R. R. Branstrom | Daily Press Derek Lark points to a set of antlers from a 2017 harvest. He said it was the only year that he and his father each shot a buck, and that this particular trophy shows a fulfilled prophecy — he’d been teasing his father, Bill, about getting a bigger buck than the six-pointer Bill had shot. Derek counts seven on this one he snagged at the end of the season.

NAHMA TOWNSHIP — Heading out to deer camp for hunting season is a long-embraced tradition of many Yoopers. Some city-dwellers, spouses, and non-hunters may wonder what drives these enthusiasts to take vacation time to sit in a cold blind in the woods, stay in a generator-powered shack off the grid for two weeks at a time, and get elbows-deep in ungulate guts on the frozen ground — if they’re lucky.

The very things that might turn some people off, however, are exactly what draws others in.

Readers might recall the values of 19th-century Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, who famously sought peace and escape from the weights of civilization and society by retreating to Walden Pond.

Deer camp offers similar attractions. Some hunters say they enjoy taking in the scenery of autumn leaves, falling snow, and wildlife that emerges before the eyes of a person sitting still outdoors for hours at a time.

“This is a way to get away for a little while,” said Derek Lark, sitting at a wooden table at his family’s camp. Once upon a time, this table likely sat in someone’s dining room with a smooth surface. Now, it’s riddled with scratches, rings and other marks, and at least one of its legs is a rough four-by-four. It’s perfect for a laid-back setting — no need to stress about upsetting Grandma by not using a coaster.

“I saved up all my vacation time through the year and took two weeks off,” Derek continued. “It’s kind of a way to get away from normal life for a little while.”

Derek’s father, Bill Lark — who currently owns the property along with his wife, Connie — agreed. Though in Bill’s case, he’s retired, and was also able to spend a few more days earlier in the fall to hunt birds with his German Shorthaired Pointer, Remmy. But deer firearm season is the big one.

“There’s always the allure of shooting that thirty-pointer,” Bill laughed.

“The biggest deer I’ve shot is still that first one I ever shot. So I’m kind of always chasing getting something bigger than that,” Derek said.

A nook of the cabin is clad with trophies from bucks shot primarily on this property. One wall holds mostly European mounts (with skulls and antlers) and a torn-to-shreds orange hat that signifies perfect scores shot by Derek when he participated in a league in an Escanaba gun club. Hanging on another wall is a large wooden board covered in over a dozen pairs of antlers and about 30 metal placards representing other types of trophies from the days when Bill’s parents, Les and Mary Lark, owned Lark’s Town Pump, a bar in Escanaba at the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue North. These acknowledge such accomplishments as “1974-75 Delta Pool League Champs,” “National Slowpitch Tournament Champs 1976,” “Women’s Dartball League 1981 2nd Half Champs,” and “1981 U.P. Music Division 3 ‘Almost Organized.'”

This cabin and property, tucked away on a bog on a side road off of a back road off of a county road, wasn’t always the Larks’. According to Bill, it was built by the Korntved family a couple generations ago. Bill and his brothers were friends with Bob Korntved, who inherited the place from his parents, and the group used to come to hang out at the camp in the late ’70s.

“Back then, it was more drinking and playing cards than shooting deer,” Bill remarked. And that’s not to say that drinking and card games aren’t still an important part of camp; when the Press visited, there was a poker game planned for the following Saturday at a friend’s camp on Jug Lake. Other traditions include a prime rib dinner and cornhole games one evening per year at the same friend’s. Thanksgivings have been spent at camp, but this year, Bill said, they went back to town.

Reflecting on his early memories of the place, Bill said that the footprint of the building is the same, but a lot of the cabin has been redone. One modernization is an indoor toilet with a woodstove in the bathroom — sheer luxury compared to some camps.

When the Larks bought the five-acre property in the early ’90s, Bill explained, it had a two-holer outhouse.

When he first started coming to camp with his buddy, there was a sign on the wall of the outhouse, asking visitors to write their name and weight on a sheet on the wall before they went, Bill recounted.

“And of course I had to come in and ask him what the heck is up with putting your name and how much you weigh on the outhouse wall, and he says, ‘Well, that’s in case you fall in, we know how much to shovel out,'” Bill said, to laughter.

Fast-forward in time to 1991 or ’92. Bill had just bought a brand-new Sonoma pickup truck.

“When this camp came up for sale, I told my wife, ‘Well, I’m getting rid of the truck and I’m gonna … go buy an old beater pickup, because I’d rather make payments on the camp than on the truck,'” he recalled.

