Back In The Hunt

Hospital Promise Keeps Deer Hunting Party Intact

by Craig Bihrle

Given Shane Sellon’s condition at the time – lying in a hospital bed in Rochester, Minnesota, unable to move his arms or legs – Roger Van Horn’s assurance seemed more optimistic than realistic. “We’ll make sure you can deer hunt this fall,” Van Horn promised the young man he was visiting, knowing full well that the hunt might amount to only a ride in a vehicle to watch others experience what he had passionately pursued for more than half his life.

Roger Van Horn’s hopeful statement, however, was taken literally by his own son Mike, Shane’s friend since diapers and hunting partner since both were old enough to legally join the Sellon-Van Horn deer hunting group in central North Dakota’s McLean County. That’s when Mike Van Horn started thinking about a type of device that would help Shane participate in the deer gun season again, as more than an orange-clad spectator.

Shortly after the Van Horns left their friend that day, Mike Van Horn started building. Last November, for the first time in four years, for the first time since an accident took the use ofhis legs and left him with little arm movement and only minimal dexterity in his hands, Shane Sellon bagged a deer.

It wasn’t a big deer – a mule deer doe, actually – but it was a trophy just the same, a trophy awarded to two friends and their families who invested a lot oftime and effort so a life-changing event didn’t change their lives quite so much. Shane Sellon (left) and Mike Van Horn are lifelong friends and hunting partners. Through Mike’s ingenuity and Shane’s perseverance, the two can still hunt together despite an accident that could have ended Sellon’s days afield.

The story, however, doesn’t end there. Or begin there. It begins in the 1950s and early 1960s. Roger Van Horn’s father was disabled, so in eighth grade Roger moved in with the Sellons to live and work at the farm northwest of Turtle Lake in McLean County. After he graduated, Roger went off to college and eventually settled in the Twin Cities area. His best friend, Harvey Sellon, kept working on the family farm and eventually took over the operation. Just about every fall Roger returned to his home country to hunt. Some years he came even when he couldn’t hunt because he didn’t draw one ofthe limited nonresident deer licenses. The rest ofthe family came along, too. “Mike and Shane grew up thinking they were cousins, not realizing they weren’t related, because we were together quite often,”said Shane’s mom, Sharon Sellon on a day last November, while catching her breath between feeding hungry deer hunters and taking care of grandchildren while their mother, Kara, was in the hospital giving birth to the 15th Sellon grandchild. “They hunted together from the time they were little.”

The Sellon-Van Horn group is similar to hunting groups everywhere. Family, friends, generations get together every fall because of hunting. Whether it’s an opening weekend or week-long adventure; ducks, pheasants or deer; the group gathering is a sacred square on the calendar. It is a moment in time that creates building enthusiasm throughout the year, and solemn reflection when it’s over – by those waving goodbye from the doorstep, or driving home in the dark to start work again the next day.

But the let-down doesn’t last long. Disappointments over missed opportunities quickly become the basis for year-long planning for next year’s gathering. Theories about how to trap the big buck or better lure in geese start flowing in phone calls, emails and letters. Plans take shape. Sometimes, plans change course.

On July 2, 1999, on the day before his sister’s wedding, Shane Sellon was building a boat dock for use on his grandfather’s lake lot on Crooked Lake in northeastern McLean County. The dock was hanging from a front-end loader on a tractor and it somehow slipped and fell and landed on Shane’s neck.

After a red-light ambulance ride to the hospital in Turtle Lake, then an emergency flight to Bismarck, Shane wound up in Rochester for several months. “Basically,” his mother Sharon explained, “… they told us he would never move below his shoulders, that he would never have any movement in his hands or in his legs.”

That was the outlook when Roger Van Horn told Shane theywould make sure he got to deer hunt in the fall of 2000.

It is not all that unusual for people who have lost use of one or more limbs, either from amputation or paralysis, to adapt to their new situation and continue to hunt. Few avid hunters can give it up easily, and often the urge to hunt again is a primary incentive for overcoming challenges. And it works both ways. When someone in a group is faced with physical challenges, the others redirect their priorities to assist their partner, and are less concerned with their own success.

