It was a wet first day of opening deer season, and I was soaked by 8:30 a.m. as I stood standing in the rain talking with four conservation officers and three hunters.
One of them was a 17-year-old kid, who an hour and a half earlier had been dodging bullets in a hunting accident that left a four-inch red stripe across his swollen calf from a 9 mm rifle round that scraped past.
Most hunters rise before dawn so they can be in peak position when the light first breaks in the early forest morning. Keeping hunters in line means getting up even earlier for Environmental Conservation Officer Brett Armstrong and myself this past Saturday, on the first day of shotgun and rifle deer season.
Unlike most conservation officers, Brett is fortunate because he doesn’t have to work alone. His partner, Nitro, a 5-year-old black German Shepherd, keeps him company.
I was supposed to meet Brett at 6 a.m. ready to go and my original plan was to get up at 5 a.m. But, in reality, I was hauling at about 5:45. Luckily my employment at The Evening Sun has trained my internal clock to a 6 a.m. regimented wake up. Brett told me he had been out since 4.
The first thing the three of us did was travel around the county on the back roads, noting parked cars and properties. “It’s good to know where people are going to be,” said Brett.
While driving around, Brett gave me a crash course on the responsibilities of a conservation authority. There were many, but Brett was kind enough to break it down: “Basically? To protect the natural resources of New York State and to ensure public safety,” he explained.
In addition to regulating, hunting conservation officers are charged with protecting the environment against abuse from both businesses and individuals. Conservation officers possess all the same powers of regular police and then some. While performing their duties, they have a degree of leeway in crossing private property that regular law enforcement might be restricted from doing, explained Armstrong.
“I don’t see how we could ever do our job if we weren’t able to go where potential offenders will be,” he said.
Hunters are supposed to go by the calendar and wait for dawn to begin shooting – and on Saturday dawn was scheduled to arrive at 6:53 a.m. It was about 6:30, and I was standing alongside Brett at Lyon Brook State Forest as he inspected licenses and exchanged friendly conversation with some hunters. He was always looking for the opportunity to offer a safety tip when the chance casually arose. “Don’t forget to tag your kill as soon as you can,” or “I think dawn will be here at about 6:53 or so,” and so on.
Brett said he wasn’t nervous about the firearms people often carried. “They’re engaging in a legal activity with a firearm. Most people we deal with are good, law abiding citizens that have just made a mistake or didn’t know what they were doing was against the law,” he said.
With more than 20 minutes to go before dawn, we heard our first shot ring out from an overcast, foggy and darkly wooded area. The single shot was off in the woods, but Brett said it was fairly close. Instead of tracking around in the forest where dozens of hunters were just waiting for first light, we staked out the road and waited for the illegally shot deer to be dragged out. Brett explained that officers were trained to determine the time of death of a kill based on its muscle responses.
He was also in the middle of telling me of how most hunting accidents happen in the hours of dawn and dusk and often people were shot by members of their own party, when we were interrupted by a call from Madison County that a there was “a hunter-related shooting.”
With about 200 Encon officers in the state and of those only eight have K-9 units, Brett’s services, or rather Nitro’s, are often in high demand during the hunting season.
We arrived in Madison County at a location I’d never heard of where the rain drenched my notepad, making the name unreadable. My clothes were not much better off.
We arrived at the location just before 8:30 a.m. and three other officers and a forest ranger greeted us. The shooting took place at about 20 minutes before dawn when a man firing a vintage 9 mm foreign rifle, that no one could identify (not even the hunter using it), shot across and field down and a hill.
Later it was determined he missed the deer, although he said he hit it, firing three rounds with the bolt action rifle. The bullets traveled across the field past the deer and into the path of a 17-year-old. The second shot streaked across the teen’s calf just above his ankle and burned a red streak across his skin.
“I felt it hit and it was so powerful it knocked my leg way back, like this, and I fell to the ground,” the wide-eyed youth explained.
With the teen were two other relatives who were also in the vicinity when the shooting took place.
While we conducted the investigation, another Encon officer, Corey Schoonover, also responded with his K-9, Griz, a Sable German Shepherd.
The incident apparent happened in Cory’s region, Brett explained, but the initial call and the hunter’s residence was in region number 7, which is Brett’s territory.
After a long process of interviewing witnesses and having the Madison County Sheriff’s Office pick up the lone shooter, who apparently left to track his deer after making a brief apology, we went to the scene.
Nitro and Griz are trained by the Department of Environmental Conservation to mainly find people, wild meat and gun powder.
The officers and I went to the scene and had both the victim and the shooter show us right where they were. Then, Cory took Griz and searched the area. Griz uncovered two of the three shell casings fired. The casing are important because they tell officers where the shooters were when the shots were fired.
“Sometimes people’s recollections aren’t as clear as they might think,” said Brett, who added, “It helps us verify a story, if nothing else.”
The officers then placed bright orange flags at the casings, the alleged location of the deer, and the position of the teen. Then they used a rope line to better illustrate the possible path of the projectile to see if the three points matched up, and they did.
Griz was not able to find any blood or the bullet which allegedly hit the ground near the victim. Brett said if the dogs were directed in an area within reason, then they could locate a round even if it was buried deep below the mud.
“But on the other hand, you never know. A bullet might travel through some objects, skip across others - you just don’t know where a round will end up.”
Brett and I departed the scene before the investigation was completed because there were other calls in Chenango for a K-9 and two dogs on one scene is usually one too many, said Brett.
The shooter in the case was ticketed for firing before daylight and officers were still determining if they should charge him with reckless endangerment when we left.
At this point I said goodbye to Brett and Nitro and headed back home. Brett, however, continued his day until 9 p.m.
Brett took off for Smithville to assist his partner with a ‘shooting from a vehicle’ complaint. 
I remembered something that Brett explained to me as we did our enforcement throughout the day: “I think that part of our job is also to protect the heritage of hunting. People without an opinion about hunting see the abuses some hunters take and it turns opinion against it.”
Brett is an avid hunter and outdoorsman himself. “Hunters need to be responsible because their activities reflect how the sport is perceived by the public, and when people get hurt or disregard protections, it unfortunately turns interest away from the sport,” he said.