Did You Know? - Deer Hunting

The Vermont Folklife Archive is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England—past and present. In “Did You Know?” we share these stories with you. We're in the midst of deer hunting season, a common pastime in Vermont, so this month, we bring you a look into the hunter's world. Whether or not you are a hunter yourself, we hope you find these stories and personal reflections illuminating, heartfelt and sometimes humorous as our Associate Archivist Susan Creighton did when she listened to these interviews.

Although not as central as it once was, hunting remains an important part of Vermont culture, whether out of necessity, for enjoyment of the outdoors or both. In this installment of “Did You Know?” we'll hear from two different long-time hunters: Prentiss Dwinell of Marshfield, VT, and Doug Lawrence of Braintree, VT.

Prentiss Dwinell grew up hunting and trapping, learning from his father, mother, and older brother. In August 1998, he was interviewed by late VT Folklife folklorist Greg Sharrow as part of the Henderson Collection of interviews about hunting and fishing. By that time, Prentiss had stopped hunting, so he talks about the important place that hunting had in his earlier life. Here, he talks about growing up in a hunting culture:

GS When you were a kid hunting was something everybody did?

PD Everybody did it. It was something everybody did. Come November, everything shut down, you couldn’t even get your carburetor fixed for crying out loud on the first opening day of deer hunting. There was no garages open. They were hunting. Ha! Ha! Ha! The storekeeper was open, but that was about it. 

GS Um hum.

PD Yeah. If you had trouble with your furnace, forget it. The furnace man’s gone to deer camp. If you had a water leak, well, he’ll be back in a week. It’s true.

GS Yeah.

PD Everybody took off. Everybody took off. They might not leave town, but they were up early in the morning, and they were gone all day, so they were unreachable. So, you planned for that. You kind of planned for that. You didn’t realize it until you got older, but you planned for that. You knew that people weren’t gonna be around. You just knew it. They’re gonna be gone, you know, what is it, sixteen days. Most of them would be gone for at least a week. The second week they’d kind of drift back and open up shop and get things going. You know. Beginning to wear out. Tire of it, or whatever. Or else they hadn’t seen a Goddamn thing, so sick of it. You know. Yeah.

Doug Lawrence grew up in Rochester and Mendon, and was also an avid hunter from a young age. When he was a boy, his father taught a marksmanship course at The Mendon Fish and Game Club, and Doug spent time there learning to safely handle a gun, to shoot, and rules of responsible hunting. In June 1997, Greg Sharrow interviewed Doug to learn more about his early experiences.

GS Did you do target shooting?

DL We did for a while. The Mendon Fish and Game club was plugged in to a—I think it was not in the National Rifle Association, there was a Civilian Firearms Authority back in the 60's, something like that, or the early 70's, that was a federal program to promote marksmanship in the civilian populations. And they provided the club with firearms and one set of firearms they provided were Winchester match grade 22 rifles. And my father was into marksman and shepherding us, so he used to run the marksmanship course. So, I used to shoot on the, we didn't have a team, but we shot weekly throughout the summer there. But mostly we just plinking at, make your own targets, make your own prize type of thing. 

GS So this was something you weren't alone in interest in firearms and interest in hunting, there were other kids. 

DL Yes, that was my entertainment, that was everybody's entertainment. Out of grade school, I can't remember anybody that didn't have an interest in it. It was universal, that was what you did in the fall. And the luckiest kids, their fathers would actually pull them from school to go to deer camp. Some of the unlucky kids I remember them getting deer while they were in school and come to school and say I got my deer yesterday. Say you did? [Laughs] You were sitting beside me. Oh yeah, dad helped a little.

As part of learning to hunt as boys, both Prentiss and Doug were taught guidelines for safe and responsible hunting by their family members, lessons both men took to heart. 

Here, Prentiss talks about another aspect of responsible hunting: not wasting what the animal has provided to you.

I used to get a deer of course, every once in a while, I’d get a deer. But … my dad always got a deer. My brother always got a deer. Sometimes my mother would get a deer. You know, we had deer meat for crying out loud, we were swimming in it. And my mother always, of course, canned it or froze it or whatever she had to do. Put it up for winter, you know, we ate it, because the philosophy was in our house: you kill it, you eat it. You know, we didn’t give it away or throw it away or throw it down over the bank or anything like that, or let it go bad, so we always had plenty of deer meat. You know. What the hell, if I got a deer, well it’s just one more deer we got to eat.

Another aspect of responsible hunting involves only taking animals that are legal to harvest. Doug recalls his first encounters with a deer as a teen, and worrying about whether his quarry was legal to shoot.

