The Joy Hunt Club

“They call me Deerslayer . . . and perhaps I desarve

the name, in the way of understanding the creatur’s habits,

as well as for sartainty in the aim.”

--”The Deerslayer” (1841), by James Fenimore Cooper

*

At dusk on a desolate, storm-blasted marsh, a lone hunter in camouflage--all but indistinguishable amid the mist and swamp grass--draws his bow and releases an arrow into the primordial gloom.

It is a timeless act, ancient as man. All evening, the small sika deer have been moving like spirits, unseen, elusive. The high, keening wails of the bucks arc ghostly across the flats.

Now, the hunter hopes, one will die.

His arrow--a black carbon shaft tipped with a 150-grain, razor-sharp Snuffer broadhead--rattles faintly as it leaves the bow, proceeding at 130 mph toward a curtain of brown reeds.

Has the deer suddenly moved? The hunter--Timothy Forster, 45, a soda-plant supervisor--hopes for a perfect kill, maybe a nice double-lung shot, or a heart shot. A wounded animal could mean hours with a flashlight, following a glistening blood trail across a land of deadly 5-foot snakes and sucking tidal sinkholes.

Or maybe the shot is a clean, humiliating miss. In any case, a hunt that began at dawn is about to climax in one-third of a second--the time it takes an arrow to transit the 20 yards between hunter and prey.

Forster had trekked well before first light to his position beneath a lonesome pine near a trail stamped with fresh deer tracks, carrying in one pocket a tiny bottle of silicon powder to test the wind, and in his hand a classic longbow he’d crafted of American red maple and African bubinga: Weighing a mere 24 ounces, it produces a stunning 58 pounds of thrust at full draw. Though he’d slain many a deer in decades of hunting with rifles and mechanical compound bows, Forster had yet to take one with this more-primitive weapon.

Twice this season he had shot and missed; now, minutes before dark, his third arrow cleaves the air. All day he’d waited in his camouflage suit, motionless as a tree stump but for the glint of his eyes scanning the terrain through a slit in the hood. So effective is the disguise that curious white-tailed deer--the sika’s larger, more-populous brethren--have walked up to Forster, sometimes looked directly at him. At such moments the hunter remains utterly still, unable even to draw his bow because, in the fraction of a second it takes, the deer would bolt and be gone.

Hunt by hunt, season by season, Forster has entered deeper into his strange and ferocious intimacy with the deer, studying their habits and quirks, their “rubs” and “scrapes” and fern-lined beds, their responses to the phases of the moon. He slips in and out of their world unannounced, watches them feed and fight and play and love and die.

Then he eats them, completing a primitive communion with nature that lends hunting the meditative, spiritual dimension so enchanting to serious practitioners. It also, perhaps, accounts for the ambivalence lurking in the hearts of many hunters--shared with society as a whole, but admitted only in private--about killing these beings they adore, whose anguish triggers their empathy, yet whom they yearn to provide with the gift of a quick, clean death.

In his hunting Forster has found great joy, a sense of accomplishment not available elsewhere, a slaking of some prehistoric thirst perhaps, and--not least--the boisterous healing camaraderie among buddies sharing tales of great hunts and bad, monster bucks and broken bows and legendary snorings in the tent--all the jokes and foibles and tender moments accompanying the shared sense of competent all-American machismo that prompted E. B. White’s wry observation in 1941 that Hitler would never have reoccupied the Rhineland if he’d “ever spent a fall in a New England village, watching the bucks go by on the running boards.”

As he shoots, Forster experiences a powerful sensation, the rush familiar to all hunters, as his brain triggers a massive flood of adrenaline. He feels a dizzying thrill, and it takes disciplined self-mastery to steady his trembling limbs as--heart pounding and blood roaring in his ears--he draws, anchors and releases in one seamless, instinctive motion.

The arrow flies.

*

“ ‘Twas an awful mistake to miss that buck!” exclaimed Hurry.

--”The Deerslayer”

“Whack ‘em and stack ‘em!”

So declares Wynn Warren, one of Forster’s high-spirited hunting pals, as the men make their plans one night in the cozy, bright kitchen of the modest Forster home in Shady Side, a village south of Annapolis, Md.

The jokey phrase is their private mantra, inspiring confidence along with the double-fist gesture they execute before parting to enter the woods, for in the end each man hunts alone.

