Hunting for the love of it

As you prepare for the state’s firearm season for white-tailed deer, and you juggle your time as you ready your gear and work so that you can spend a few hours, days or weeks in the woods hunting, I’d like you to remember Mike Sanders, a hunter from New Mexico.

I heard about Mike Sanders through some friends who are members of The Wheeling Sportsmen, a branch of the National Wild Turkey Federation. Once I learned his story, I gave him a call. At first, I’d been skeptical – how was it possible that he could hunt?

The white-hot heat of an oil refinery fire in 2004 burned 80 percent of Mike Sanders’s body. In addition to his severe burns, he lost all the fingers on his left hand and his vision.

Before 2004, Sanders had thrilled to the hunt of big game, as he roamed the forest service lands of New Mexico. But after he was burned in the fire, he lay in a drug-induced coma for six weeks. After he was brought out of the coma, he spent the next 16 months in the hospital, fighting for his life.

“For a while, I thought of selling all my hunting stuff, but I couldn’t let that part of me go,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for my wife, who stuck with me through all of those tough times, and who kept me thinking about what I could do, instead of what I couldn’t do.”

“I was sighted for 43 years, hunted a lot and was an avid shooter,” he added. “I wanted to find a way to get back to doing the things I loved.”

His former co-workers at the oil refinery had kept in touch with Mike and his wife Michele during his recovery and rehabilitation. When Michele told them of his longing to continue to shoot and hunt, those former co-workers launched their own hunt – a search for adaptive equipment which would allow a blind person to hunt. After an exhaustive search, they found Wildlife Optics.

The company makes a camera which mounts on a set of rails above a gun’s scope. A mechanism of the camera focuses through the scope, and then transfers the image “seen” through the scope onto a screen. A sighted person views the screen and directs the hunter to adjust the firearm until the crosshairs onto the right spot.

“I was a good marksman before I lost my sight, and it was a challenge to let someone coach me,” he said. “Minor adjustments I would make would translate to big changes down range.”

In 2007, even before he’d even heard about Wildlife Optics or gotten the gear, Sanders had optimistically applied for deer and antelope tags. He’d gotten the tags, but he hadn’t received the adaptive camera until one week before his hunt.

“The first practice at the gun range, it was really rough, and I know we were both thinking that we weren’t going to be able to do it,” he remembered. “But it was such a thrill for me to just be back to shooting my rifle, and we kept working at it.”

On Aug. 1, 2008, with Michele coaching him, Sanders dropped an antelope with a 200-yard shot. In the years since, he’s continued to shoot and hunt, loving the sheer muscle memory of firing his rifle and enjoying the aspects of the outdoors that have become even more precious to him – the sounds, the smells, the camaraderie of hunting friends.

He has this advice for hunters:

“My advice is to get out there, any way you can,” he added. “You might not be successful, but for me it’s a thrill to be out in the woods – I would say to hunters, don’t forget how lucky you are just to be able to do something you love.”

“I want to tell my story not to make myself out to be this great hunter, but to tell it in hopes that it will encourage people and help them understand what I’ve come to know,” Sanders said. “It’s not a dis-ability; you have to find the ability in the disability, and never give up.”