Mike Van Horn didn’t have any idea how much his role would be when he started envisioning the device that would help Shane hunt again. It helped that he is a talented engineer (he runs his own business in Fergus Falls, Minnesota), someone who not only thinks of things, but can also build them. What he built, with a couple thousand dollars of his own money over several hundred hours of his own time, was a rifle that Shane could aim by using a hand contol with very limited control of his hands.

“The project began because I couldn’t let Shane down after what he had been through,”Mike recalled. “I continued refining the project because it became a personal challenge to make the device accurate and easy to handle.”

Through hard work and patience, Sellon has been able to regain some use ofhis right hand. While he can barely lift his hand from his lap, he can operate the control for his electric wheelchair. In similar fashion he can maneuver the device, which looks and functions much like the joystick used for computer or video games, that aims a specially mounted rifle.

The rifle is mounted on top of a sturdy control box bolted to the equipment box in the back of a pickup, and carries a fourpower scope reengineered to act like a video camera. Via video cable, what the scope sees is transmitted to a screen that sits on Sellon’s lap inside the pickup. With the toggle lever, Sellon can move the crosshairs’ centerpoint to where he wants the gun to shoot. Because his fingers aren’t quite nimble enough to pull on some type of triggering device, or to avoid discharging the rifle accidentally, he fires the gun by biting down on a plunger connected to the rifle by a cable, like the cable release on a camera.

The rifle system, much like Shane’s efforts to regain even small amounts of mobility, is a work in progress. “I thought of it on the fly, I guess,”Mike Van Horn said ofthe device that”… looked like a piece of farm equipment on the back of a pickup,”the first year.

That first year the viewing screen was a black-and-white television and it was difficult for Sellon to make out deer or hunters on the screen. The second year a color monitor improved the sight picture, but every time the gun fired the aiming point moved a foot high and right.

By fall 2002, Mike Van Horn had those bugs worked out. A trip to the Sellon farm a week before deer season revealed a screen that was too bright, so Mike fixed that. “The mechanics of it are working fine now,” he said last fall. “It’s just a matter offine-tuning some of the electronics.”

All the while that Mike Van Horn was working on improving the rifle system, Sellon was making frequent trips to Bismarck for therapy designed to help coax even minimal use from nerves and muscles that had stopped functioning. “I never got beat by anything before,”Shane stressed, “I figured, I’m going to get through this.”

Progress has been slow, but passion for hunting provides added incentive to keep striving for what seem to be small gains – gains that Shane says he doesn’t even notice day-to-day.

Mike and Roger Van Horn, on their periodic visits, do notice. “He changed the station on the radio in a vehicle, “Mike said of Shane’s progress in November 2002. “He wasn’t doing that last year.”

Those improvements likely played a role in Shane’s successful deer hunt last year. Roger and Shane were “posting” near some trees, waiting for other group members to drive a deer past them. Like many hunters with physical disabilities, Shane has a permit that allows him to hunt and shoot from a vehicle. Since he can’t drive, family and friends eagerly take a break from their own hunting to help Shane get into position where he might get a shot. Often it’s his wife Dawn or dad Harvey, but on this occasion it was Roger and he spotted a deer bedded down in a tree row perhaps 60 yards away.

It took awhile for Roger to convince Shane that what they saw was a deer, but once convinced, Shane anxiously maneuvered the crosshairs on the screen in front of him, locked in on the deer, and bit down on the trigger. The gun, mounted in the pickup’s bed, fired and the deer didn’t move. Just to be sure, Shane took two more shots and later found that all three hit the deer where he was aiming.

“He’s come a long ways … from what we were told to expect,”Sharon Sellon stated with pride.

Unfortunately, it’s not likely Shane will regain enough movement in his hands, arms, shoulders and torso to where he could lift, aim and shoot a gun by himself. But hunting is in his blood, and Mike Van Horn’s invention is a way to keep that blood flowing throughout the year. The process has been a testament to friendship, family, and a hunting tradition that creates personal bonds that elevate the human experience.

Shane Sellon is realistic in his assessment ofthe hunting experience. It’s not the same, but everyone in the group understands that, and has adapted. “Nothing will ever compare to walking and carrying a gun,” Shane says, slowly, pausing to reflect on the changes and challenges he has encountered in the last four years. “But at least I can still get out there and still do some of what I did before.”