To be a Myrkle Man is to be at one with the myrkle, which is synonymous with being at one with marsh mosquitoes, greenbrier, ticks and shifting sand.
To be a Myrkle Man is to be a hunter joyously possessed.
Sonny Pace is a dyed-in-the-camo Myrkle Man. Sonny, who lives near Assateague, and a band of fellow Myrkle Men had just finished a week of hunting sika on the Virginia end of the island (without a deer to show for their intense efforts). Now they were about to start hunting in Maryland, and they agreed to show us the ropes along the way. We were good candidates for Myrkledom, I should add: Bart, my slightly unstable friend from home, who had brought along not one, not two, but three decoys with which to lure the wily sika (he hoped); Wayne, my good buddy from Colorado, who hoped to call in a sika the way he calls in elk. And me. Not one of us would qualify as the most stable horse in the barn.
The first morning we met at the Park Service campground on the northern end of the island, where we three neo-Myrkles were camped for the week. Sonny and crew piled into their 4WD trucks, and we followed, into the hintersands.
We drove 10 miles south, through the soft sand, sliding and spinning until we got the hang of sand driving. We pulled off onto a side road that led to a waterfowl blind. The Myrkle Men gathered up tree stands, Bart picked out a decoy, and Wayne and I, hyperactive on this first day, elected to still-hunt the inland pines and the edges of the marsh. We were off.
Sika are, if anything, more nocturnal than other deer. That is what the literature told me, and that is what the sign con¬firmed. There were tracks and scrapes everywhere, as if a vast migration of the animals had passed through, but that first afternoon I didn't see a deer. Nor did anyone else.
The next morning, well before light, we returned. Bart stole off with his decoy, Sonny rushed to his stand (his cohorts had abandoned him), and Wayne and I teamed up to prowl through the pines and puddles. We might not sneak up on a sika, but we thought we had a chance of seeing one and calling one in.
The calling worked. We think. At least a sika called immediately after Wayne sounded an adenoidal bugle. His response could have been coincidence; we prefer to think it was conditioned. In either case, his cry, which sounded like the bugle of a 100-pound elk, gave us a direction. Calling sporadically to keep the sika cranked, we moved in.
I can't say I saw the deer a half mile away, but I saw something that didn't look right, didn't belong. We took to the myrkle and the pines, and crept and snuck until we were 200 yards away. The speck was a stag, a handsome 6-pointer, black and shaggy and regal in the morning sun, posing beside a clump of myrkle in the middle of a large grassy flat. Wayne called, but the stag neither answered nor looked our way.
Without a mud snorkel for breathing while low-crawling through the wet, slimy flats, we could not approach the stag from where we were, so we drew lots. Wayne won and set off to circle the stag and stalk him from behind, through a line of brush that offered some cover. He had not been gone 10 minutes when a second, smaller stag bounced across the field, followed immediately by yet a third. The two interlopers sproinged past the big fellow, who faded into the myrkle clump.
Minutes later Wayne appeared on the far side of the field, stalking carefully. I realized he had spooked the other two sika from the brush edging the flat, but that didn't matter because the big fellow was still in that clump, and we had him surrounded. So I moved in.
We were within range when the stag's head popped out of the brush, pivoting like a periscope. This was a wily animal, because the first thing he did was take a doe hostage—a doe we didn't know was hiding in that tangle—and force her to run interference for him. |
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