The Deer Slayer

My hometown is Northbrook, Illinois. Northbrook is located about 20 miles north of Chicago and about 4 miles to the west of Lake Michigan. I grew up with 80 acres of woods across the street. It is officially a county forest preserve, but to us it was just "the woods".

The woods were ours. Oh sure there were big wooden signs proclaiming that they belonged to the citizens of Cook County, but in reality we owned them. My childhood friends and I oversaw this wild place. We knew every square inch and spent a great deal of our time as kids playing there.

These woods were my introduction to nature. They were a place of big oak trees, ponds, marshes, and open prairies. The wildlife living there included deer, raccoons, and frogs. Some of the large oak trees had been there for hundreds of years. The rest of our wilderness apparently was farm land just 40 years or so before my friends and I arrived on the scene.

The place now is called Somme Prairie Grove. It is an intensely managed conservation area. Brush cutting parties, weeding, seeding, and controlled burns are the activities of the day. There are now maps of the area with history attached to them. One of the history tales is of an infamous deer slayer who hid in a perch in an old oak tree waiting to bag his trophy buck. They discovered the remnants of his tree stand when their mission of conservation began back in the 1990's. It is a fascinating myth. How do I know?

My friend and I carried the 2x4's out there to those two oaks and built a triangle viewing perch in adjacent trees high above the woods floor. There we surveyed our kingdom until we grew tired of our woods and moved on to other things that teenagers like to do. I went back and took down my perch, but my friend, the deer slayer, left his up for the historians to find, years later... and wonder.