Deer Painting II, oil on paper, 1991, Phil Dewey
A Deer Hunter’s Full Life


Full Season: A Deer Hunter's Story, by Dave Drakula,

Beaver Pond Publications, Greenville, PA (2001)
 
        Dave Drakula hunted deer for 43 years.  That is a long time for a man to devote to one enterprise.  He killed many deer, mostly bucks, in his lifetime. His memoirs, his “story” about those hunts is bound between the covers of Full Season: A Deer Hunter’s Story.  The story within the story is that this story, his only book, was barely completed when he died at 59, at an age when he might have had many more seasons.
        Full Season is Drakula’s attempt to capture his life long passion for deer and deer hunting.  Dave grew up in a mining town in Fayette County, southwestern Pennsylvania, at a time when deer were scarce.  He was eight years old when he saw his first dear, killed by an uncle on a hunting trip to McKean County, the legendary “Big Woods” of Pennsylvania.  It was a moment that shaped the rest of his life.
        His career as a reading teacher, writer and conservationist started with his introduction to Forest Patrol, a book for young readers by Jim Kjelgaard, who grew up in Galeton, Pa., recommended to him by his sixth grade reading teacher. She let him keep it. He still had it at the time of his death.  In a tribute to Kjelgaard, published in 1990, Dave recounts that Forest Patrol did three things for him: “it made me a reader, a writer and transported me to a world where I wanted to live, North Central Pennsylvania…” Dave had by then become a reading teacher and an outdoor columnist after having moved to Emporium in Cameron County in 1965.
        It was during this period he came under the influence of the Outdoor Editor of the Pittsburgh Press, Roger Latham, outdoor writer, conservationist and a pioneer in the field of deer management.  It was Latham who encouraged Dave to write.  He became a syndicated columnist for ten newspapers and created his own publication, The Mountain Journal, a regional magazine devoted to outdoors stories and articles about the “big woods.”  He sold the journal at the time of his retirement from teaching in 1999; the new owners subsequently abandoned it.
        Full Season is really two books.  The first two-thirds captures the years of Drakula’s youth, his early experiences in the woods, his admiration for his father who died of prostrate cancer when he was 49 years old, his move to Cameron County with subsequent explorations of its mountains, his growing interest in deer biology and the role hunting plays in management of the deer herd and his maturation as a writer.  It does not delve into a failed first marriage or the estrangement he experienced when his only son, David, now a playwright, revealed that he was gay.  It does not record an eventual reconciliation. His second wife, Gwen, is portrayed as a woman who fully understood the self-imposed over riding demands of a writer and outdoorsman. Central in the retelling of these years is the role of his grandson, Doug, who from the age of four accompanied Dave on many of his trips into the big woods.  It was to Doug that Dave tried to impart all of the lessons he had learned in his voyage from the mines of Uniontown to the mountains in the big woods.  Residents of Emporium still remember that the two were inseparable.
        The beginning of the final third of Full Season - the book-within-the book - starts with the realization that, at the age of 53, he had outlived his father only to learn that he had the same cancer himself.  Three years after successfully treating the prostrate cancer and being told by doctors that he had a good chance of living out a full life he retired from teaching, sold The Mountain Journal and set about doing something he had never been able to do: spend an entire season, a “full season,” in the woods.  For the next two and a half months he was there hunting, observing and taking notes every day except five.
        The final chapters of the book are based on the careful notes he recorded each week during his final, full season.  By now, Doug is a twelve year old and an accomplished hunter himself.  The eight weeks of hunting with bow and shotgun in New York State and bow and rifle in Cameron County are replete with observations on weather, wildlife seen, the topography of the hunting ground, and Dave and Doug’s successes in taking both bucks and does.  The only clue for the reader to the final ending is his observation that he lost 22 pounds and experienced extreme exhaustion.
        The writing of Full Season occupied Dave throughout the year 2000 and soon after it was completed in 2001 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease of the lymphatic system.  Quite often the typical symptoms of long periods of weight loss, fatigue, fever and other indicators are ignored or ascribed to other things before the individual finally seeks medical attention. He died August 25, 2002.
        Full Season is not a ‘how-to’ book.  It is not a folksy or humorous anecdote-laden burlesque about his adventures in the woods.  It is not a boastful account of big racks, odds-defying long range shots, and clever tactics for out smarting the whitetail deer.  There is no tabulation of the number of bucks killed with weights, points and rack size. There are no endorsements of products, firearms or any of the other items that overwhelm today’s outdoor shop browsers. Most of it would probably be rejected by the slick, popular hunting and outdoors magazines of today. Indeed, if a young person turned to it hoping to learn how to master the craft and techniques of deer hunting he would be disappointed.
        Instead, Drakula quietly, but persuasively, tells one man’s story about the difficulties, the disappointments, the small joys and incremental steps to success in the quest for whitetail deer.  The acquisition of the virtues of patience, study, reflection, observation and empathy for the prey become the goal, not the killing of deer.  He writes in the chapter entitled ‘Changes’ that “he went several seasons without killing a buck and didn’t feel any disgrace,” notwithstanding he was somewhat of a local hero known to always “get his buck.”  He began to realize that the business of ‘keeping score’, while accepted in certain activities of our society, did not have a place in hunting.  He writes, “Better to understand that as hunters we’re awfully lucky to be able to do what we do, that being a part of the outdoors and killing an animal is a precious gift of opportunity and life.”



SOURCES:
“Jim Kjelgaard – From the Bigwoods to Hollywood,” by Dave Drakula, The Mountain Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4, July/September, 1990
“Vampire’s Kiss,” by Heather Joslyn, Baltimore City Paper, May 15, 2002 – a review of “Son of Drakula,” a play by David Drake (Drakula)
Telephone conversations with Gwen Drakula, Dave Drakula’s widow and Doug Petty, his grandson, November 7, 2006.