The Rites of Life: First Hunt

By Liz Barry | Audio slideshow by Kim Raff

Steven Browning kneels behind a tangle of leaves and branches, stone-still except for the flick of his eyes as he scans the woods. His father, Anthony Browning, kneels beside him, binoculars pressed to brow.

Today, Nov. 3, is Steven’s first hunt. He has been in the woods since before sunrise.

At 7:35 a.m., nature’s morning hum is jolted by the crunch of dead leaves.




Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Father and son watch and wait. The sound continues for 10 minutes, an unknown creature.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“Daddy, I think I see a deer,” Steven whispers.

Slowly, he raises his rifle. The minutes pass likes hours. Finally, the creature reveals itself.

Squirrel.

Steven exhales, and lowers his rifle. Not yet.

The first hunt

Hunting runs deep in the Browning family of Amherst County. Steven’s grandfather took Steven’s Dad squirrel hunting every Thanksgiving growing up. Dad took up deer hunting on his own as a teenager. Now, he passes the tradition to his sons: Steven and 11-year-old Jonathan.

Hunting reaches back beyond the frontier days, when it was essential to survival. While today the number of hunters is on the decline nationwide, hunting remains an ingrained tradition for thousands of families in Virginia.

More than 250,000 people have active hunting licenses in the state. With no minimum hunting age, the parents are the gatekeepers.

Steven had to wait until 14. That was the rule of his father, a hunter for more than three decades.

Over the years, Anthony taught Steven how to read the woods. Now, Steven can spot deer trails and estimate the size of the deer from a single hoof print. He knows when it’s mating season by the markings bucks leave on tree trunks from rubbing the soft velvet off their antlers.

Steven’s father also passed down his hunting ethos. For Anthony, hunting is more about spending time in nature than killing a deer. When he does shoot one, he uses all the meat and lets nothing go to waste.

Above all, Anthony taught Steven that safety comes first. Once a bullet leaves the gun, it cannot be taken back.

The final step for Steven was getting his hunting license. In October, he passed the state-required hunter’s educa-tion course with 96 on the final test, two questions short of a perfect score. He bought the license yesterday and signed it this morning.

Now the moment has arrived.

For Steven, a freshman at Amherst County High School, the first hunt is a mark of maturity. It gives him the power to end a life with the squeeze of a trigger. It also tests his knowledge of nature and the habits of deer. Most of all, it’s a moment that forges a special bond between him and his father.

Into the woods

Just before 7, Anthony and Steven enter the dark forest, father barely taller than son. Their path is lit by the glow of the moon and a single flashlight.

Their hunting ground is 150 acres of woods on a neighbor’s property, where they have permission to hunt. Yes-terday, the pair surveyed the land, chose an ambush spot and created a nest of camouflage with tree branches and brush.

Anthony and Steven step over a low line of barbed wire and walk down a long hill, kicking up dry leaves. In less than 10 minutes, they reach their spot and take position on the damp ground.

Steven leans against a thin tree trunk and watches the woods, rifle across his lap. He wears a blaze-orange shirt, wool gloves and a knit cap pulled over his long brown bangs. His camo pants are hand-me-downs from his father.

Anthony is propped against an adjacent tree, rifle by his side, puffing a Black & Mild cigar. His face is framed by a green outdoorsman hat and a stubbly gray beard. He wears a fleece jacket and insulated overalls for warmth.

Father and son are hunting with muzzleloaders, antique-style rifles used by Civil War soldiers, old-time mountain men, and folk heroes like Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone. They like the idea of preserving an old tradition, not to mention the adrenaline rush. With muzzleloaders, the stakes are high. Reloading can take more than two minutes. And the blast is loud enough to send a deer running.

Bottom line: You get one shot.

Watch and wait

By 7:30, the light is seeping into the gully. The forest emerges from the shadows in shades of green, yellow and brown.

“Dad, it’s getting lighter now,” Steven whispers.

“You see the sun as it’s hitting the top of the trees? It’s going to get lower on the trees,” Anthony whispers back. “As the sun gets higher in the East, it just kind of brings a whole different view. It kind of makes you appreciate what God gave us. There are too many people who never get to experience this.”

Anthony pauses. “This is what makes life worth living,” he says. “The dawning of a new day.”

