Hunting Camp Stories Clean Enough to Tell at Dinner

The best story I own cost me a nine-point buck and most of a thermos, and I've gotten about twenty years of dinner conversation out of it. Good trade. Deer meat runs out by March. A story that lands at the table on Thanksgiving will feed you until you're old.

Camp stories have a shelf-life problem, though. Half of what gets told around a woodstove at 11 p.m. can't be repeated in front of your mother-in-law, and the other half is just four guys arguing about wind direction. What follows are the ones that survive the trip home.

The man who called in a buck with his back pocket

My brother-in-law hunts a ladder stand on the edge of a cut cornfield, and he carries his grunt call in his right hip pocket because he's lost two of them off a lanyard.

Twenty-two degrees, gray light, and he shifts his weight to get the blood back into his legs. The stand lets out a long, low groan underneath him. He freezes. He's now completely certain that the welds are going and he's about to become a story of a different kind.

So he does what any reasonable man does. He grips the rails with both hands, holds perfectly still, and starts a slow inventory of every bolt he can see without moving his head.

That's when the buck steps out at forty yards, ears forward, looking for whatever deer just made that sound.

He never touched the rifle. He was still holding the rails when the deer walked off into the pines. He came back to camp, set a cracked grunt tube on the table, and said the only thing that could be said, which was, "It was me. I was the noise." He's the only man I know who called in the biggest buck of his life with his own hip pocket and got nothing out of it but a broken call.

The thermos and the gravy

My dad used to fill two green steel thermoses the night before opening day. One coffee. One whatever was left in the pan, because he believed no calorie should die alone.

You know where this is going, and it's still funny, because the details are what make it. It was dark. It was 4:40 in the morning. The heater in the truck hadn't caught yet. He unscrewed the cup, poured, and took the kind of long confident swallow a man takes when he's sure about the world.

The face he made is the whole story. I have never seen a human being reevaluate his entire life that fast.

Then he screwed the cup back on, drove eleven miles of gravel, climbed into the stand, and drank the rest of it over the next three hours. Because it was warm, and because he had committed. He shot a doe at 9:15 and told everyone at camp the gravy was the reason.

We still say it. Somebody pours a cup of coffee at deer camp and somebody else asks, "Which thermos is that?"

Forty minutes in another man's stand

This one's mine, and I tell it on myself, which is the only reason it's allowed.

I got dropped off in the dark on a property I'd hunted twice. I found a ladder stand roughly where I thought mine was, climbed it, clipped in, got my pack hung, and settled in to be a serious outdoorsman.

At about 6:50, a man cleared his throat from a stand twelve yards to my left.

He'd been there since before I got out of the truck. He watched me walk in, watched me climb his stand, watched me hang my pack on his hook, and said nothing for forty minutes because he didn't want to spook the field. When it got light enough to see each other's faces, he lifted one hand, slow, like you'd wave at a neighbor across a fence.

We both climbed down. He was gracious about it. He said the only mistake was mine and the only casualty was the morning, and then he asked if I had coffee. I did. I gave him the whole thermos. I'd checked which one this time.

The trail camera that took nine hundred pictures of me

I put a camera on a gate post on a new lease and left it six weeks, which felt like patience.

Every picture was me. Me arriving. Me leaving. Me arriving in a different jacket. There's a sequence of about thirty frames where I'm clearly standing in front of the camera fiddling with the settings, looking more concerned in each one. Somewhere in the middle, at 2 a.m., there's a raccoon, slightly out of focus, walking left to right with the unbothered air of an animal who knows exactly where the camera is.

I made the mistake of showing the card to the whole camp. The verdict was that I'd conducted a six-week study of one middle-aged man's declining posture. My son still asks whether the raccoon ever came back.

The smallest deer anybody ever celebrated

The last one isn't a joke, but it gets the biggest reaction at a table, so I'm counting it.

A nine-year-old at our camp shot his first deer on a cold Saturday, and it was small. Genuinely small. You could have carried it out over one shoulder if the rules of the moment had allowed it, and they didn't, because six grown men decided within about four seconds that this was the finest animal ever taken in the state.

They got the tailgate down. They got the hat straightened. They argued about the best light. One man, who has taken deer that would make your jaw drop, looked at that little buck and said, "You're going to have a hard time topping this one." He said it completely straight.

The kid is sixteen now. He's taken bigger. He has never once mentioned them.

How to tell one so people actually laugh

• Two minutes, maximum. Time yourself once in the truck. Most camp stories die because the teller explains the property line for ninety seconds before anything happens.
• You're the fool, or nobody is. The story about the man who isn't at the table gets told at his expense and comes back around. The story about yourself can't.
• Cut the gear talk. Nobody at dinner needs the caliber, the brand of the stand, or the name of the lease. Keep the temperature and the time. Those do all the work.
• Land on a line and stop. "It was me. I was the noise." Don't follow it with "and that's when I realized." The room got there before you did.
• If it needs cleaning up, it needs cutting. Any story that only works with language you wouldn't use at church isn't a story yet. Find the version that works clean. It's usually funnier, because now the situation has to carry it instead of the shock.
• Tell the sweet one last. Somebody at the table has a kid who's never held a rifle and is deciding right now whether this is a world they'd like.

My son is eleven. He's heard all of these. He has opinions about which ones I'm telling wrong, and he'll correct me in front of company without a flicker of mercy.

Last week a cousin asked what deer camp was even like, and before I could open my mouth, he said: "Tell the one about the thermos."