It was the fourth night at deer camp and the smell was pretty bad.

Everyone but myself was hanging around in underwear while wet clothes dried near the fire. None of us had bathed in days. Most were drunk to the point where we could look out of only one eye at a time and we occasionally forgot each other’s names. All systems normal at hunting camp.

I was mainly dry because for the past three days, I had not gone into the woods at all. I had tried my hand at hunting, but there were a few things about the sport I didn’t care. For one, you had to get started very early in the morning. For two, you had to do it outside. For three, you had to be quiet and still while you were trying to wake up in subfreezing weather.

“SURE IS COLD UP HERE IN THE TREE STAND!” I liked to bellow at regular intervals, just to make sure my vocal cords weren’t frozen to my Adam’s apple, or something messed up like that.

In the way of hunters, my friend Boomer screamed at me to shut the hell up without issuing a single decibel. So I began to do jumping jacks in order to thaw my blood. Boomer made me stop. I tried to light up a smoke over which to sulk. Boomer crushed it in a glove. I went to protest the utter destruction of a perfectly good cigarette but got the universal sign for shut the hell up or I will beat you with the butt of my rifle.

“FOR A GUY NAMED BOOMER,” I tried to whisper scream, “YOU SURE VALUE SILENCE A LOT!”
Remarkably, he didn’t get a deer that day.

So I was a crappy hunter, but that was just fine. I didn’t live in a log house with daughters named Laura and Mary who had to be fed every damn day. Hell, I wasn’t interested in shooting a deer, anyway, unless it was one of the bucks that owes me money or that one that said mean things about my ma.

It was decided unanimously that I should stay out of the woods the rest of the trip, and peace was restored to our hunting party. While everyone else was out enjoying the thrill of remaining perfectly motionless for eight hours at a time, I contributed to the expedition in other ways. Mainly, I slept until noon, drank all the beer so there was none around to attract bears, and thought about ways to find women even though we were several miles into the woods around Lily Bay.

“The nearest women are in Greenville,” Boomer told me. “And you don’t want any of them.”
I would later prove him wrong about that notion, but it’s a story for a different column, in a different newspaper and written under a different name.

The fact is, I loved hunting camp despite the fact that I was not allowed to carry a gun, leave the cabin or — after one unfortunate mishap — handle the canister of skunk urine.

In my estimation, hunting camp is maybe 25 percent actually pursuing prey. The remainder is drinking, telling lies about women and plotting to embarrass your hunting companions. In fact, anthropologists will tell you that hunting developed among the earliest humans because they needed a way to sober up, invent new lies and plot revenge. Call your neighborhood anthropologist. He’ll tell you.

I haven’t been anywhere near a hunting camp in 15 years. The only time I spend in the woods these days is on the Suzuki dual sport — and this time of year, I’m more prey than hunter.

I was out in the woods the other day when I came upon a group of men in blaze orange leaving the woods near sundown. Two of them were silent and nodding frequently. The third was talking nonstop and I’m pretty sure I know what he was saying: “So, I’m sitting at the bar just minding my business when this beautiful woman … No, TWO beautiful women walk up and they’re all over me. I kid you not. The next thing I know, the three of us are up on the pool table together and that’s when things really got interesting …”

I know how the story ends because the very same thing happened to my friend Boomer way back when in Mercer. I kid you not.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. To share your love of hunting, e-mail him at [email protected].