Arduous journey to restore the joy of the hunt

CAMP VERDE — The 6-foot long osage wooden bow was a tight fit even in the extra-large box blind where Justin Hedgecock and I were sitting.

Justin, 37, had to swing the two ends sideways while keeping the solid wood arrow mounted on the bighorn sheep’s antler rest and getting his body into position to make the shot on the mature buck in front of us.

With 10 typical points and mule deer forks on each G2, the old buck was a trophy in most quarters but had aged into management status after a life spent on the hills and in the canyons of Camp Verde Ranch.

Justin and I had met several years ago in Alaska, and I’d been trying to get him down for a bow hunt at Bobby Parker’s ranch, just to let him see the quality bucks that can come out of the Hill Country when they’re given the time to grow old and enough food to keep them upright during our regular droughts.

The times when we had hunted together in South Texas, Justin had been a compound bow shooter and had killed several very good bucks on Jack Brittingham’s Encantado Rancho. But the ever thoughtful and forward-thinking young man had become fascinated with traditional archery and had brought with him three different bows and arrows to match.

He has also decided that if he’s going to try to follow in the footsteps of our Native American ancestors, he should have to do it with stone points. Many of his arrows were tipped with Brazilian agate points a napper had made for him.

“I figured if I wanted to really copy our indigenous people’s archery skills, I should do it the way they did it,” Justin said. “I still will use modern broad heads but that’s not the same with a long bow.”

On this third morning of our hunt, he waited patiently until I gave him the go-ahead to take the buck, which had come up out of a canyon behind and to our east and walked directly in front of us to pick up a few kernels of corn I’d scattered before daylight.

I took plenty of time to make sure the buck, which was pushing trophy status, was one we’d want to harvest as part of our quota under the Managed Lands Deer Permit program the ranch has been involved in for a number of years. Fortunately, he would be just that kind of buck — old, very good but not quite a trophy — and I watched him for several minutes before asking in a whisper, “Do you like that buck?”

I got a big-eyed smile in return, and then Justin began positioning himself to take the shot. Since he’s left-handed, he was sitting to my right in the wooden box blind and had the buck perfectly broadside at about 13 yards, close to the maximum distance for a comfortable shot with the long bow.

Just as Justin drew the bow, the old buck either saw or heard something he didn’t like and immediately turned and walked away. Not a fast walk and not a trot, just a determined move to the south. He was out of sight in seconds, and we wouldn’t see him again that day.

I started apologizing immediately for taking so long to evaluate the buck, but Justin was adamant that he wasn’t unhappy at all. “No,” he said, “that was great. I’m having a great time, and we got close to him. It was perfect. Just being close to these deer and seeing how good they are is enough for me.”

Justin can afford to have a long view of hunting now, considering the past 10 years of his time, more than six of which he spent not knowing if he’d ever walk again, much less resume his outdoor life of hiking, guiding and hunting in the Rocky Mountains of the West and the tundra of Alaska.

That miserable part of his life began when he was about 27 years of age and guiding a Dall sheep hunter in Alaska.

“My hunter had killed a sheep, and I had to pack it down off the mountain for him,” Justin said.

That would be a 100-pound pack of hide and horns that he needed to carry more than 21 miles out of the wilderness.

He’d done that many times with no ill effects, but during the trip down, Justin made a bad step and felt a terrible pain in his knee, though he was able to complete the trip and get his hunter safely back to civilization. Then began the hard part.

Surgery to repair the cartilage damage in his knee was successful at first, but the new wore off quickly. The easy part was over, and nearly seven years of intense pain and frustration began as Justin found himself unable to stand for more than a couple of minutes before intense, burning pain would begin in the knee and spread throughout his body.

Multiple surgeries and endless trips to the Mayo Clinic and doctors all over Europe were unable to find the cause. Actually, Justin was his own savior as he spent hours lying in bed or just sitting, because any time he stood the pain returned with a vengeance.

The ultimate diagnosis was something called “central sensitization,” he told me. “It was triggered in my body by the trauma to my knee. The 21½-mile walk out following that trauma caused the neurons in my body to become hyperactive, which in turn caused the sensory cortex in my brain to become sensitized.

