Deer season is less than two months away; let’s reflect on how deer hunting was ‘back in the day’ compared to today.
My first ‘stand’ was actually not a stand at all but rather a 5-gallon bucket set behind a yaupon bush on the edge of a pin oak flat in East Texas overlooking an area I hoped deer would be feeding on an abundant acorn crop. This was way back in the fall of 1961 when I was eleven years old deer hunter.
I would get off the school bus and if I could bypass my dad who very often had a few chores for me, I’d grab my bolt action .410 and grab a few rifled slugs and sneak off to the patch of woods behind the house.
Deer were very scarce in East Texas in those days; in the course of a year we might actually sight a couple crossing the field behind our broiler houses. I would find tracks in the woods that I thought were made by deer but, in retrospect, I imagine most of them were made by hogs. Regardless, I was hunting deer and I had built myself a stand!
A year or so later, I learned that any real deer hunter hunted from a stand up in a tree. I was all about tree houses back in those days and spent the better part of summer constructing my first elevated hunting platform. I am sure only the nails are present today in that old pin oak, if tree is in fact still standing.
The stand was constructed of pine slats from the sawmill down the road, not really the strongest lumber to build with, but my stand remained serviceable for a couple of years. It had the look of a roughly built ‘fort’ which served as headquarters during the summer months for my buddies and I.
Thanks to some help and transportation from my brother-in-law Billy Joplin, I soon abandoned the woods behind the house and was introduced to a new hunting spot not far from the Red River. Here deer were around in huntable numbers but hunting then was nothing like what we experience today. I might get a glimpse of a deer on every third hunt.
By this time, deer hunters in our area had invented the prototype of today’s ladder stands. We would basically nail a small seat onto a wooden ladder, usually about 12 feet in length. These were the first portable deer stands I remember. They were somewhat portable but a bit clumsy to drag around in the woods.
This was way before modern day ladder stands with sections that fitted together quickly in the woods. We had to lug the entire ladder with the seat around. But our ‘invention’ was very popular and we thought we had reinvented the wheel! I’m sure deer hunters of the day were doing the same thing all across the country.
Later came the first very crude and somewhat dangerous “climbing tree stands.” The first one I saw was chiefly of wood construction and had a brand name beginning with the letter “B”. If you are much over the age of fifty, chances are good you have at least heard of these stands and possible skinned a bit of hide off your legs coming down a tree much faster than you went up!
If the first expandable broad heads gave broad heads a bad name, this first climbing tree stand all but stifled the idea of a tree stand that could double as a ‘climber’. I am not sure if statistics were kept back in those days as to safety ratings but if they were, these first climbers would have a negative rating.
Generally, climbing stands today are very safe but even the state-of-the-art modern climbers are not suited for the older hunter. It requires a bit of exertion to ratchet oneself up a tall pine tree and it’s a task left to younger hunters in relatively good physical condition.
I was never much on climbing stands; that old wooden climber left a negative connotation that I could never shake. But, back in the day, I was very big on constructing wooden ladder stands. Long before commercial ladder stands with seats were thought up, we nailed wooden steps into the tree that allowed access to a couple boards to sit on.
Looking back, my first “portable” stand was a homemade wooden ladder stand with a couple of two-by-sixes nailed on the top for a seat. Granted, these wooden stands weren’t light but they were portable to a degree and not too heavy for a couple of guys to pack back to that big buck hotspot.
We usually notched a U into the back of the seat to rest upon the tree trunk and add stability and then employed ratchets to secure the stand to the tree. When we found a place we needed a stand, we would unbuckle the strap and tote the stand to a new location. This eliminated the hammer and sawing back in the woods. Finally, a portable stand that could be set up quietly in the woods!
Granted, once we decided we needed to build these stands 14-feet high, getting them through the woods in one piece became a challenge, but we were young, strong and plenty determined!
On private land or long-term leases, many deer hunters begin building what we called box blinds and they were appropriately named. Usually constructed of a two-by-four frame covered in plywood with a sheet metal roof, these stands were truly box blinds.
I can remember some pretty elaborate wooden blinds back in the day. Unless they were set on the edge of a woodline or in a field where they could be off-loaded from a trailer, many were constructed back in the woods during the summer months. I remember building a couple of box blinds on a lease we had in Jack County back in the early eighties. A buddy and I packed all the materials up a small mountain and built our blinds on the spot. I would give anything to go back to these remote locations and see what is left of our construction of over 40 years ago.
Safety is always a huge factor when hunting from above the ground and today’s stands have safety built in. Yes, I’ve watched the improvements of hunting stands through the years. Today the stands I hunt from are a far cry from that old pine limb I set on back in ’61 but I find myself longing for those days, back when I seldom saw a deer, back before Boone and Crockett inches of antler were in most hunter’s vocabulary.
We are truly living in the ‘good ole days’ of whitetail hunting but I sometime find myself reflecting back on that country kid in Red River County setting on a pine limb hoping just to see a deer, any deer!
Email Luke Clayton through his website www.catfishradio.org and listen to his weekly radio show/ podcast “Catfish Radio with Luke Clayton and Friends”.
