It is sometimes understandable why non-hunters don’t understand hunters. If you’ve never tried it you can’t really comprehend the experience and the thrill. It can also be quite confusing to the uninitiated when listening to hunter conversations. Sometimes common words can have very different meanings to specialized groups, especially deer hunters.
In colloquial conversation, a drag is synonymous with something negative: a bummer or a downer. In deer hunting’s lexicon it’s a method for getting your deer out of the woods, which makes it a good thing unless you shot that deer way back in the boonies and you’re by yourself. Then it can be a real drag getting it out.
Somewhat similarly, a rut is something you don’t want to get stuck in, either when driving the backwoods roads or traveling along the path of life. To a deer hunter however, the rut is a magical time, the whitetail breeding season when normally wary bucks drop their guard and move about more during daylight, sometimes acting quite foolish. That’s one rut we wish we could get stuck in but unfortunately it only lasts a few brief but wonderful days.
Somewhat the same, a rub is also something to avoid in life as it represents some hindrance or drawback in the language of common folk. Not so for the deer hunter. Bucks rub trees for several reasons, including to leave scent along their regular travel routes. By noting on which side a buck rubs successive trees along such a route the hunter can determine the deer’s direction of travel, and so avoid getting rubbed the wrong way.
A scrape is similarly something to sidestep for the non-hunter to whom it means a scuffle or an abrasion. “Junior got in quite a scrape on the playground today.” While not getting in a scrape, a deer hunter might want to spend time hunting near one. Like a rub, it represents an olfactory signpost, a common area for deer to communicate through scent, and a place they might visit repeatedly.
Even the terms applied to our methods and equipment can cause the non hunter to scratch their head. A “stand” is anyplace you go to wait for a deer, whether it be an elevated platform or a favorite stump. An outsider might indeed think it a feat of endurance to remain on your feet for a morning, an afternoon or even an entire day, until they learn that you actually sit on a stand.
They’ve probably figured out we hunters need to be quite still while sitting on our stands if we want to catch a deer by surprise. (Which, by the way is also the only time the word “catch” should be applied to deer hunting. One does not catch a deer). Quiet and stealth are indeed essential to still-hunting, but you don’t sit or stand still. You move quietly and stealthily along.
An eavesdropper might think a hunter is quite athletic if he says he “Jumped a buck,” but it is actually the buck that jumped, and ran away without offering a shot. If that same buck, or a different one is said to have jumped the string, it wasn’t leaping over some piece of twine. It was reacting to the sound a bow makes when an arrow is released, and because that arrow travels slower than the speed of sound, deer occasionally move out of the arrow’s path before it arrives.
Even outside the season our conversations can be confusing. When a hunter says he’s going shed hunting, he’s not looking for a place to store his hunting gear. He’s looking for shed antlers, which are also sometimes erroneously referred to as horns.
I could go on but you get the point, also a term for an antler tine as in, “That little buck had four points.” If a hunter says they saw a lamb, they mean a fawn, not a baby sheep. A nannie is an old doe, not a goat and a toad is a really big buck, not a small terrestrial amphibian.
Bob Humphrey is a freelance writer and Registered Maine Guide who lives in Pownal. He can be reached at: bhunt@maine.rr.com
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