A Reddit user said one of the hunting moments he never forgot happened when he was 14 years old during Michigan’s firearm deer season. According to his comment in the thread, he had slipped into the woods about 90 minutes before sunrise and settled in against a tree around three-quarters of the way up a ridge. He was overlooking a small marshy oak flat, which sounded like a good place to be once the morning really got moving. But it was still so early and so dark that he figured he would shut his eyes for a little while and rest before shooting light. That turned out to be a bad idea, because he promptly fell asleep.
He wrote that he did not wake up slowly or comfortably. What yanked him out of sleep was a pack of coyotes starting up on the far side of the marsh. He said they were yipping and yowling in the pitch black, and even though he is not normally afraid of coyotes, the way it hit him in that moment was something else. He was young, asleep in the woods, suddenly awake without his bearings, and the sound was echoing off everything around him. He said it was one of those wake-ups where for a second you do not even fully know where you are, and the noise just slams into you before your brain catches up.
From the way he told it, that alone was enough to get the hair standing up on the back of his neck. But the woods were not done with him yet. He said that just as soon as he got his bearings back and managed to catch his breath, a flock of turkeys suddenly lit out of the treetops about 50 yards to his right. The way he described it, it sounded like the whole forest came apart. After already being jolted awake by coyotes in the dark, having a bunch of big birds crash out of the trees nearby felt like the woods piling on one more scare before dawn had even properly broken.
That was what made the story so good. It was not one clean scary moment with a single animal and a neat finish. It was a kid hunting before first light, falling asleep by mistake, waking up in that awful half-lost state to a pack of coyotes sounding off across a marsh, and then getting hit all over again by turkeys erupting out of the trees nearby like the whole woods had decided to gang up on him. He did not write it like some polished campfire tale either. He wrote it like somebody who still remembered exactly how that one morning felt in his body.
And then, because hunting has a way of doing that, the day kept going.
He said that by 11:30 that morning, he shot his first buck, a little spike. That ending almost makes the story better, because it means the same day that started with him half asleep in the dark getting blasted awake by coyotes and then turkeys turned into the day he killed his first deer. He even wrapped it up with a line that told you he had clearly made peace with the whole experience over time: “We had chills, we had thrills, we had kills. I give that day a perfect 5/7.”
So the story he told was not about getting charged or cornered. It was about one of those mornings in the woods that gets burned into your memory because everything about it hits harder when you are young and alone in the dark. He snuck in 90 minutes before sunrise, leaned against a tree on a ridge over a marshy oak flat, accidentally fell asleep, woke up to coyotes screaming across the marsh in the pitch black, got rattled all over again by turkeys bursting out of the treetops nearby, and somehow still ended the day by killing his first buck. For one morning in the Michigan woods, he pretty much got the full package.
What do you think — if you were 14, asleep against a tree before daylight, and woke up to coyotes howling across a marsh before turkeys erupted out of the trees beside you, would you stay put and hunt the morning out, or head straight back to camp?
Original Reddit post: What are some of your hunting horror stories?