The morning settles into the rhythm of the hunt, alternating between silent watching and easy chatter. On watch mode, every sound is amplified: a grumbling stomach, sniffle or zipper. Inevitably, the mood lightens. The pair laughs, shares stories and munches on Cheez-It crackers.

At 8:20, Steven’s body tenses.

“Daddy, daddy, top of the hill, there,” he whispers.

“You see some movement?” Anthony says.

“I see something,” Steven whispers, his eyes fixed on a far-off spot.

The rustling is louder now. The leaves snap and crunch.

A minute passes before Steven breaks the silence. “God, it’s another squirrel.”

One shot

After a lazy two-hour lunch, Steven and his father hit the woods at 2:30 to find a new spot. They discover fresh tracks, and set up watch by a fallen tree with dead brown leaves and branches like crooked elbows. Steven leans against a tree stump, gun on lap. Dad sits a few feet away.

Back to the waiting game.

At 4:05 – nine hours into the hunt – two bucks run across the clearing. Anthony hollers. One deer darts off, the other stops behind a tree and then crosses Steven’s line of fire.

Steven has a clear shot, but does not shoot. He follows the buck with the barrel of his gun; his finger fumbles with the trigger.

Boom. The shot cracks through the air, leaving behind a cloud of smoke.

Two minutes of silence pass as father and son take in the scene.

“I missed,” Steven says.

Steven surveys the ground where the deer was when he shot. He finds hoof prints, but no sign of blood.

“I can’t believe I was pulling the back trigger,” Steven says.

Steven’s rifle has two triggers, a set trigger, which prepares the gun to fire, and a trigger that releases the bullet. During the precious seconds when he had an open shot, Steven pulled the wrong trigger.

Disappointed but not dejected, the pair replay the deer encounter, analyzing the details.

“It was a nice six-pointer,” Steven says.

“It was. It was nice, Steven. Congratulations. I hunted for about six years before I got my first shot,” Anthony says.

The play-by-play continues.

“This deer had no clue we were here,” Anthony says. “This is a good ambush place.”

“Yes, it was,” Steven says. “We ought to come back here.”

“We will.” Anthony says.

The true story

Steven and Anthony wait two more hours for deer, to no avail. At 6, they pack up and head home.

When they pull into the driveway, Steven’s little brother Jonathan dashes across the lawn to greet them.

“I got me a 10-pointer in the back of the truck,” Steven says with a grin.

Jonathan’s face lights up in disbelief. Then the real story comes out -- the morning of squirrels, the two bucks, the wrong trigger, the big shot.

“And he missed a deer,” says his mother, Mona Browning, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” Steven replies. “It was my first deer. Everybody misses their first deer.”

Too young to hunt, Jonathan spent the day making a hand-stitched pouch to carry his essential hunting gear. Right now, it just contains his pocket knife. Jonathan must wait at least two more years until his father will allow him to join his big brother.

As for Steven and his father, they plan to hunt again next weekend.

Steven and his father hunted almost every weekend during hunting season. He has yet to kill his first deer.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it is sickening to use this as an example of a "Rites of Passage". Guns should never be in the hands of a juvenile. This father should be ashamed of himself for teaching his son that killing is some sort of "Rites of Passage". There are plenty of other activities that fathers & sons could partake in that don't involve guns.

Anonymous said...

I think its sad that so many of our young people grow up with no concept of what the circle of life is.
Their only idea of what killing is comes from shooting "pimps and ho's" on some video game.
At least this young man knows nature, how it works, and the very basic fact that death preceeds any meal we sit down to that involves meat.
More people need to understand how nature works and how dangerous guns are.

Anonymous said...

I thought the story was well-written and it should have a place as a Rite of Passage. Even if you, personally, think children should not be hunting - the fact remains that they do and that it is considered a rite of passage for thousands of families in America.

And, frankly, the type of rationalizing that has to occur for people who eat meat to condemn hunting as somehow antithetical to teaching proper values to children is just facetious. "Civilized" people allow other people to do their butchering for them - right?

Now, I personally believe there should not be any private ownership of guns but -- this story doesn't sicken me at all. If anything, it helped me get a glimpse of why people want to preserve hunting in America.