I guess I told you before. The first hour of the first day I ever hunted in which I had a firearm in my hands, it was my father's he handed me, I had an opportunity to take one. And I was so worried, I thought I'd seen horns. Playing back the tape in my mind now I know I did. But at that time, my father was very strict on obeying the rules no matter what. I was terrified with the idea of misidentifying the deer and shooting one that wasn't legal. And so, the deer stopped with his head behind a tree so I couldn't see that anymore, I could see the rest of the deer, could have killed it a thousand times. But I kept looking at it. I had the gun, my father could see around the tree, and he kept saying it's got horns, and I kept saying I don't think so. So, we did that for maybe 30 seconds, and finally it went over the hill and my cousin shot it. And sure did. [Laughs]. 

So that was when I was, I guess, 13 or 14. I didn't see another deer with antlers while I was hunting until I was 18, and I finally shot one in Mendon there in between Pico and Killington. So it was a stretch of at least 5 years of seeing deer almost on a daily basis. But back then the deer herd was managed, they were harvesting bucks only. And the herd was about like it is today, probably 20 or 30 or 40 does per every adult buck. So, seeing deer was easy, seeing one that you could harvest took some luck in addition to everything else. I'd finish normal season having seen probably 30 or 40 deer, nothing that I could legally shoot. So, there was some frustration there.

Something these interviews make clear is the reverence these hunters have for the natural world, and how an integral part of hunting is being out in—and simply observing—nature. In addition, both reflect on the transmission of hunting knowledge across generations and the ways children learn the ways of the woods.

Prentiss says:

One thing is the biggest percentage of the population that lives here in Vermont today are probably not deer hunters. Right. And deer hunting is not something that you can learn by listening to a tape or reading a book, it’s something that you learn by hunting with a hunter that really knows what he’s doing. And from my perspective growing up in a family of hunters, now Barrett’s father, mother, brother, and hunting with a friend whose father was a deer hunter, and he had a couple of brothers, his father had a couple of brothers who were hell of a deer hunters. And, a, you learn by listening to hunters, and you learn by starting out this high as a kid. And you learn by watching and observing. I mean we used to go in the summertime, we used to go and sit beside the road with field glasses, my dad and I and my brother and my mother. And we’d watch deer. Late in the afternoon and into the early evening, we’d watch deer. We’d set there and watch them. My dad would say, “There’s something over there in the woods behind that deer, I can see there’s something, either another animal or a human being or something over there in the woods behind that deer.” And I said to my dad, “How do you know?” He said, “Watch his ears. He keeps flicking his ears, and he keeps looking back, and he stamps his feet, and he keeps looking back.” 

See, you learn by watching. For a kid to learn how to be a deer hunter, a kid—and I think it’s sad that kids don’t know how to hunt from their parents. You know, it has a lot to do with human beings in civilization, we pass these skills on down for centuries and centuries and centuries, and some of them we keep, you know, survival instincts and stuff like that, we keep as we go along, but I think hunter and gatherers by and large, we’re no longer hunters and gatherers. We've really moved away from that. And if you lose those instincts, or if you lose that transformation of that from one generation to another to another to another, you got to start out from scratch. You got to have somebody that knows what the hell they’re doing.

Doug says:

In the hunter’s safety program, they identify phases of the sportsman. Initially, you start out without skills or knowledge or anything like that. Your ultimate goal is to bring home the game. And then they identify a next skill level where you acquire the physical skills and knowledge, and then you bring home quantities to prove your prowess. And then the next stage, they talked about Method Stage where you want to challenge yourself, and so you may take up a more precise or difficult method of doing that such a thing, such as archery hunting or fly fishing instead of worm fishing. And then the final stage that they identify is one in which you probably enjoy better taking a young person out and showing them the ways of the woods instead of actually doing it yourself. And yeah, I think the people that really enjoy it–I mean, if you have to get a deer to have fun, how many days are you going to be happy when you're deer hunting? And you do meet some people that are that way. And the problem is that hunting is called a sport and it's not a sport, you know; it's a solemn act. Other sports, baseball, basketball, football, you attempt to score points, and you attempt to win over an opponent. At least in my mind that hunting can't be, is not such that it can be quantified in that way. It's heritage that relives the hunter-gatherer skills that we come from. Some people are extremely removed from those, and some like me aren't. I don't think I'm all that different than people were a couple hundred years ago in that respect.

These two interviews are just a small part of many other interviews in our collection in which Vermonters discuss hunting, trapping, and their relationship with the natural world. Check out other VT Folklife work related to these topics here on our website.