Bucks of Nebraska

We took the kids to get their Santa pictures on one of those gray Nebraska afternoons when the snow was already falling in slow, heavy flakes. My wife had the baby on her hip and our oldest was tugging at her coat, asking every thirty seconds how much longer. The line snaked out the door of the little studio downtown, and the cold worked its way up through the soles of our boots while we waited.

I was wearing my Bucks of Nebraska hat. An old man standing a few places ahead of us turned around, eyed the logo, and gave a small nod.
“Nice hat,” he said. His voice was rough, like it hadn’t been used much that day.

He looked at the snow collecting on the shoulders of the people in line and shook his head. “Cold like this always takes me back. Twenty-seven years ago. Winter of ’98. Last buck I ever shot.”

I must have looked interested, because he kept talking.

He had a stand in a narrow belt of cottonwoods that followed a dry creek bed out past the river bottom country. The snow had come early that December- dry, powdery stuff that squeaked under your boots if you stepped wrong. He’d been watching a big eight-point for almost two weeks. The buck would show up just before last light, working the edge of a picked cornfield, always coming from the same thicket of plum brush.

That morning the temperature sat at six degrees. He could feel the cold through the soles of his boots even before he left the truck. He walked in before daylight, the beam of his flashlight bouncing off the snow. He climbed into the stand in the dark and settled in, muzzleloader across his lap, the cold metal already biting through his gloves.
The sun came up slow and pale. A light wind pushed out of the northwest, carrying the smell of frozen dirt and distant livestock. He sat without moving for almost four hours. His feet went numb. His nose ran and froze on his upper lip. The only thing that kept him from climbing down was the thought of that buck’s rack in the morning light.

Around ten-thirty he saw movement.

Not the buck at first—just a doe, then another, filtering out of the plum thicket like gray shadows. They fed for a while, heads down, ears working. Then the eight-point stepped out behind them.

The deer looked bigger than he remembered.

Heavy neck.

Dark antlers still carrying a little velvet stain near the bases he said.

The buck stood broadside at about eighty yards, head up, testing the wind.

He raised the muzzleloader slow. The open sights settled just behind the shoulder. He remembered the exact sound of his own breathing inside the hood of his coat. Don’t rush it, he told himself. You’ve waited this long. One shot. Make it count.

The charge went off with a heavy, rolling boom. White smoke billowed out and hung in the cold air. The buck mule-kicked once and ran hard into the thicket. The does scattered. He sat there for a full five minutes, hands shaking, listening to the quiet settle back over the field while the smoke drifted away. Then he climbed down and followed the tracks.

The blood trail started sparse—bright red drops on white snow—then grew heavier after the first fifty yards. He found the deer piled up in a small clearing inside the plum brush, already gone. Steam still rose from the body in the cold air.

He sat down in the snow beside it and just looked for a while. No one else around. No radio. No phones that worked out there. Just the wind moving through the bare branches and the weight of the animal under his hands when he finally stood up to start the work.

He dragged it out alone.

It took the better part of an hour.

By the time he reached the truck his shoulders burned and the sun was already sliding west again. He said he never felt colder or more awake in his life.

That night he hung the deer in the shed behind the house. The next morning the whole place smelled like winter and blood and woodsmoke. He still had the antlers nailed up in a garage somewhere, or so he claimed.

The old man went quiet for a second, watching the snow land on the sidewalk. Then he looked back at me.

“I never thought that morning would be my last day in the woods,” he said. “But my wife fell ill later that year. She didn’t make it.

After that his son moved him in with them. Grandkids came along. Somewhere in all of it the woods just… slipped away. Now the little ones take up every free hour I’ve got. I don’t mind it. But some days, when it gets cold like this, I can still feel that muzzleloader in my hands.”

The line moved forward a few steps.

He gave my hat one more glance, nodded once, and turned back toward the front of the studio.

My wife shifted the baby higher on her hip and asked if I was ready. I told her I was.

I’ll never forget listening to his story.