It’s early in the morning; the “golden hours” for hunting are just before sunrise and sunset. “You get to see the woods wake up,” says Wyatt Adams ’18. “As the sun comes up, the birds start chirping and the fog starts rising. It’s peaceful – serene.”
Before he sets out for the day, Adams says you have to wash with anti-scent soap, dress up in gear, spray yourself down with scent lock spray, go out into the woods, and creep in as quietly as you can.
“You have to walk really slowly,” says Adams. “You take a couple steps and look around, take a couple steps and look around.” A walk that would take 10 minutes normally could take half an hour, he says. Then it’s a matter of waiting.
“It’s the funnest boredom you’ll ever experience,” Nick Solley ’18 adds. “If you’re doing it right, nothing else really knows you’re there. As soon as you sit down, you notice how much the woods moves.”
Hunting also involves months of preparation beforehand. Solley tells us he goes out into the woods to set up game cameras, scout out feed pots, find where water is, where deer are moving, and more. Solley and Adams are both members of the Hunting & Fishing Club at St. Lawrence.
They both own an assortment of rifles and shotguns that they use for different types of game. They keep all their firearms in an off-campus house in a locked safe. They used to store their guns in the Hunting & Fishing House off-campus, but the house has been purchased and no longer belongs to the club. Because of this, the organization faces issues of continuity moving forward.
It’s illegal to keep firearms on a school campus, per New York State legislation and the St. Lawrence University weapons policy. This poses a challenge to a club that regularly uses firearms. Solley says the club hopes to buy a safe and keep it in a faculty advisor’s house, or to get space to store them at the Canton Sportsmen Club.
Ethan Collins is a senior who hunts independently in his free time during the duck season. Collins owns a rifle and stores it in a safe at a friend’s house when he is at school. When asked if people know that he is a gun owner, he responds, “Oh, yeah; that’s what I’m known as.”
Though he is not shy about his hunting interests, Collins is a bit hesitant to talk about politics. He comments on the stark disconnect between most SLU students’ perceptions and the actual ownership of firearms. “On campus, everything is understood from a third person, out of frame context,” says Collins. “It’s all from secondhand information; there’s very little hands-on experience from the student body.”
Adams also says he’s faced some backlash on campus for being a hunter. He feels that people don’t always understand why he does it: “I don’t hunt because I want to kill shit. It’s because I like harvesting sustainable, healthy meat and actively engaging with the ecosystem.”
But in the greater community outside SLU, familiarity with guns is a whole different story. “In the North Country there’s a huge practical knowledge,” says Collins. “They use it as a tool to survive. I know lots of families that use their firearms to hunt so they can put food on the table, because it’s very cost effective.”
Adams also says it’s also about the pride of being able to eat food you’ve gotten yourselves: there’s also a sense of pride in tagging an animal. In addition, he and Solley both learned to hunt with their families at a young age, so it’s also about that connection to them.
Collins says when it’s hunting season, he is out once or twice a weekend trying to stock his freezer with game meat to impress his housemates. Who doesn’t love the sound and smell of a sizzling duck sausage on Sunday morning? When asked where he hunts closest to campus, he lets out a playful gasp. “I can’t say that; it’s a secret! Hunting spots are sacred, man.”