Spotlight on Deer

I’ll say this for working at Cabela’s, every day is an adventure. I never know what banalities or novelties I might encounter when I respond to a radio request for a Hunting Outfitter. A customer might be looking for advice on elk calling—that’s fun. Or I might need to help load a 450 lbs. safe into the bed of a lifted truck in a slushy parking lot—that’s less fun.

My earpiece squawked out a request for a Hunting Outfitter to head over to ISP: In Store Pick-Up. This is a nook at the back of the store attached to a small storage cage in the warehouse. When you order something online to pick up at Cabela’s, it doesn’t get mixed in with all the other merch. It lands in this little cage where ravenous customers can’t get at the goods before you.

The employees manning that station are only there to hand over preordered items, but since they sit under a sign and wear nametags, they get all manner of questions:

• Where’s the bathroom?

• Is there a restaurant in here?

• Why don’t you carry more 6.5 Grendel ammo?

• Do you sell buffalo meat?

• Do you guys fix brakes?

There’s no outer limit to the absurdity of the questions we get, but the one I got today will likely be the reigning champion for some time.

The call came from Oleksandra Kovalenko. I knew this because Oleksandra is a recent Ukrainian immigrant and her accent is a dead giveaway. I confess, I’m a bit obsessed with her name. Every time someone plugs in their radio, a computerized voice declares it to all channels, e.g., Adam Schnell has signed in.

I’m sure that Oleksandra Kovalenko sounds like Emily Smith in Ukraine, but it’s exotic to my ear. I invariably repeat it aloud after the automated announcement, replacing the computer’s robotic formality with a mellow timbre. I’ve seen more than one quizzical glance from a nearby customer as the Cabela’s employee shelving goose decoys intones “Oleksandra Kovalenko” for no apparent reason. 

When I got to the ISP counter, there were two customers, middle-aged guys, Pakistani if I had to guess, speaking with my comrade-in-arms, Oleksandra Kovalenko. The guys had fluent English, but very heavily accented. As for Oleksandra, her English may not be what you’d call “broken,” but it’s dinged up real bad. Her limited vocabulary, paired with their strong accents, was wreaking havoc on communications.

Oleksandra turned to me and said, “Thank you. They want a thing, but I cannot know what it is. They say for hunting.”

“Got it. Thanks,” I said.

Oleksandra nodded and fled the scene, suddenly remembering pressing matters in the backroom.

Looking at the customers, I immediately noted that one of them had an impressively waxed and manicured mustache. The other’s face was naked, and in the absence of another way to distinguish them, that will be their monikers hereafter.

I said, “Hey, guys. What can I do for you?”

Naked said, “Hello, we are looking for delight.”

Aren’t we all, I thought. But I said, “Sorry… I missed that. You’re looking for what?”

“Dee-light,” he repeated.

“Sorry, I’m still not sure what you’re saying.”

“Dee-light!! For hunting,” he said.

I stared blankly. I feel genuinely awful during exchanges like this. The dude was getting frustrated, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was getting at. I know if the roles were reversed, my Punjabi or Pashto would be just as difficult to decipher for him, but no amount of empathy on my part was going to help me understand him.

“We need to buy a dee-light,” he said again. “Dee-light!”

“Um… what is it for?” I asked, hoping to approach delight from a different angle.

Mustache jumped in. “Dee-uh! Dee-uh! We are going hunting for dee-uh, and we need the light.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Got it: deer. You’re going deer hunting.”

“Yes,” Naked confirmed. (And with that cleared up, I will revert to standard spelling.)

“Sorry. I’m with you now.”

“Do you have the light?” he asked.

“Sure. I mean, I’ve got lots of lights. There’s a three pack of headlamps on sale. You can buy them separately too. I like these ones that have a green setting because—”

“No,” Naked broke in. “Not head light. The deer light.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what a deer light is.”

“You shine it on the deer.”

“If you mean for field dressing a deer at night, I use a headlamp not a flashlight. Most hunters do.”

“No. Not headlight, not flashlight,” Mustache said. “Light to shine on the deer.”

And that’s when the penny dropped.

“You mean… a light to shine on a deer when you’re hunting it?” I asked.

“Yes, it helps,” Naked said. “You shine the light at the deer and then you shoot at it.”

“Well…” I stammered, “like… I mean… you can’t do that.”

“Yes. It works. They cannot see you through the light.”

“No. I know that it works,” I said. “What I mean is that it’s illegal. It’s against the law. It’s against lots of laws. You can’t hunt at night, and you sure can’t use a light to do it. It’s called ‘spotlighting’ and it’s poaching.”

“Yes, that’s it. Spot-light!” Naked cried in triumph. Spot was the word we were missing that would clear everything up. “We need the spot-light for the deer!”

