you Can Say That Again

By Matt McNair

“I saw him come up from Clearcut, just this side of Back Ledge. Whooof. Thumper. He’s bedding down on the other side of it, across from Old Berm.”

“Old Berm as in Old Berm on Mud Hole?”

“Yeah.”

“But this side of the mud holes, right, not the berm on the other side?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said ain’t it? How could that deer be holed up behind the berm on the other side of the mud holes if he’s between Clearcut and Old Berm? I already said he was crossing Back Ledge.”

“Think we could pinch him? Me peel off at the Ledge and you head to Old Berm and drop down toward Clearcut?”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Gonna be cold in the morning though, new moon too, maybe we take the second shift.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

If you have never been to a deer camp you might consider the above conversation utter gibberish, the nonsensical babbling of two people with, among other shortcomings, a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how nouns work, inasmuch some are common and some are proper.

If you have been to a deer camp — especially if you’ve been to one enough to consider it yours — well, it’s still not going to do you too much good in the way of providing actionable information. But it probably does make sense, in that you recognize there is information being conveyed. (The language is the same, the dialect’s different.) Somebody has seen a deer. The deer is big. Teamwork may be in order.

Teamwork is fun. When people say things like “that’s why they call it hunting, not killing,” this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about. (They are also making excuses, but, you know, glass deer blinds and all that…) The teamwork bit can extend way past just hunting the same deer, too, and a lot of it has to do with the little traditions and colloquialisms and such that take root after the same people go to the same camp year after year after year. Some of the colloquialisms seem pretty universal — for instance, it’s pretty clear that these two dandies are neither as bloodthirsty nor as young as they once were, as citing questionable hunting lore and unironically saying “second shift” is veteran camp-speak for “I want to sleep in and I don’t like being cold anymore,” and just one assenting grunt means teamwork’s in play and Operation Stay Comfy is a go — and your average guest, presuming they’re a camp-goer generally, will be hip to the lingo lickety-split, no problem.

“Go to a place enough times, and with the same people, and little nicknames will pinpoint every member’s location with laser precision — no compass required.”

But the place names, though … that’s a different caliber of smoke pole. The years-long accumulation of in-jokes, tall tales, lies, misadventures and mishaps, all in the same place, invariably results in a geographic gumbo of no value whatsoever to anyone outside the camp, no matter how savvy their woodcraft, despite the fact that all that gobbledygook is referring to real, honest-to-goodness landforms and features of the very real physical world surrounding the camp.

(Human Geographers — humanities scholars who are enamored of science but struggle with precision, and love maps but are too uncomfortable with the imperial-colonialist implications of “mapping” as an enterprise to really enjoy them — would describe this as “in-group toponymy.” Do not ask me how I know this.)

Crossroad, Brandon House, Mud Hole, Sand Trap, Toilet Bowl, Avatar Tree, Gut Hill, Berm, Upper Berm, Lower Berm, Other Berm, Porch, Clearcut, Bone Yard, Lighthouse, Creek Stand … go to a place enough times, and with the same people for the same purpose, and little nicknames like this — silly, profane, reverent, wholesome, it runs the gamut — will pinpoint every member’s location with laser precision, no compass required.

If you’re not a member, or at least a regular guest? Good luck, hoss. And sure, you can get around in the woods, nobody’s saying you can’t, but that’s where all those common and proper nouns come in. In a vacuum, most of these words are going to be common nouns, and what’s more, they’re going to be common nouns describing very common features of the landscape in which you are about to pert-near get lost. You’re going to need to listen for inflection and look for vague gesticulation; landmarks (where something happened once and has been talked about incessantly in camp every year since) get stressed syllables and a full-armed (yet somehow half-hearted) pointing gesture that mocks the very idea of cardinal directions. Land features get mumbled and warrant no gesture at all.

Got all that? Good. Now you’re ready to head to deer camp, where buck fever (or ague, should a true codger be around) is rampant, where you’ll get a fine meal to eat if you’re lucky or an old bag of Bugles if you’re not, and where somebody’s gonna have just enough signal to keep checking their game camera and get fired up about nocturnal deer who might as well not exist.

And, as a guest, you will of course be hunting with the member that brought you, on account you don’t know the lingo and so might get lost. If you’re not accustomed to any deer camps at all, you might be skeptical of this notion, but will go along with it to be polite. If you’re a regular of another camp, though, you’ll know it’s true: Trying to orient with another camp’s goofy jargon will get you lost. But you also know that’s not the reason for the escort.

Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-teamwork over there just don’t want you killing their deer.