Fathers and Sons & Ammo

I once thought hunting was just for hillbillies and sadists. It takes a poem to change my mind, sometimes.

Journal of a Deer Hunter

Wilmer Mills

Daddy killed himself when I was twelve,
And on the very day he turned his shotgun
End over end to blow his own eyes out
Of sight and out of mind he'd tried to tell me
Not to miss, to make each bullet count.
But even that was like a parting show
To try and compensate for all of what
He never said out loud, like how to hunt
And be a man.
                          The rest I learned muself,
Albeit trial and error, second-hand,
But now I've got it down to second-nature.
Every season is the same routine
Of rising early for the morning hunt.
But that's the time of day I like the best,
When Daddy used to wake me in the dark
And serve me toaster-oven rolls
And instant coffee in a paper cup.
He didn't talk, and only now I know
How silence was a part of camouflage,
The way a father and a son relate 
By blending in until the differences
Are hard to see.
                           Then riding int he truck
I felt industrious and all grown up,
Entrusted with a man-size knife and gun
And ushered into something so important,
All in silence. I was shown my stand
And waited in the field-side trees until
That moment when there's light enough to see
The sun reflecting silver on a rack.
I've learned to read the age of tracks in mud
Ans buck-rub markings on the sapling bark.
I know that when I hear the angry snorts
Downwind of me, I'll also hear the sound
Of trampled brush and antlers clattering.


By squeezing triggers winter after winter
I'm reminded how the first one fell,
One shot. Then beagle dogs gave nose and throat
To panic, running white-tail high, the ghostly,
Cloven scent before them, until my slug
Connected with his neck and all his weight
Collapsed around the lead, his forelegs splaying,
Antlers falling faster than his head.
I dress them with my bowie knife int he field,
Sometimes in dew and sometimes in the snow
That coats a winter pasture's crinoline.
It pinkens where I let the steaming guys
Roll out across my hands, gone slippery
And sticky, both at once, and stinking, too,
Of musk and bile, and like the dank doe piss
I ear to sucker-sniff a buck in rut.


I make each bullet count. I never miss,
Like Daddy told me on the final morning.
Dusk was neither night and neither day
And everything got caught between itself,
So now all mornings are the only morning.
Year after year, by taking aim to see
A barn roof make its own horizon line
And trees a mile away whose branches seem
So stenciled on the sky that I could count
Each twig from where I sit I've learned to feel
The pulse increasing in my trigger finger
When a buck explodes across my sight.
So in that half-light I can actually shoot
Between my heartbeats where there's room enough
For every buck to be the only buck
Who shows me how to see the quick and the dead.
That moments just before I pull the trigger
Daddy' still alive, and after the hunt,
We both go home and sit in front of the fire
And clean our guns. And no one says a thing.