Another recollection from my summer in Paonia, Colorado
Above is a photo of a five-point buck in the greenhouse at the farm where I worked this summer. (See “Cows, Coal and Peaches: My summer in Paonia, Colorado.”) This wasn’t the first time he or one of his brothers bedded down in the aisles. Why didn’t we chase them out? Because we were trying to keep them safe. Here’s the story.
The scene: Early August, in what I’d describe as “suburban” Paonia. Not suburban as in identical tract houses packed along cul-de-sacs but “rural suburban”; an area just outside of town made up of “fives and tens” (parcels 5 and 10 acres each), with quite a few smaller lots (a quarter acre or less) carved out of them over time. The houses tend to be along to the roads, and collectively they are like walls around the the edges of large “blocks,” enclosing interior spaces that are mostly irrigated pasture for cows and hay, or orchards.
That interior area is where the story takes place. Basically picture a mostly open space criss-crossed by fencing, dotted with trees, and surrounded by a border of houses with their lawns, swing sets and out-buildings, etc. From any one house, you can see several to many others, some right next door, some a few hundred feet away. Much of the fencing between the properties is short enough for deer to jump, and there are also gaps, giving the bucks free access. Some fences have gates in them to allow access to shared irrigation infrastructure, or just to be neighborly. In this area, there is a sense of privacy beyond the fact of it all being private property.
In the interior of this particular block, bucks have been hanging out for years, and are well-loved by most of the neighbors. They shelter in tree groves, browse in the pastures, and score fallen apples. Sure, every once in awhile a bedding plant in a flower garden might get munched, or an ornamental shrub, but for the most part no one had any complaints and they are such handsome animals who are pleasant to have around. At least a couple of them, like the one pictured, had five point antlers, which in my experience is not so common to see. Usually it’s fewer.
At my boss’s farm, they didn’t harm any of the crops, though they did regularly nibble on Bindweed and Thistles, two of the most common weeds, so that was appreciated. The crops this year were all medicinal herbs, many strongly aromatic, and thus not palatable to deer, but they also left my vegetable garden completely untouched. Even so, in the spring and early summer we’d shoo them out of the fields and close the gates against them, because that’s just what you do.
That changed in August.
Early that month an out-of-towner in a big fancy white GMC truck started circling the neighborhood. The guys in it knocked on doors asking permission to come onto private property to shoot a buck. This is legal in a rural area like this, if it’s during hunting season, but not otherwise. More on that later.
Many of the neighbors are in regular contact with each other by text and phone, so word quickly spread about these guys, who as it turns out were from a trophy hunting operation in Montrose, and were offering $5000 or more if they were allowed to kill and take a buck. The general consensus was opposition, in part for love of the animals, but also because of the suburban quality of the neighborhood, with so many residences in such close proximity. Not a place where using firearms seems wise. Additionally, though some of the neighbors are themselves hunters, they do so for the meat and look down on trophy hunting. And they go to the National Forest for that.
This wasn’t the first year this had happened, and in the past someone had always caved to a trophy hunter with a checkbook. Yes, $5000 is a significant chunk of change but accepting it was widely seen as a dick move. This year residents put up new “No Hunting” signs to send a message, not just to the trophy guys but also to neighbors who might be considering the offer.
Last year’s traitor, who we’ll call “Curly,” owns a property with two long shared sides with the farm where I lived and work. My boss was in close contact with Curly, who said he regretted giving in the previous year. He was well aware that the community was against anyone letting the trophy hunters “inside,” so to speak, to target a buck. Furthermore he said he was pissed off because some of the photographs posted online by the trophy operation appeared to have been taken on his land this year, which would be trespassing since he hadn’t given them permission to enter. So it seemed he had joined the opposition and my boss was happy about that.
Meanwhile, my boss and I decided to offer sanctuary to the bucks. We stopped chasing them out of the fields and left the gates open so they could come and go as they pleased. I started giving them a wide berth when I was walking around the farm so as not to spook them.
My boss left for a few days to visit family in another state, leaving me in charge of day-to-day operations and I stayed busy with harvesting, weeding and all the other work. On the night of Aug. 20th, shortly after dark, he called me because a neighbor had heard a gunshot and had seen the big white fancy GMC on Curly’s property, right behind hers. Her adolescent daughter had heard the shot through her open bedroom window, which faces the field.