Janice Forster, 38, putters nearby, slightly amused by all this. She’s admittedly a “hunting widow” to a man who calls himself “obsessed. . . . I told her when we got married, ‘I hunt, and I hunt a lot. You gotta accept that.’ ”

She does. Janice, like Tim, is from an upstate New York town where schools closed for the opening of deer season, and hunting was emotional glue for both family and community. Wade, 9, has just hunted for the first time with his dad. Nicole, 13, will race out to meet the truck when he returns from a trip, peering eagerly into the bed of the pickup and chirping, “Did you catch anything?”

“Catch anything,” he’ll say, laughing. “You mean shoot, Nikki?”

As for Warren, 29, a federal lawman, “My wife thinks I’m a lunatic because all I think about is hunting.” Yet, like Janice, Aimee more than plays along; recently she “got another farm” for her husband--meaning she sweet-talked a farmer into letting him hunt on land where deer gobble crops. So far, Warren has six kills (Maryland’s 50,000 bowhunters nailed 13,588 deer last year) to his pal’s zero--though Forster isn’t letting it get him down.

“I’m gonna whack one!” he promises with a grin.

“I told Tim,” Janice interjects cheerfully, “the first one, it’s going to hamburger.” They have their own grinder--he butchers and grinds, she wraps--and a sausage maker, too. The steaks and roasts will come later, with more kills, until the freezers overflow and the men are distributing meat to friends.

Now, as they plan, the stories fly thicker than a winter coat on a buck’s back: deer milling under the trees, but you can’t draw because one’s always looking your way; or racing back and forth playfully right in front of your ground position--but too fast to nail; those crazy gun hunters kneeling on the highway by their car, illegally popping off rounds at distant deer; Warren with his deer call competing with a doe for the attention of her fawn; Forster watching a “bachelor group” of trophy bucks follow a doe in rut--just out of range.

“One time a deer actually challenged me,” Forster recalls. “I was standing against a beech tree in full camouflage and the deer was crossing in front of me, and it noticed me. It turned and looked, and started bobbing its head and pounding its foot. Then it ran at me and prodded, trying to get me to move. I could feel the heat from its breath! It scared me. I didn’t know if the deer was the hunter and I was the hunted. Eventually I had to move to get it to go away. I didn’t shoot. I don’t know why.”

Fox, wild turkeys, owls, ducks, raccoons, deer--Forster loves watching. “They’re all out there doing the same thing I’m doing. A fox will get a mouse, and that’s something to see--how that fox stalks the mouse.”

*

“The creatur’ goes off with gratitude in his heart,”

said Deerslayer, “for natur’ tells him he has escaped

a great danger. You ought to have some of the same feelin’s, Hurry.”

--”The Deerslayer”

Forster is a big, exuberant guy with a ready grin and a can-do attitude, clearly comfortable with himself and life. He radiates a natural, sincere integrity more reminiscent of Cooper’s woodland moralist, the Deerslayer Natty Bumppo, than, say, Robert De Niro’s noble but embittered Vietnam vet in “The Deer Hunter.”

He grew up in the village of North Collins, one of eight children of a locomotive engineer. Forster was mechanically adept from the start and, after vocational high school--a sports injury had kept him out of the military--he rose through a series of cannery and bottling jobs.

He began hunting in earnest in his early 20s, experiencing--in his own way--what environmental biologist Ann Causey calls a “mixture of elation and remorse, of thrill and regret [as] participation in death . . . connects the hunter so intensely and immediately to life.” In her view, taking pleasure in killing game is “not a moral issue at all, because the urge itself is an instinct.”

Forster concurs. He finds “always a little remorse when an animal loses its life, especially a large buck like the ones on my wall. It’s sad, but exciting. . . . Was it a quick kill, or a drag-on kill? That bothers you for a couple days, because they make a noise [when wounded], and they’re like anything else--you know it hurts when you spine-shoot them.

“I’m not a killer,” he continues in his earnest way. “I’m a seasoned hunter. I don’t just kill things for fun. . . . The kill, it’s just something in me that heightens my excitement. I experience good feelings. I’m no psychopath. I know right from wrong. I couldn’t easily snuff a human--unless my family was threatened . . . . “

At 5:40 a.m., he pulls in next to a cluster of pickup trucks.

Men in hunting dress move in the shadows. “Hunted the hardwoods three days,” one says. “Didn’t see a thing.”

