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Nothing better than being a contented hunter of whitetail deer

5 min read

I was going through some of my older papers in an attempt at cleaning out my room when I discovered a letter from someone who is a bit of a hero to me.

Bob Bell was editor of Pennsylvania Game News a while ago and also was a nationally known writer.

It seems I sent Bell a story and he rejected it based on content, something that rarely happened.

The letter said the Game News couldn’t accept an article about a bird defecating in a hunter’s game pocket or a rabbit kicking him in the groin. I might have cleaned this up just a bit because the paper is a family paper.

I scratched my head and wondered what I wrote almost 30 years ago and what happened to the original story. After a bit, it came to me it was an article titled “Stories for the grandchildren.”

Just think, if I could find it, I could try selling it now.

Times and acceptable language have changed.

I do remember one tale that was mentioned about a young nephew’s early deer hunt. It seems he downed a doe and his father and I were going to field dress it for him. Needless to say, he was happy to get his deer and maybe happier that he didn’t have to do the messy job of cleaning the beast.

One of us was holding the deer’s legs while the other wielded the knife. We weren’t paying attention to the nephew until we heard a sudden loud cry. There he was, lying on the ground in obvious pain. The young man was hurting and could hardly speak, but a quick look around solved the mystery of what happened. He urinated on an electric fence. What a way to enter puberty.

As I read the letter, it also reminded me of a fast-approaching archery season. It really is not too soon to be thinking deer and it is hard not to stop along a back road and put the binoculars on any distant deer. I must say I have never seen so many does with two fawns.

On the other side of the coin, I haven’t seen many big bucks. It probably is the weather and those big ones don’t like to come into the open as much as fall approaches. They are older and have been shot at more than once.

As the food supply changes, so will the movement of the deer. Mast is a favored fall food and deer will go after acorns over most other foods.

In another month or so, it will be girls who will be more important than the food supply, or at least it appears that way, as the bucks move back and forth over a wider terrain than their normal range. One of the most difficult things to explain comes under the question of why the fascination with deer and even why hunt?

In these old papers I found a piece that may explain some of it.

The whitetail deer has been hunted since long before the Europeans set foot in the new world. His bones turned up in archeological finds in the Carlisle Cave and are abundant among the remains of the prehistoric mound builders of the Mississippi Valley.

Is it any wonder then that man still treasures the time of the whitetail hunt above most things? While hundreds of years ago it sustained a group of colonists trying to found a new country, now it feeds our need to be the predator of the forest man was meant to be.

While the settlers hunted whitetail with primitive weapons, each fall we go forth with down-filled clothing, insulated boots and scoped rifles that would defy the imagination of our hunting forefathers.

Is the time for hunting behind us? I don’t believe so, for the past is not so easily shaken. Needs of men go far beyond the shelter and food syndrome, otherwise religion would cease to exist.

How could man walk the forest for thousands of years only to be suddenly thrust into a concrete atmosphere and be expected to forget? Which is more natural, the executive office, or a fall forest with its friendly reds and yellows?

Where truly does man belong?

The enemy of the whitetail deer will not be the sport hunter, but his destruction if it sadly comes, will be the encroachment of civilization and the inevitable loss of habitat. Without the protection afforded by the ethical sport hunter, the do-gooders may well “good ” the whitetail to death.

Nowhere except in the hunting ranks does true logical concern for the welfare of this noble creature exist.

As I sit at my typewriter, I can think of many places I’d rather be, and at the head of the list is an old abandoned farm where I would be checking the poison ivy, hawthorne and blackberry growth for a large trophy whitetail buck. The old Model 70 would be heavy in my hands and the binoculars would be in their usual place under my left armpit.

Perhaps I would be a little hungry and cold, my feet would be sore and muscles that hadn’t been used in a while would remind me of my age. But I’d be doing what my ancestors bred into my genes so many years ago.

I would be a content hunter of the whitetail deer.

George H. Block writes a Sunday Outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.

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