The older you get, I think, the less a dead buck appeals to you, and venison isn’t as good to eat.
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| My daughter Christy with a buck she killed last year |
It
has been a long time since I was not out in the woods somewhere as deer season
began, but truthfully… I never did enjoy it much. The
idea of an orange costume, and sitting and waiting with a scoped high powered
rifle that you can hit an acorn with at 200 yards doesn’t thrill me
much. I am impatient, and I like to be moving slowly and seeing new
things when I am outdoors.
Same
way with fishing. I don’t like sitting in one place in the lake tied
up to a tree or anchored when I can be floating down a beautiful river casting
a lure to a new spot all day. Of course if you are hauling in
crappie or big bluegill hand over fist that changes things. Sitting and waiting
for a bite any longer than 20 minutes isn’t very appealing to me. The exception
to that is watching a bobber. Bobbers on a still surface mesmerize
me. I expect there are many of you out there who feel the same
way.
Seeing
a bobber dip and dance a little brings excitement and
anticipation. And when it just disappears beneath rings of surface
water reacting to the swiftness of a hard strike, you can hope the fish beneath
it is a lunker. But even if it isn’t, you are happy about pulling it
in. If you are that way, you got that way most likely go back to a
time when you sat on some pond bank watching a bobber with anticipation that is
hard to explain unless you have been there. When next summer gets
here, I will do a lot of fishing, but I will certainly spend some time sitting
in a shady spot watching a bobber. There is an addiction to it.
There
is anticipation too when I sit in the woods and watch for squirrels in the
treetops, or sit with my back to a big oak waiting for a deer to appear, or a
gobbler to gobble. It is great to be in a tree-stand watching for a
buck, but a friend of mine defined deer hunting that way as fifteen seconds of
excitement brought about by three hours of boredom. I cannot possibly
sit three hours in a tree stand, waiting. I can handle an hour of it, but no
more. I want to walk, moving slowly against the wind, hoping for a miracle of a
buck with nice headgear stupidly following a doe. That has happened
lots of times, because a buck in mating season, with his neck swollen in a
heavy ‘rut’, is dumber than a stockyard steer.
I
learned all about that as a kid when the old veteran deer hunters came in on a
cold November night and bragged about their deer hunting and the latest set of
antlers.
It was
old Bill Stalder who filled me in about that, when I was only 11 or
12. He hunted with what he called his ‘guvamint forty-five seventy,
a military rifle with a stock most of the way up the barrel. He
hunted in deep woods, brush-country usually, watching a deer trail and facing
into the wind. Bill wanted a rifle that would shoot through a one inch sapling
and would still be just as effective if it fell out of the bed of his truck, or
spent a day or two in a pouring rain, or a mud-puddle. None of
those old timers used a scope. What an insult that would have been
if they had been accused of such a thing. Few ever took a shot that
wasn’t within fifty yards.
In
Bill’s long-past years, deer were not at all plentiful. When he was in
his twenties they were almost all gone, because times were hard and folks who
didn’t own free-ranging hogs or cattle needed them to eat. They
restocked whitetail deer for years just after I was born and opened the season
again when Ol’ Bill was in his forties. He was ready for
that. He was my grandfather’s trapping partner and he knew all about
the outdoors. He said there wasn’t much to know about deer, and he
was right.
I
can tell you one thing, the situation was far different then because deer
didn’t become nocturnal after the opening weekend of the season as they do
today. Call that evolution maybe. At any rate, it just
isn’t rewarding anymore to hunt deer and I am done with it, except for using my
camera. I’ll bet I will shoot two or three nice bucks that way, but I know a
great deal about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, what they call
‘chronic wasting disease’ in deer, and what I have learned makes me want to
never eat venison again.
I
hope to get the word out about that disease, and the word out about using the
telecheck system and what it might result in for innocent hunters, by directing
readers to my website, where much information is given on each that cannot be
printed in newspapers. That internet site is larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. But
I am not through hunting at all I will hunt ducks as hard as I can with my
Labrador this year, maybe go pheasant hunting in Iowa. When the duck season
closes I will chase around after a pair of beagles. And on some warm
winter day I’ll go fishing even if I can’t catch a thing.
If
you wish to get more information about my upcoming Christmas magazine, just
call my office.. 417-777-5227, or email lightninridge47@gmail.com My post
office address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.65613
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