*

“They can’t accuse me of killing an animal when there

is no occasion for the meat or the skin. I may be a slayer,

it’s true, but I’m no slaughterer.”

--”The Deerslayer”

James Fenimore Cooper’s tough but sensitive homespun hero--and what’s Natty if not the frontier original of every do-gooding tough guy from Sheriff Will Kane to Travis McGee?--was created partly in reaction to a European hunting tradition in which nobles and royals slaughtered for sport while commoners had their hands chopped off for poaching. In America, as with nearly everything, hunting became largely the province and glory of the common man.

“I grew up on venison,” Janice Forster recalls. “My dad hunted with his dad, my brother hunted with my dad, then I married Tim and he hunted with my dad and brother. In fact, when they’d all go hunting, there were days when we’d have three deer to cut up.

“There’d be 20 people in the kitchen and the women and children would watch the men cut up the meat. . . . We’d wrap it and there was always a big frying pan going on the stove with butter, and the children stood there waiting for the hot pieces of meat. . . .

“We couldn’t cook it fast enough.”

“Mom!” calls Wade, still in camouflage from his hunt with his father that morning--his first ever--”Guess what time I had to wake up?” He tells her they saw “hundreds of deer tracks,” but no deer.

She smiles appreciatively.

Why should Janice care about the quirks of European tradition, or the current anthropological disputes over whether hunting is instinctual or learned?

Janice has her man. He’s a good husband and father. He hunts.

“I’m proud of him,” she says. “The pictures of him and his deer, I take them to work.”

She’s got a husband who doesn’t watch football or baseball but goes into the backyard and practices on a full-size buck target, or works in his shed making longbows, just like when he was a kid--except that these go for $300 and are handsome enough to show in an art gallery.

“A lot of women, their husbands gamble and drink,” Janice says. “I say, ‘At least I know where my husband is. He’s out in the woods!’ ”

Janice tried hunting a few times with her husband but, she recalls good-humoredly, “I never saw a thing. I got ate up by mosquitoes once, and froze the two other times.”

*

“The Delawares have given me my name, not so much on account of a bold heart, as . . . a quick eye, and an actyve foot.”

--”The Deerslayer”

In the dusky marsh, Forster’s arrow flies toward a sika doe feeding in a stand of reeds.

For much of the past hour, the deer had been close by, unaware of the hunter’s presence. Forster had heard a twig snap and glimpsed part of her head--but that was enough.

Inch by inch, she’d moved nearer. Inch by inch, he’d positioned himself for the shot--moving his bow up, checking the arrow was firmly nocked, flexing his fingers, planting his feet.

Tensing, crouching, watching--he’d been ready. All was quiet but for the occasional wail of a sika buck.

Then the doe moved, suddenly presenting a shootable though still imperfect target. She was 20 yards away, with much of her body visible, yet quartered with her head toward him rather than away.

This is problematical for a bowhunter because an arrow entering a deer’s body at the perfect spot behind the shoulder has a better chance of penetrating both lungs if angled slightly from behind.

Nevertheless, not wanting to lose his chance, Forster drew and anchored.

Then he held. Holding a powerful bow at full draw without trembling is a feat, and even a strong man like Forster can keep steady for only a few seconds.

“Please,” he said to himself, “let her turn.”

As if she’d heard, the doe turned--a perfect target.

He shot.

The arrow strikes with a resounding whack, followed by a mad thrashing as the wounded deer gallops in a wide arc.

In 20 seconds, the noise stops abruptly.

“I whacked her!” Forster roars. “She went down! That deer is down!”

He’s so excited, he’s dancing. Another hunting pal, Michael Welch, hearing the commotion, appears.

“Hey, Mike, I whacked one! Man, I’m so pumped!”

It’s almost dark. Flashlights come out. Forster follows the white string tracker attached to his arrow that had unreeled from a spool on his gear. It will lead him to the carcass.

Forster returns, dragging the doe.

“Oh, man! I got her through both lungs. It’s a perfect shot! That’s a huge doe, 60 pounds easy. When I hit her, she went berserk!”

It takes him a while to calm down.

“My first deer with a longbow. I am so proud!”

He unsheathes his Wyoming knife and guts the animal.

Back at camp, the doe--sleek and elegant even in death--lies in the back of the pickup, ready to go to town where Forster will register the kill, as required by law.

But first, he pulls out his cell phone and dials.

“Hey, honey, guess what? I whacked one!”