If You Build It...

Growing up, hunting and fishing was always a big deal in my family. Being of age to hunt was more exciting to me than even getting my driver’s license. It meant that instead of just hearing all the greatly exaggerated stories of my father and uncles, I would now be able to take part in creating them.

 For years my father, brother and I have been talking about building a fully enclosed deer stand where we hunt, but every summer we find ourselves too busy to build one. The reason we need one so bad is the 40 acres of land we hunt can be covered with one rifle,  and if we are spread out all over it the less the chances are of us having deer come through.  For the past few years only two of us would be able to hunt the land in a small ground level turkey blind leaving the third man to go elsewhere. This left us quite cold and unable to see a good portion of land due to undergrowth blocking the blind windows no matter where we put it.

Throughout the 26 years my parents have been married, my dad has been saving every worthy scrap piece of construction material he could get his hands on because, “I’m going to build something with it someday.”  My mother has never shared his positive outlook on this aesthetically agonizing pile of (exploitive deleted) spread around the garage. We decide that two days before opening deer season we would load up the trailer, tow it all out there, and build a pillbox big enough to house all three of us.

We argued about our designs and ideas the entire way to the hunting land, but as soon as we got there our ideas started taking shape.  We got that thing up faster than the bounce rate of a Bernie Madoff alimony check. I began by immediately unloading all the tools and materials and my brother started working on cutting the vertical posts to 8 ft lengths while my father began to figure out the foundation.  We leveled out the ground and nailed the foundation together in less than a half hour.  The floor, walls and windows took a little more than 2 hrs to complete. 

Opening morning everything went off without a hitch, we climbed into the “Death Tower” around 3am toting chairs, snacks, and a propane heater. When we got settled we were able to strip down to nothing more than jeans and a t-shirt. It didn’t take long and we were teasing each other about all the frozen openers that we had shared and the fact that it took my Dad a quarter century to finally build us a tree house. Amongst all the chuckling and knee slapping we came up with a pre-determined shooting order, not really caring if we actually would see a deer.  The order was so that if a 10pt. or better came out it would be my Dad’s, if not it would be me then my brother. 

Current regulations stated buck only and over the past 10 years we had only seen one per season and it had been 3 years since any of us had even tagged a deer. About five minutes into first light I got the first buck (small 8pt.) A couple hours later a 14 pt. and a 6 pt. came out at the same time. A total of three empty .300 Win Mag casings laid on the floor and a total of three bucks laid on the ground, no more than 3 hrs into the season…simply stellar! Let the “Field of Dreams” jokes begin!

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Travis Mai - Hitch Guy
Social Media & Tech Specialist - CURT Mfg.