In this life, it seems that the lessons you don't forget are the hard ones. Learning something without pain can be done of course, but those things never seem to stick with you quite like the ones that hurt. Not to mention lessons taught to you by wild animals... those are even harder to come by.

It was a warm November morning, the third day of Florida's gun hunting season. The temperature was around 70 degrees, and the sun wasn't up yet, though there was daylight aplenty. I was easing down a firelane between some mature sand pines and younger fifteen-foot trees, my homemade climbing stand strapped to my back, sort of still-hunting while looking for a suitable tree to hang the stand on.

I was pausing often in my walk, looking and listening, just taking it easy. The woods here were quite thick, with impenetrable low scrub oaks, other thick brush, and the occasional palmetto clogging the land between the twisted, limber tall sand pines on my left. The stand of smaller trees to the right was somewhat more open, as the thick canopy of the tightly-packed young pines disallowed much sunlight from reaching the forest floor. During one of my many pauses, I heard something moving around in the thick scrub to the left of the trail.

As I stood listening, I felt the old familiar scrub-hunting frustration I get from being close to game, yet not being able to see any part of it. There wasn't much noise in the brush, and I had about decided that it must be some small critter such as a raccoon, when I heard it grunt. I freely admit that at the time, my brain was not functioning properly, and the first thing I thought of was a pig. The problem was, of the many animals that one may expect to see in that forest, a pig just ain't on the list. That's about as far as my brain got me in determining what it could be. So what did I do? Well, I grunted back!

What I actually did was belch in the direction of the noise in the brush. Call it a grunt if you wish - the critter obviously did. Because in less than a second, there was suddenly a buck deer standing in the firelane, facing me, at a range of eight to ten feet. Naturally, this caught me by surprise - and I daresay the buck was a bit nonplussed himself.

Proving decisively that human and animal thought processes run at the same speed (or lack thereof), I stared at the buck. The buck stared at me. Approximately an hour later, or more likely a second or so, something clicked in my feeble thinker, and the following was revealed to me: Here I was in the woods hunting for buck deer; here was a buck deer. There was a rifle in my hands; I should use the rifle to shoot the deer.

As you can tell, my thought processes are often anything but eloquent, but they do get the point across. Unfortunately for me, I was too late. The buck's brain had also clicked, but apparently his was much more succinct than mine, because he very eloquently snorted, spun around in the trail, and left, at about the time my rifle-clutching hands were responding to my earlier adrenaline-blurred epiphany. He disappeared in record time; just a few bounds and he was out of sight.

Naturally, by then I was put out. Sensory overload and the pint of adrenaline in my bloodstream had me a bit shaky at best. But my trial was not over, you see. The buck had not been alone in the brush, and when he ran, several other deer started moving through the thicket, parallel with the firelane, following him. Another jolt of adrenaline flooded my system as I realized that there were still deer nearby.

I started slipping along the trail, hoping madly that the buck would do something much more stupid than what I had already witnessed, or that one of the deer in the brush would turn out to be a buck silly enough to show itself to me. No such luck. As I called myself all kinds of ugly names for missing my chance at a buck, I shrugged the stand off my back and hustled down the trail. My reward consisted of a couple glances of fast-moving patches of deer-colored hair as the brush-bound deer crossed the firelane at the point where the buck had left it.

The Lesson Pays off

I went back along the firelane, found my stand, and hauled it back to where I'd had the close encounter with the buck. It appeared that the spot where the buck had magically sprung from the ground like a jack-in-the-box was in fact a game crossing, and so I set up my climber on a relatively straight pine not far from that spot.

It was a foggy morning, the haze hanging about twenty feet off the ground, and after getting settled in my tree it took me a while to notice that there was another hunter in a ladder stand about 75 to 80 yards distant, along a firelane on the other side of the mature pines. I was already quite disgusted with myself, and this just made it worse. I had missed my chance at a buck, I was late getting on a stand, and I had managed to set up almost on top of another hunter.

I didn't want to climb down and move, since that would only further disturb the woods. So I brooded. It wasn't long thereafter that a certain indisputable fact hit me like a ton of bricks: I had heard a buck grunt. After the deer had appeared in front of me in the trail, the grunting had been instantly pushed from my mind by much more urgent thoughts like how to stare ga-ga at a buck rather than shooting him. Well, I started feeling a little better when I realized what I had witnessed. Not much, but some better. At least I had learned something that morning.

And so I sat belching while hanging off the side of a pine tree, performing a sort of internal, closed-mouth burp that produced a fair, though not very loud, imitation of the buck's grunting. I had now learned to grunt like a whitetail buck, taught by the critter himself. I felt good about that.

Along about then, the other hunter got down off his ladder, started to leave, then waved at me so I would see him. I motioned that I would go, but he didn't understand. I hollered that I would go so he could stay. He waved me off, gestured that all was well, and left.

One hour later, I looked over at the firelane the other hunter had walked down, and what should my wondering eyeballs ID? A wandering reindeer, just like on TV. Actually, it was a whitetail deer strolling down the firelane. I couldn't see its head and the screen of brush was thick and getting thicker as it went - it was about to be gone and out of sight forever, so I let loose one of my newly-learned burp-grunts.

The deer stopped in its tracks, turned 180 degrees, backtracked until it found a trail that led in my direction, and started coming towards me. It stopped at about 60 yards, looking hard for the source of the grunting, quartering towards me. There was no doubt about his gender now - a pair of antlers stood tall and stately upon his majestic head.

I already had the Ruger 44 Magnum Carbine to my shoulder, so I lined up the peep sight and let him have it. Through what I later determined was complete failure of the bullet to expand (it was of a poor design) and shot placement, the slug travelled diagonally through the deer longways without hitting a bone or knocking him down. He stumbled, and ran the way he was facing - towards me.

He zigged, he zagged, he bounced, I missed. He was coming at full speed and I was operating on autopilot. I swung the handy carbine up and past the trunk of the tree I was in, and as the buck sped past broadside to me I brought the little gun to bear and pulled the trigger once more - another hit! The buck kept going, but he was slowing down. My heart fluttered between thuds. My knees knocked. My eyes walled.

Thirty minutes later, after some interesting tracking during which the blowflies helped out by finding one or two specks of blood where I could not, I had my buck. The hard lesson of the day had brought me an almost-instant return on the small investment of time and thought that went into my grunting experiments in that tree. And you can bet I won't forget that lesson anytime soon.