The Red Brush Gang 2021

An Outdoorsman’s Journal

Mark Walters sponsored by

Hello friends, The next couple of weeks I will be writing to you about the 11 days I spent at my deer camp, which is in the heart of the Meadow Valley Wildlife Area in northern Juneau County. First thing, this would be my 50th year in a row of never missing an opening day of deer season in this neck of the woods. For me that is a pretty important piece of the puzzle.

Saturday, Nov. 20 High 42, Low 26

So, our temporary shack that is built on public property for the deer gun season is an 18-foot by 36-foot pole barn with 20 bunks, two wood stoves, six propane lights and a table going down the middle of it. Last night 16 of us slept in it and before the season would end, on our biggest night we had 23.

There is an electronic dart board and most nights we have a dart tournament. Sometimes there is wrestling and an occasional pull-up contest. I do very poorly in the wrestling and not so good in the pull-up contest. Two nights ago, I did some painful damage to my left elbow in the pull-up contest that will heal but would be a problem for all of camp.

We hunt both the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge and the Meadow Valley Wildlife Area. Some of us walk out of the shack to hunt, others drive as far as 15 miles and then walk as far as 1.5 miles to our stands.

My 20-year-old daughter Selina and I drive and then do a 1.5-mile walk. Our day, like most others in the gang since grey wolves became a solid feature in the area, would be very slow with two deer being spotted. In all my years for an opener I have never heard such a low number of shots.

On the other hand, we have 12 kids in camp this weekend between the ages of 6 and 33 with 10 of them being over 17. Ryan Moll is 33 and would be hunting near his dad Jeff and his brother Ross, who would be with his 6-year-old son Jordan and 10-year-old stepdaughter Elise Mianecki.

Jordan, Elise and Ross sat together in a ground blind and had very little action, but these kids loved camp, could take the cold and were very patient.

Ryan Moll who flies A-10s and is a captain at Selfridge Air National Guard Air Base near Harrison, Mich., was 30-feet up in an oak tree and put a whacking on an 8-point buck. A crazy story on that is that while he was dragging the buck back to the truck, he saw just a small part of a horn sticking out of the water on a dike. Ryan waded in over his hip boots pulled what was a spiker out of the water and then located the hunter that he was sure had shot it as he had witnessed the gun going off.

The hunter looked at the spiker and said it was not his, that he had shot at a fork horn. Long story short, the buck was tagged and not wasted by one of the Molls.

Back at camp Allie Schuster, who is a senior at DeForest High School and plans on attending UW-Eau Claire next year with the hope of becoming a math teacher, was hunting in her normal stand when a spiker came by. She put a bullet in it and that would be our total for day one with over half of our gang not seeing a deer.

I am Allie’s uncle, and we have a total love/hate relationship that we both play out very well. When she was like 10, she would always say that there was no way that she would ever hunt. Then she sat with her father Shane Schuster and froze her butt off but did not hunt. The next fall I took her camping for the youth hunt, and she harvested an 8-pointer. Even though she truly is a brat, Allie is now hooked on deer camp.

My nephew Riley Schuster, who is like 33, would be the only person to see what we call a big buck. Riley got a quick shot at a very solid 8-pointer and then could not shoot because there was orange in the background. The other hunter shot the buck and, like the rest of us, Riley was very sportsman-like and had a real nice talk with the hunter.

On Monday we are officially done sitting in stands and begin doing deer drives. We stay up every night until between late and very late. The laughter never ends, my elbow is hurting and there is no place like deer camp.

Here till I die! Sunset