“The result was that every time I tried to stand up or walk for the next 6½ years my brain would respond in a way that sent a massive pain response to my knee,” he explained.

We met on an Alaska fishing trip at Newhalen Lodge in 2015, when Justin was still in the midst of his pain trauma. He had returned there to visit lodge owner Bill Sims, for whom he had worked for many years. Sims recalls how that came about.

“He wrote me a letter saying he wanted to come to work for me,” Sims said of the opening round of negotiations between the Alaska bush legend and the skinny kid from North Carolina, who was only about 12 years old at the time. “He told me he didn’t eat very much and could sleep under a log. ’Course, he ate more than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

Justin returned every summer for the next decade, eventually amassing enough experience to begin guiding brown bear and sheep hunters in Alaska and elk hunters in Montana, where he still lives. The pain interrupted that career, though, and Justin had to fight his way back.

After our Alaska trip, we were so taken with the young man and his approach to the wild and dedication to wildlife that my wife, Rana, bought a Zuni fetish carving of a mythical white bear that’s supposed to help with healing.

Doctors eventually gave him some visualization techniques that have allowed him to resume his guiding career, as well as throw in volunteer trips to a rhino orphanage in South Africa, where he goes several times a year to shovel rhino droppings as a way of helping the orphaned youngsters return to a life in the wild.

The time confined to chair and bed wasn’t wasted, though, as Justin read and researched his physical condition and learned a great deal about himself and the world.

Unmarried at the time, he decided he wanted to do something to help preserve the wild places he’d come to know.

“I established a foundation in my (unborn and conceived as of now) son’s name, the Henry Wilson Fund, to help save animals and land so he could follow the tracks I’ve followed and have a chance to see those animals and those places.”

Justin took his first step toward having a son named Henry Wilson Hedgecock when he married a Montana native, Amanda, nine months ago. They still live in Bozeman but travel to Texas and Africa as they work toward that family.

I told him Rana and I thought Henry Wilson would be a cute name for a daughter but he reported he’d already settled on that name as well. “I kind of like the name Archer or Pamir for a girl,” he said.

Justin is simply enjoying his life now, ecstatically happy to be able to enjoy the outdoors again. “It’s such a blessing to be able to walk again,” he said.

“To walk” translates to “and to hunt,” of course, which Justin came to Central Texas to do shortly after the new year began. He showed up with custom long bows, courtesy of a Montana friend who worked to get him into the sport for many years before finally breaking down and sending a bow for Justin to learn and practice on.

“I’ve been using the traditional bow for about nine months now, and I’m learning how to shoot and aim and what my limitations are,” he said as I watched him practice during our lunch break. “I try to shoot every day, just to make sure I know where the arrow is going, and I’ve learned a new appreciation for our ancestors and the skill they had with bows like this. I killed a javelina a couple of days ago, so that was my first trophy with this bow.”

Now my slow response time in giving him a go signal on the old buck at the Lower Air blind had kept him from getting a clean shot at his first whitetail. I told him we’d go back there the next morning, and we were sitting there just before 8 a.m. when the buck stepped into view coming from the south.

I knew him immediately and gave Justin a nod to let him know this was his deer. The buck was feeding left to right less than 15 yards away when Justin got himself situated and ready to draw the bow, which had a draw weight of 56 pounds.

The buck continued to move into the breeze and turned a slight going-away angle as Justin began to draw the bow. As he came to a full draw, however, the buck sensed something or heard something or saw something and moved quickly to turn to his left. The arrow, already on its way, struck him high on his right side, sticking into the backstrap and flopping around as the buck trotted away.

“Unless it got into his liver, that deer isn’t hurt,” I assured Justin when he turned to me in distress that he might have fatally wounded the buck. My assessment was confirmed 45 minutes later when Justin found his arrow lying along the trail the buck used when he left the area.

There was no blood trail and no sign of the buck when Justin walked out the canyon he’d dropped into shortly after the shot. We never found the deer, and Justin had to leave without his Hill Country trophy.

Just a little leery of wooden arrows flying at him from inside a camo’ed bow blind.