The five-acre property, the cabin and everything in it — with the exception of one book his friend Bob claimed — cost a grand total of $8,000.

A few years after buying, Bill said, he remodeled the whole place. Though he’d intended to repair just one sagging portion of the floor, he found everything to be rotten when he opened it up.

“Would have been like ’96 or ’97 I took all the siding off of it. I stripped the whole drywall out of it. I took all the flooring off this side, all the floor joists because they were all rotten, and I remodeled the whole camp. I wired it and re-drywalled it, and put my cabinets and flooring and painted it, and all that fancy stuff. Insulated it … bought a generator,” Bill rattled off.

Like many — some would say the best — hunting camps, the place was off the grid. There hadn’t been electricity or running water, but gas lamps and a gas stove. After Bill bought a Honda generator for the camp in 1997, power usage still had to be minimized because the generator itself ran on gas.

A major update came at the end of deer season in 2023. Neighbors had gotten power in and allowed the Larks access from their box. Bill said he felt bad that it had cost the neighbors around $20,000 to get power out to their place and only about $3,000 from there to the Larks, but that the neighbors were very nice about it.

Now that they’ve got amenities associated with electricity, Bill said it’s no longer a camp but qualifies as a “cottage.” There’s even a Roku TV with cable and Netflix as of this year.

Still, though, being out in this neck of the woods between Nov. 15 and 30 is about being in the blind, trekking through the bog, and experiencing the wild — even if a hunter doesn’t bag a buck.

Bill and Derek shared stories of other animals they’ve encountered. There was a wolf that stalked Derek one year, tracks right on the porch in the snow, a family of bald eagles that stole the organs of a deer after Bill completed field dressing, and beavers that flooded a road by damming up a culvert.

“I battled with them things for years,” Bill said of the beavers, “and then we got a new neighbor down here that traps. … One of the first ones he pulled out of there was like 60 or 70 pounds. I’ve never seen a beaver that big before.”

One unusual run-in with a deer a few years ago was exactly that. The deer ran into the hunter.

Early one morning, Bill was walking to his blind about a mile from the cabin.

“I look up, down the road, and I see a flash of a deer,” Bill reported. “Before I could even think about maybe putting my gun up or whatever, the thing ran me over. It knocked me right down. It hit me so hard that it just knocked me down and rolled me. It put a big lump on the side of my head and face I had scratches and scrapes on my face from hitting the brush when I went down.

“I got up, and it was bouncing down the road … and I’m thinking, ‘what in the heck happened?’ I’m kind of in shock and I’ve got hair stuck in my teeth. … I couldn’t pull it out with my bare fingers. I had to have my glove on to pull the hair out. Just jammed into my teeth — so that’s how hard it hit me.”

Derek, who said he had been sleeping in, remembers his father returning to camp that morning to resight his gun, which had also taken some damage in the incident. Derek said he woke up to Bill sitting in the cabin, breathing heavy, face bloodied, with deer hair on his clothes and stuck in his gun.

Strange incidents aside, hunting camp is about a number of attractions.

There’s the pursuit of a prideworthy harvest and the hope of shooting certain identifiable bucks seen in person or on trail cams, which seem to take on a greater sort of power when given names. Mounted on the Larks’ wall is Stinky, an old buck with an impressive rack. Still in the woods is El Toro, whose curved antlers Bill likened to a bull’s horns.

There’s the competition with others — Derek shared that one year, after Bill shot a six-pointer early in the season, Derek teased him that he was going to one-up him with a bigger buck. Towards the end of the season, Derek got one with a tiny seventh point.

But it’s also just about enjoying the time away from the grind of everyday life. Bill said that when a buck presented itself early in the season, he didn’t take a shot at it, because he didn’t want to tag out and be unable to hunt for the remainder of the two weeks.

That doesn’t mean he’s out hunting at every opportunity, though. He also enjoys being the camp cook. The first night at camp, the gang had a chicken dinner, and on other nights, they’ve had pasties Bill made from scratch.

“That’s been a tradition up here, because my mom used to make pasties, and she would send a bunch of pasties up with us,” Bill said. “And then she passed away, and it’s like, ‘Well, I gotta carry on the tradition.’ I make the dough and everything.”

The first weekend, three generations of Larks were at camp. Two of Bill’s grandsons — Desmond and Aaron, Derek’s brother Logan’s kids — came out to enjoy the opening of the season. On Monday the 18th, Aaron’s 16th birthday, the boy got a buck. It was his third deer, but the first at the property, his grandfather and uncle relayed.

“Right through the heart — it was a good shot,” Bill said of Aaron’s birthday kill.