“I’m Going to Scare Those Poor Kids to Death.”

This article was first published February 23, 2025, at fieldethos.com.

Good bucks on camera in August don’t always stick around till October, but this one did. He first showed up in a bachelor group with a couple of his buddies. Those two eventually left for either greener pastures or hotter does, but this one stuck around. And, because the buck steadfastly maintained his summer feeding pattern well into the fall and wasn’t in the least bit camera shy, I got to watch him shed first his velvet and then later his summer coat. I learned his habits and picked up on his preferences. Never have I been more confident of my chances with a deer; I practically had him home and hung above the fireplace.

I hunted the buck on a couple of October’s cooler evenings, but I decided to wait until Oklahoma’s muzzleloader season opened in late October before I sat for a morning hunt. Opening day of muzzleloader season would feature a full moon, but it was the right time of year to be in the woods and I wasn’t about to waste an opportunity to hunt with a rifle in my hands.

To get to the ladder stand from which I’d be hunting the buck, I parked my pickup at the edge of a fallow field and skirted its edge, walking underneath a canopy of live oaks at the head of a draw, before dropping down and creeping across a few yards of open ground. I stepped out of the truck that morning and was met with a whisper of west wind, ideal for the stand I intended to sit. I shivered for the first time that fall and inched my jacket’s zipper closer to my chin.

I didn’t bother with a head lamp for the walk in; the full moon was plenty bright enough to light the way. I was looking down, focused on where I placed my feet, when another whisper of wind, this one from the north, made me look up. The north wind was less than ideal for my stand, and I decided to wait until it blew itself out before continuing. Scanning the skyline, my eyes were drawn to the canopy I was soon to walk beneath. There, hanging from the canopy’s uppermost branches and silhouetted against the full moon, was a body on the end of a rope. I felt another whisper of that north wind and watched in horror as it swung and spun the corpse. 

The plausible explanation came to me in a flash. The guy whose place I was hunting had made his money employing men with strong backs, if not sharp minds, and one of them, disgruntled and down on his luck, and probably drunk to boot, had probably been fired from his job and decided to make a statement by taking his life on his employer’s property.

My mind raced with responsibility. What was I supposed to do? Call the authorities? Cut down the corpse? It wouldn’t be daylight for an hour, at least. Could I even do what needed to be done in the dark? I debated and finally decided that I couldn’t let the poor soul swing another second. I ran back to my pickup and pulled it around until its bed was directly below the body. Then I climbed into the back and reached up for the rope. 

When I did, another gust of wind blew the body against me. It wasn’t the heft of human flesh I felt, though. The body was insubstantial, its limbs plastic and hollow. What was going on here? I stepped up and onto the edge of the truck bed then and shined a flashlight. My beam fell upon a mannequin’s featureless face. And that’s when I remembered a comment made in passing a few weeks previous by the man whose place I was hunting.

“I’m taking my grandkids on a Halloween hayride this year, and I’ve got some surprises planned for them. I’m going to scare those poor kids to death.”