FENCEROWS… Hunting the Albino Buck
By John Luthens
I’d heard about the sightings and seen photos circulating, but thoughts of the Ozaukee County albino buck hadn’t stirred any response to action on my part. Any real plan of action stayed simmering for the summer on the backburner of my mind.
Albino deer are rare, an albino buck even more so. There are Native American cultures that hold the sightings of albino animals in sacred esteem. Here one was living practically in my own back yard, with all the magic and good fortune that it portended for the coming hunting season. I had to do something eventually.
Maybe it was the last day of August that finally did it. Maybe it was the full moon, with its soft, white glow shining through my bedroom window, and thoughts of the moon glowing white on the lone albino that had roamed my neck of the woods for several years.
Maybe I just needed to get out hunting. Maybe I just needed to get out more, period. My mental state can be debated but, bit by bit, my plan of action came together. I went out in early morning to hunt the albino buck.
Jumping the gun on the hunting season that morning, instead climbing in my truck with a bow or cased gun and a deer stand waiting far to the north, I hopped on my mountain bike with a camera and a pack and headed into the wilds of Ozaukee County.
I knew the general range of the buck from the news stories and local talk. My plan required me to access a north-south running railroad track that split the albino sighting area in half. The tracks ran roughly between Grafton and Port Washington. I figured to be walking the tracks right into the buck’s own lair before dawn.
I headed for the Ozaukee Interurban Trail before most of the town was even awake. A few cars zipped by me before I hit the trail; early bird workers getting a head start on the Labor Day weekend. The bike trail was my best route to get to my hunting spot without detection, and it was my best route to avoid a bike-car collision with early morning commuters.
The sun rises over a railway track in Ozaukee County
The Interurban Trail is a 30 mile railway grade spanning the length of Ozaukee County. A rail car connected the outlying suburbs with Milwaukee, back in the days before freeways took over the job. It stands today as a fantastic bike route that winds through the countryside and suburb towns, including my own home town of Grafton, bringing you along the Milwaukee River to Port Washington before stretching along Lake Michigan into the far northern reaches of the county.
A setting moon lit the trail for me. Cottontail rabbits darted into trailside cover. I biked up rising hills and coasted easily down the other side in the moonlight. The warm air of late summer collided with traces of a cool autumn breeze on the descents.
I stopped to catch the moon on my camera but it refused to turn out right on the digital screen. There was a dull grinding in the mechanism of the telephoto lens, likely the product of too many abusive fishing trips during the summer. The camera sounded like a fly reel that’s been dropped in the sand and stomped on.
A few twists off the bike path and onto some back roads took me to the railway. I glanced up and down the road before tossing my bike in the weeds and heading down the tracks. Like my camera, my bike isn’t anything fancy. It’s been used and abused. I wasn’t too concerned about a passerby finding it and tossing it into their trunk. I was more concerned about a passerby reporting a rail-walking vagrant to the police department.
The moon sunk to one side of the tracks as the sun rose on the other. It’s a different perspective on the rotation of the spheres when you are walking a straight line.
There were plenty of blackbirds flitting around the cornfields, and early morning geese were up and about for their breakfast. I actually saw geese sitting on a power-line tower. If it weren’t for the High Voltage signs, I thought I could make a pretty good goose blind beneath the tower.
As I neared Port Washington, the tracks ran close to a subdivision. A wayward skunk stumbled across the tracks, bleary eyed from a night of carousing the subdivision garbage dumpsters, heading off to a hollow log in the tree line to sleep it off.
Deer were around, I could almost sense it. My feet fell into the uneven pacing that rail walking involves. There is no rhyme-or-reason to the width of rail ties, or any set distance between them. Eventually you find a stride if you don’t concentrate too hard, and if you start humming songs from the movie “Stand by Me.”
Sure enough, I kicked five deer out of a field of goldenrod that stretched along the tracks. There were no horns, as far as I could tell, and none of the deer were white. Further down, I jumped another yearling from its bed-a pretty deer, still not the right color.
As I walked, I formulated my letter of complaint to the DNR:
Dear Dr. Kroll, Your herd management strategy has some serious flaws. It’s not that I’m not seeing enough deer; it’s just that I’m not seeing enough white ones.
I couldn’t sign my name for risk of wardens showing up on my doorstep and giving me a big fine for hunting along the railroad tracks in the first place.
I did find a sunken and crumbling old stone culvert running beneath the tracks. In the dried mud directly in front of the culvert entrance were a set of large deer prints. Assessing the situation, I became convinced deer were using the culvert as a runway to the other side of the tracks. I slid down the stone bank to take a closer look. The prints led straight out of the culvert. It had to be the case.
I suppose I could have sat down on a log and waited for something to move through the tunnel. Who knows, it might have even been the albino buck coming in for a close-up photo opportunity-not that I could count on my camera to come through in the clutch.
But there was a lot of season coming up. I’d hunted the albino buck. It had to have fortified my good standing with the hunting gods. Besides, I was almost into town, and I was close to a convenience store that serves a pretty decent cup of coffee.
The sun was just starting to beat down above the railroad tracks, and it was going to be a hot day, but there was still that smell in the air, if the wind blew just right- that smell that promised something crisper moving in from the north. The fall scent of hunting was slowly coming in.