“No, that’s… You’re not understanding me. That’s the actual name of the crime: spotlighting. You can’t do that.”

“Yes, spot-light for deer. This is what we came for,” Naked said.

I was stunned. For those of you who don’t hunt, there is a hierarchy of poaching just as there is to any other criminal behavior. For example, speeding is a crime, and beating a man to death with a lead pipe is also a crime, but they are treated very differently by the justice system.

Here’s the equivalent of speeding in the world of hunting: Billy has a moose tag, and Bobby has a deer tag, but Billy shoots the deer while Bobby shoots the moose. By the letter of the law, that’s poaching. Even if each one puts his tag on the other one’s animal, and everything else is copasetic, that was technically a criminal act. But like speeding, most hunters don’t worry too much about this one, and even the warden might give a mere warning upon learning of it because the spirit of the law is intact.

But spotlighting… that one is murder in the first degree. It combines several major transgressions all in one. Hunting deer at night: crime. It’s done from a truck: crime. It’s discharging a firearm on a primary or secondary highway: crime. Deer season has been over for a month and a half: crime. And we’re not even at the offence’s namesake yet (the use of a light to dazzle and thereby paralyze a deer while you shoot it): crime, and a despicable one at that. If Fish and Game catches you spotlighting, they’ll take away your guns, your truck, and your hunting privileges. Hell, you might even see the back seat of a cruiser.

I was at a rare loss for words. After a second, Naked asked: “You have spot-light?”

“If we do, it sure ain’t in the hunting section,” I said. “It’s illegal to hunt with a light. You can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can do this,” Mustache assured me. “We hunt with a police officer. He is coming with us. He said to go and get the light.”

“It doesn’t matter if he’s a cop or not. It’s still illegal.”

“Okay,” Mustache said, “it is not allowed. But…” he raised is eyebrows and gave me a sly, knowing look, “you have the light, yes?”

Well, well, well, we’re communicating just fine now. Mustache was giving me a nod-nod / wink-wink visual that translates in all languages. Oh, he understands it’s illegal, all right. And he’s equivocating by swapping illegal for not allowed, a suspiciously sophisticated use of the English language for a conversation wherein we’d had some trouble getting our messages across. I’m guessing he knew it was illegal all along. But now, he’s saying, Sure, it’s illegal, but you can still sell me the goods to pull it off, right?

No. I don’t have it, I wouldn’t sell it to you if I did, and you can go straight to hell with no turns, I thought.

If that seems like an overreaction, you have to understand, these are the guys who get caught, land on the local news, and create animosity between hunters and landowners and the public in general. They’re the reason I have trouble getting permission to hunt on farms and ranches. Because of them, I say “I’m a hunter” but people hear, “I’m a reckless, no-good low life.”

“No, we don’t have spotlights for hunting,” I said. “Anything else?”

“No,” Naked said. “We will look somewhere else. Thank you.”

I walked away without offering farewells. I was mad, and there was nothing I could do about it. Spotlighting holds a special place of disdain for nearly all hunters because of the violation of a principle we call fair chase. I know that a non-hunter would likely take exception to the use of the word “fair” in the practice of hunting when we use high powered rifles or modern bows to pursue game. But there are two things you must consider.

First, despite those advantages we hunters have, the deer still win about 95% of the time. Hunting is no sure thing. Second, and it’s related to the first, the use of rifles and bows keeps the playing field to an arena that deer mostly understand: there’s a ground-based predator that they can see and smell and must flee. They’ve been evolving alongside humans that have been casting projectiles at them for untold thousands of years. They know this game.

Cars, bright focused beams of light, and long straight roads all came along in the last hundred years. Deer can’t deal with them yet. They haven’t learned to recognized them as a threat. That’s why massive, cagey bucks who’ve easily evaded hunters their whole lives get smoked on a highway some dark night. Deer are helpless when caught in headlights or spotlights. When I go hunting in my favorite spots in perfect conditions, there’s still a low chance of success for me, but if I were to go spotlighting on any given night, you could request a deer, elk, or moose, and I bet you I could deliver. It’s a truly unfair and shameful practice.

If I had any actionable information, I would report these guys in a heartbeat, but I had nothing. What could I do? Call up the Report a Poacher toll-free line with a hot tip that two dudes named Mustache and Naked were probably going out to spotlight deer somewhere in Alberta, sometime next week? Not quite enough for a precision sting operation.

Later on, I found out they went to the gun counter, the fishing section, and the camping section, asking the guys there for a deer light, always feigning surprise when they were warned that it was illegal. And, each time, they persisted: “Sure, it’s… not allowed, but do you have any spotlights?”

If you’re out there Mustache and Naked, I hope you find your spotlight, I hope you find your deer, and most of all I hope you find yourself staring at flashing lights in the rearview mirror when you pull that trigger.