Lessons in rediscovering a long forgotten 9-point buck
The COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 forced me to make my house my entire world.
So I decided to organize my cellar and in the process uncovered a long lost treasure. It was dead when I uncovered it but it had been alive on Nov. 21, 1932.
It was a 9-point stuffed deer head I had stored away in my basement 30 years ago and forgot all about.
I didn’t kill that 9-point buck myself. I bought it at a yard sale out on Mascoma Lake for $25. It had been shot by a woman 90 years ago. Written in pencil on the wooden back the deer head was mounted on were the words:
Shot by Ruth Estey “Fallow Mire” Nov. 21, 1932
I have no idea what “Fallow Mire” means unless it is a well known hunting area. Literally it means “unplanted mud-patch”.
I kept the buck in my basement for 30 years because I’m not a hunter and I thought it might depress me to have those dead eyes staring at me in my living room every day.
Plus I thought it might be cheating to display it at all, since the only physical skill I exhibited in obtaining my 9-pointer was using my hands to open my wallet.
To me it would be like hanging a fake college degree on my wall.
To hang a 9-pointer in my house, which I hadn’t shot myself, would be boasting. A 9-pointer to a hunter is like “cum laude” on a college degree is to a student: it’s praise for achievement, both the buck’s antler achievement and the hunter’s killing achievement.
Those 9 points on the antlers aren’t a huge rack but they are a regal crown on my Mascoma Lake mummy.
And his nose protrudes at a handsome straight aristocratic aquiline angle.
If you Google “deer nose” you discover a deer has 297 million olfactory receptors. A human nose has 5 million and a dog nose has 220 million.
You discover something else too: a deer has a second nose in the roof of its mouth which it uses to analyze the scent of urine.
My 9-pointer has a closed mouth so you can’t see the 2nd nose at all.
President Theodore Roosevelt, a taxidermy enthusiast who paid for dozens of animal trophies he’d shot to be mounted, advocated this axiom about displaying stuffed animals: “Carnivore, open mouth: herbivore, closed mouth.”
Deer eat grass and leaves not meat. Hence my 9-pointer’s closed mouth.
I also discovered that a deer can remember a human scent for 8.5 days.
Just as a tongue-in- cheek comparison, I can still remember the scent of my first grade classroom 72 years later: A deer may have 292 million more olfactory receptors than I do as a human, but my memory is longer.
One researcher followed a buck for 20 days and discovered it had traveled 225 miles or about 11 miles a day.
If Ruth Estey shot my buck in 1932 near the Mascoma Lake yard sale where I bought its mounted mummy in 1992, then my buck was only 20 miles from my house in Hartford, Vermont on the final day of his life.
Whether he ever got to Hartford alive on his own four feet in 1932 or not, he’s partly here now, in 2022, head and antlers anyway.
He’s now permanently staring out at me every day from a wall in my home in little old Hartford Village, Vermont.
And that make him the honest to goodness real Hartford Buck, doesn’t it?