The Big Buck

I grew up across the street from an 80-acre tract of land known as the Somme Woods Forest Preserve of Cook County Illinois. For a young boy, these woods were filled with adventure. Stately oak trees hundreds of years old stood aligned like pawns on a chess board horizontal to the dividing road and forest entrance. Beyond the oaks were scattered stands of sumac. Fields of tall grasses lay intertwined with marshes and small seasonal ponds throughout the mostly flat landscape.

Trails were carved out by our daily travels. Tree frogs would greet us with their melodic song each spring. Red wing black birds would stake out their claims on the marshes. Mallard ducks would inhabit the small ponds. Fireflies would dominate the night appearing just over the fields in summer. As we got older, white tailed deer moved into the area. In the fall, the thought of seeing a buck deer would have us combing the area for hours. They were elusive though and seldom seen.

I am not a hunter in the sense of killing animals for sport. Back then, some of my friends were hunters and I wanted to simulate the experience. There was a small marsh in the middle of the woods that we planned on pretending to build a duck blind from and pretend to hunt from with our toy rifles. When the day came one gray November day to go sit out in the cold and pretend to hunt ducks, my fake experience was cancelled due to a previously planned trip to Grandma’s house.

I was so mad that I kicked the porcelain bathtub and almost broke my foot when my mom insisted that I get in the car and skip the fake hunting trip in the woods. To this day, I can’t figure out what the lure was and why this make believe reenactment was so important to me. Sitting on cold and wet ground in the middle of the woods in November pretending to hunt does not sound fun to me now.

As I got older, after that episode I am not sure if I can use the word “matured” here, I looked forward every year to early November and my quest to see the big buck in the woods across the street. Back then, I was not yet into photography because if I were, my camera would have been what I would have been hunting with.

In the late afternoon, I would venture far into the woods back where the crows squawking would sometime give you the creeps. As the light faded, sometimes I would build a fire and wait for the big buck to appear. As darkness fell, sometimes a buck would calmly walk by. Year after year, I would return to the same places that I had seen one. It was amazing how consistent they were. One year, I came around a bend on a trail and was within about ten feet of a buck. He looked at me and I looked at him and slowly backed up out of his way.

There was also the time that a certain field seemed like it was going to become a battle ground. Several bucks appeared from the fringes and looked as if they were going to square off in a duel. It was then that the big buck rose up from his day bed in the middle of the field to display his rack and signal to the other less mature males that he was top dog around there. It was quite a sight and to think he had been there all along just waiting for his chance to strut his stuff. If I had had the photography equipment I have now, he would have been quite a shot.