The Last Buck

The following column won the first place “serious” award from the National Newspaper Association for weekly papers under 10,000 circulation in 1988:

General hunting season opened this past Sunday in Montana, but I worked in the yard. If someone told me in 1940, 1950, or even 1960, that a time would come when a still healthy George would not take down his rifle on “openin’ day”. I’d have called him teched. After shooting my first deer in 1938 at age 10, I lived for hunting. Fishing kept me alive between big game seasons.

The walls of my den hold a cherished few trophies from some of those days but most of my hunting was done before I had money to get any mounts or rugs made. At least 200 hunts live only in my mind, but they are all there, the cold mornings, coffee over a campfire, the huge buck that simply vanished from an open meadow, the banter and wondrous tall tales around a pot-bellied stove, and the big ones on the pole. Many of the best times produced no meat or trophy racks, but the driving force was still the ultimate, skillful, and successful use of the gun.

I’ve often thought about the turning point … the one event when something happened to irrevocably change my youthful devotion to “the stalk, the aim, and the shot.”

Nov. 22nd of 1964 was a Sunday, the last day of hunting season. I had passed up several large bucks and at least one good bull elk, waiting for something bigger. For that final day I had the place picked where I knew one of the largest whitetails in the world hung out, and I planned to be up there before daylight. Just as I was preparing for bed on the 21st, Hal Kanzler called and asked me to go with him to the east side of Glacier Park to photograph bighorn sheep the next morning. My first reaction was one of disbelief, “How could any true man of the west miss the last day of big game season … to go take pictures?”

Besides being a persuasive salesman and a helluva mountaineer, Hal Kanzler was a man I admired and enjoyed being with, so daybreak found me somewhat reluctantly struggling through snow at the foot of Mt. Henkel instead of stalking the biggest whitetail in Montana. I was carrying one of Hal’s cameras in place of a rifle, and the temperature was hugging zero. The climbing was lung searing tough, and if we advanced the chilled film in our Exactas too fast, it tore loose from the spool sprockets. Our lunches froze solid except for some soup in a thermos bottle. The wind howled constantly and penetrated our clothes, numbed our faces, and froze our fingers. We had to find protected places on the exposed cliffs to build little fires to keep from freezing to death.

It was one of the most rewarding and exciting days I’d ever known in the mountains. We saw major ram fights, including one where loser got butted right off the top of a cliff, three younger rams ganged up on a big full curl, the scenery was magnificent, and I discovered a challenging new world through the ground glass of a 400 millimeter camera lens.

The last game animal I killed was about 10 years ago when I was casually sitting at the mouth of a brushy draw in southeast Montana. Youngest son Clark had earlier bagged his first buck and we both had walked on the clouds. Now he was trying for a double by sneaking down that draw, just before sunset. Suddenly I heard a deer coming at a high run and a four point whitetail broke cover 50 feet away then whirled and started up a side hill to my left. Without really thinking about it, I threw up the old 30.06 and touched one off. The fat young buck cartwheeled down the slope and my dominate emotion was not elation, but anger at myself for shooting. It wasn’t a trophy animal, I hadn’t really earned it, and we didn’t need the meat so I was left with nothing. Later that night, before I dropped off to sleep, I decided a true hunter must have honest emotion, “the fire.” To shoot something just to be shooting something is wrong.

I’ve gone hunting a few times since then, but it was only to be “in the woods,” enjoy the companionship of my fellow man, and to relive those times when the excitement of the hunt was the pulse of life.

In the last dozen years I’ve shot four huge whitetail bucks, a half dozen massive bugling bull elk including a giant 7 pointer, several Boone and Crockett bighorn rams, five or six timber wolves on the Athabasca River, trophy mule deer, a record class antelope, unnumbered mountain goats, a few grizzly and black bears, a wolverine, pine marten, and hundreds of lesser critters. Never had to gut, drag out, or skin one of ‘em. Merely dropped them into a Kodak carousel.

There is one little thing that still bothers me a bit. Perhaps there is nothing philosophical about my leaving the rifles in the rack. What if in my old age … I’ve only gotten lazy?

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.