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02/23/2006: "Hunting accidents come to mind with vice president's shooting miscue"

Safety is the hunter’s code and hunting has always demanded a strong code of safety and responsibility.
Nothing else demonstrated that fact more than the recent incident with vice president Dick Cheney accidentally shooting a hunting partner. While the fallout from the late reporting of the incident as well as specific facts caused quite a stir, the underlying issue was the apparent lack of safety involved in the situation that led to it.
Hunting accidents happen probably more often than a casual observer thinks.

“I’ve been shot several times, or ‘peppered,’ as they call it,” said Hardy Steffen of Springfield, SD. “I’ve been lucky.”
But on October 16 last year, on the second day of hunting season, Steffen was not so lucky. He was on an annual hunt with several hunter friends, an outing that had taken place for years up in South Dakota. Steffen’s role in the hunting weekend had always been to provide the hunting dogs.
“I got shot by a blocker,” Steffen said. He had just stopped at his trailer to change dogs and took off his safety glasses. In the rush of the moment, moving the dogs around, he forgot to put the glasses back on and left them in his vest pocket. He started moving through the slew in a field of milo in the direction of the group of blockers at the end of the milo strip.
“The birds flew up between me and the blockers and one of the hunters took not one but two quick shots,” Steffen remembered. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’” The blocker was about 70 yards away.
Steffen felt his left eye with his left hand and there was liquid coming out. He thought it was blood but realized later it was the fluid from his eyeball.
“My whole left side was soaked,” said Steffen. “I never realized there could be that much liquid in the eyeball.” He called to his brother to take his gun and the group acted quickly, rushing him to Sioux Valley Hospital in Sioux Falls. His first surgery was performed there as they sewed the BB hole shut to prevent infection.
Four days later he was transferred him to the Philips Eye Institute in Minneapolis, where doctors removed the BB. The BB had ricocheted three times in his eyeball. After they removed the BB, the pain in his eye intensified.
“You wouldn’t think a spot so small on your body could give you so much pain,” Steffen said. He said he was miserable.
As time went along, the pain subsided and Steffen got along pretty well with the injury. In December, scar tissue in the eyeball caused the retina to detach. He was blind again.
For the next step in his recovery, the doctors sent him to Iowa City. The surgery there removed the scar tissue, repaired the retina, removed a cataract, which had grown over his eyeball since the original injury and placed an artificial lens in his eye. They also shot his eyeball full of oil so it wouldn’t shrivel and die.
“I can get along somewhat,” Steffen added, although at this point he wonders if it wouldn’t be better to be totally blind in that eye. He has also missed five months of work since part of his recovery forbade him to lift things or overdo it for fear of pulling something loose.
Steffen operates his own construction company. While he was able to keep his crew busy, he pretty much remained inactive.
“When I watch TV, I see double. And driving is a problem also unless I wear a patch or close that eye,” Steffen said. An upcoming checkup in Iowa City will tell him if he can ever hunt again.
“I went deer hunting last fall, but I didn’t shoot a gun,” said Steffen. “(The injury took place in) my dominant eye so using a scope on a gun will be a problem.”
Looking back, Steffen knows the birds came fast and low. Hunting know-how and self-control are important traits hunters need to exercise. The other hunter certainly had the know-how as he had been hunting for years but, Steffen related, if he would have used a little self-control to wait for the pheasants to get higher in the air, it would have kept Steffen out of the line of fire.
“He got excited,” Steffen said. “It shouldn’t have happened but it did and I can see how it happened. Just one of those things.”
Interestingly enough, one of Steffen’s classmates, Kevin Tramp, also had a hunting accident recently.
“It was January 8 of this year,” said Tramp. “I was hunting with my 8-year-old son and my brother. My son was just a passenger in the vehicle. I had one of those special season permits for deer.” With this permit, a hunter may shoot two doe, one during the regular season, and the other doe could be shot as late as January of 2006.
“We were in the Weigand area and pulled over to the side of the road,” Tramp said. “We had spotted a group of deer and I had looked at them out the window with my rifle scope, sizing ‘em down.” Tramp pulled his high power rifle in the window, butt end first.
“I slid my hand down the back of the gun, checking to see if my safety was on, and I must have accidentally bumped the trigger and it discharged,” Tramp said.
The bullet tore into Tramp under his right shoulder and out the passenger window without doing any more damage.
But enough damage was done. Two ribs were broken and his lung was bruised. The more serious injury came from the muzzle blast. The combustion at the end of the barrel caused such strong compression it blew his side apart.
His brother and son rushed Tramp to Avera Sacred Heart Hospital in Yankton, but he only stayed there three days. A decision by his wife when his lungs began filling with fluid moved him to McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls where he stayed for 13 days.
“Since I’ve been home, I have been wearing a wound vac,” Tramp added. This special packing for the wound sucks the moisture out and speeds healing up to 40 or 50 percent. On Wednesday, Tramp heads back to McKennan for skin grafting. These past few weeks, the doctors have been hoping the wound would close together enough to do a graft of skin from Tramp’s leg.
Tramp hasn’t been back to work at Kolberg-Pioneer in Yankton since the injury. Being shot point blank has given Tramp a definite attitude adjustment.
“There is no animal or trophy worth carrying a loaded gun in my vehicle ever again,” Tramp said. “My son was eight years old and the experience was so traumatic for him, especially when he had to go to school and didn’t know what was happening to me.” He said the counselors in school were very helpful with his son’s experience.
Tramp says he will hunt again but the “rules will be different the next time around.”