movable tree forts.
They give tips on what to look for as evidence of deer activity, where deer ret at night, browse for food, hide from the humans they expect will be hunting them. The successful hunter lurks in places where the deer don’t expect him to be, which is where the treestands come in. The Wensels describe different kinds of treestands. Their preference is for movable types that do relatively little damage to trees. Though outdoor gear adds bulk that makes skinny guys look fat, the brothers admit that at least one of them has some experience hanging and climbing ladders while being fat: “Without spare platforms to stand on while erecting a stand, fat guys need about three more hands,” but they’ve worked out a system that makes setting up their stands efficient for them.
Some “nudging” of the quarry is considered ethical in many hunt clubs. The brothers describe tricks like moving brush to make it easier for deer to follow the path to water that passes below the treestand, or adding strands of cheap material to fences to make it look easier for deer to jump a fence at the desired point.
The kind of questions they get from novices (which are the kind of easy questions women are likely to think it’s “nice” to ask) drive the Wensels to the point of using Army language. “Someone will say...``”I see him a couple times every year but I haven’t bagged him yet. What am I doing wrong?’ Chances are very good the hunter isn’t doing anything wrong...[I]f the guy is seeing a monster buck several times a season, he’s doing something very right!” Part of the hunting experience is waiting. While the rain drips into the treestand, and late-flying mosquitoes whine around the back of your neck, and a tiny pebble works its way up into your coveralls and thence down into your boot. The waiting is part of a good hunting story but it’s the part some impatient kids like to forget.
“Passing up legal deer,” the brothers remind hunters, “can also become a learning skill...Watching deer is a very important educational implement.” It’s also the way to get all those gorgeous photos. The secret to amassing a book-sized collection of good clear snapshots is to snap about twenty times as many shots as the book needs and print only the top five percent. The Wensels took 15 of the photos in this book and credit 16 other photographers with the 78 others. Still, that’s a lot of pictures—some of landscapes or hunters, and some of live deer.
While warning that there are no universal rules about gear or magical purchases that guarantee success, the brothers briefly discuss the types of clothes, hats, gloves, lights, etc., that work for them. They don’t recommend brands and don’t get into any discussion of bows or guns—that would be a different book.
My copy of Treestand Strategies and Techniques was discarded by a local library because, after ten years of enthusiastic use, it was beginning to fall apart. It was rebound, but one page is lost forever. It’s still worth the dollar a local person would pay. If you order it online you’ll get a copy in better condition. This book was designed to stand being carried around in a truck, with glossy mildew-resistant paper (the better to show all those color pictures) and a leather-look cover.
It’s no substitute for your own hunting experience—as the brothers are the first to tell you. The instructions that come with a treestand can tell you exactly which kind of screw goes into which hole and whether you have to buy it separately, but no book can possibly predict what the deer are going to do in response to the weather conditions on the nineteenth of November. You might happen to have a friend who could tell you as much as this book can, possibly more, and possibly even with more useful information, due to having more local experience. Then again, you might not, and in that case, the book would be the next best thing.
Anyway, as the history of my copy shows, there are times when through no fault of his own a fellow is required to report on a full-length book in order to get into the next grade level’s English class next year...and at such times a book like this is useful. The student might find it more interesting than David Copperfield or Crime and Punishment. The choice of this book for a report might give a teacher a sense of how different from the student the teacher is and why the teacher should leave him alone. On the other hand, there’s always some chance that a report on a book like this one might give the teacher some empathy with the student. You never know. In any case a lot of high school students have appreciated this book.
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