The Joy Hunt Club

*

At dusk on a desolate, storm-blasted marsh, a lone hunter in camouflage--all but indistinguishable amid the mist and swamp grass--draws his bow and releases an arrow into the primordial gloom.

It is a timeless act, ancient as man. All evening, the small sika deer have been moving like spirits, unseen, elusive. The high, keening wails of the bucks arc ghostly across the flats.

Now, the hunter hopes, one will die.

His arrow--a black carbon shaft tipped with a 150-grain, razor-sharp Snuffer broadhead--rattles faintly as it leaves the bow, proceeding at 130 mph toward a curtain of brown reeds.

Has the deer suddenly moved? The hunter--Timothy Forster, 45, a soda-plant supervisor--hopes for a perfect kill, maybe a nice double-lung shot, or a heart shot. A wounded animal could mean hours with a flashlight, following a glistening blood trail across a land of deadly 5-foot snakes and sucking tidal sinkholes.

Or maybe the shot is a clean, humiliating miss. In any case, a hunt that began at dawn is about to climax in one-third of a second--the time it takes an arrow to transit the 20 yards between hunter and prey.

Forster had trekked well before first light to his position beneath a lonesome pine near a trail stamped with fresh deer tracks, carrying in one pocket a tiny bottle of silicon powder to test the wind, and in his hand a classic longbow he'd crafted of American red maple and African bubinga: Weighing a mere 24 ounces, it produces a stunning 58 pounds of thrust at full draw. Though he'd slain many a deer in decades of hunting with rifles and mechanical compound bows, Forster had yet to take one with this more-primitive weapon.

Twice this season he had shot and missed; now, minutes before dark, his third arrow cleaves the air. All day he'd waited in his camouflage suit, motionless as a tree stump but for the glint of his eyes scanning the terrain through a slit in the hood. So effective is the disguise that curious white-tailed deer--the sika's larger, more-populous brethren--have walked up to Forster, sometimes looked directly at him. At such moments the hunter remains utterly still, unable even to draw his bow because, in the fraction of a second it takes, the deer would bolt and be gone.

Hunt by hunt, season by season, Forster has entered deeper into his strange and ferocious intimacy with the deer, studying their habits and quirks, their "rubs" and "scrapes" and fern-lined beds, their responses to the phases of the moon. He slips in and out of their world unannounced, watches them feed and fight and play and love and die.

Then he eats them, completing a primitive communion with nature that lends hunting the meditative, spiritual dimension so enchanting to serious practitioners. It also, perhaps, accounts for the ambivalence lurking in the hearts of many hunters--shared with society as a whole, but admitted only in private--about killing these beings they adore, whose anguish triggers their empathy, yet whom they yearn to provide with the gift of a quick, clean death.

In his hunting Forster has found great joy, a sense of accomplishment not available elsewhere, a slaking of some prehistoric thirst perhaps, and--not least--the boisterous healing camaraderie among buddies sharing tales of great hunts and bad, monster bucks and broken bows and legendary snorings in the tent--all the jokes and foibles and tender moments accompanying the shared sense of competent all-American machismo that prompted E. B. White's wry observation in 1941 that Hitler would never have reoccupied the Rhineland if he'd "ever spent a fall in a New England village, watching the bucks go by on the running boards."

As he shoots, Forster experiences a powerful sensation, the rush familiar to all hunters, as his brain triggers a massive flood of adrenaline. He feels a dizzying thrill, and it takes disciplined self-mastery to steady his trembling limbs as--heart pounding and blood roaring in his ears--he draws, anchors and releases in one seamless, instinctive motion.

The arrow flies.

*

" 'Twas an awful mistake to miss that buck!" exclaimed Hurry.

--"The Deerslayer"

"Whack 'em and stack 'em!"

So declares Wynn Warren, one of Forster's high-spirited hunting pals, as the men make their plans one night in the cozy, bright kitchen of the modest Forster home in Shady Side, a village south of Annapolis, Md.

The jokey phrase is their private mantra, inspiring confidence along with the double-fist gesture they execute before parting to enter the woods, for in the end each man hunts alone.

Janice Forster, 38, putters nearby, slightly amused by all this. She's admittedly a "hunting widow" to a man who calls himself "obsessed. . . . I told her when we got married, 'I hunt, and I hunt a lot. You gotta accept that.' "