Would I mind checking it out? my boss asked, making it clear I didn’t have to.
I put on my headlamp and headed back there. I saw the truck right away, next to the fence on Curly’s side. As far as I knew I was witnessing a poaching event, so it was my duty as a good neighbor to check it out. I entered through a wide gap in the fence and approached them, asking them firmly if they had permission to be there.
Their tone was immediately belligerent as they insisted they did. I looked in the back of the truck so I could count the points and report back to the neighbors about which one got killed. The buck’s eyes were still open but he didn’t look back. His starward gaze was vacant. He was still handsome in death, even with his twisted body crammed into the cold metal bed. It was heartbreaking. His antlers had five points each.
Then a third man appeared demanding to know who I was. I explained I represented the landowner next door. He told me he was Curly. The hunters loudly repeated that what they were doing was legal. Curly joined the chorus, also emphasizing this claim of legality.
In the moment I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I took it at face value and countered with: “Well you’re all assholes.” In retrospect, quite a thing to say to a group of men you know to be armed, but it just came out, and I did intuit correctly that they wouldn’t turn their violence on me.
They really hated that and their moods turned to fury. I turned and headed back to my boss’ property. There were a few more harsh words not worth repeating. Curly told me never to set foot on his property again. No problem!
Word quickly spread about what happened and Curly’s popularity, which had already been low (“He’s a misogynist,” one woman said) sank even further. He tried making excuses to my boss, who wasn’t having any of it.
A couple days later my boss and I were talking to a neighbor on an adjoining block who pointed out that hunting season hadn’t started yet, so as far as he knew, this shooting was straight up illegal. I’ve since looked it up, and sure enough, deer hunting season in Colorado in 2025 opened Sept. 2 for bow hunting, Sept. 13 for muzzle-loaders and October 25 for rifles. I don’t know if the trophy hunters used a muzzle-loader or a rifle on the poor buck but it definitely wasn’t a bow, and it was too early for any method.
You might have heard terms like “ethical hunting” and “fair chase.” I’m not educated enough about them to say much, but this event on Aug. 20th was definitely neither. It was trophy hunting of a virtually confined animal. These guys just wanted the head and rack to sell, that’s it. Gross, imho.
To be clear, what I mean by “trophy hunting” is when people kill an animal, often an ungulate of impressive size—or worse yet, a predator whose meat is not typically consumed—just for the pleasure of killing it, and/or to showcase the body or some body part. By contrast, someone killing an animal for food might end up displaying the antlers or whatever, but only as a secondary thing. Currently there’s an active debate in hunting culture about trophy hunting, so yeah, #notallhunters. Again, I’m not in that world so I can’t speak about it, but I hope the detractors are gaining steam.
I have to say that the experience left me feeling a little cold about Paonia too. I was shown that, as friendly as people are with each other, they don’t know how to act together as a community to protect something that’s important to them. That kind of action will be increasingly important as our society at large continues to collapse. (See my 2024 essay, “How Will Communities Handle Troublemakers?”) Looking back, I’m surprised that a basic fact—that it was illegal to hunt that month—was apparently unknown. Hopefully next year will be different. I heard that a neighbor is looking into how the neighborhood could legally be declared out-of-bounds for hunting.
Personally, my heart is with the folks who actively oppose the spurious or malicious killing of wild animals, like Roam Free Nation, which seeks to protect the Buffalo of Yellowstone Park (who are threatened by hunters as soon as they cross the invisible line of the park’s borders), and the Hunt Saboteurs Association, which engages in direct action to stop fox hunts in the UK. I think, too, about how Rhinos are carefully de-horned by conservationists so the animals won’t be poached for them (an effective but not unproblematic tactic). That buck would still be alive if someone had wrecked his trophy value by sawing off the tip of one of his five points (which I’m sure raises other issues too).
Like so much that happens to the more-than-human world in our times, this incident both enraged and saddened me. As I’ve aged, the anger dissipates more quickly even as the melancholy deepens, but my empathy grows. I’ll take it.
