Drizzt
Member
Deer hunts have changed, but the feeling hasn't
Mike Leggett
Saturday, November 06, 2004
EL INDIO — One day. One morning, actually. About two hours to be very honest about it.
That's all the time I've spent deer hunting this year. I took my bow last weekend and sat and watched a couple of does and some noisy javelinas gobble corn in a nearby road. Then I went and changed clothes and caught up with my quail hunting buddies.
I've not given up on deer hunting. It's just been too hot and miserable to go sit and sweat. I'll sweat for a quail or a bunch of squirrels, but I don't like to feel like I'm melting into a hunting bucket for a deer. I've canceled half a dozen different trips because of the weather, thinking things had to get better.
They have and I'm going to start playing some catchup on the deer, although — except on management hunts — I'll only be bow hunting this year, just like last year. It changes the numbers, but enhances the experience. For me, anyway.
And I was thinking about that as we approached this weekend, the traditional opening weekend of deer season. I was thinking about the experience of deer hunting, and how it's changed and what that means to hunters in Texas.
The basics of hunting — man chases deer, man shoots deer, man eats deer, man draws picture on wall — hasn't changed since humans first walked upright and carried a club on offense and defense. But the way we do it and how we approach it has changed, nowhere more so than in Texas.
We used to sit on boards in trees or on the ground, but now we luxuriate in heated, carpeted blinds. The cots on which we slept have been replaced by king-size beds, and the open-fronted, retired Army Jeeps of the 1960s are now decked-out Suburbans with drink boxes and upper floors for seeing over the brush.
That's not all bad, mind you. The older I get the less I enjoy being cold and uncomfortable. But still, there's a certain discomfort and rustic charm I want my kids and grandkids to know, so they can maybe appreciate how good hunting is and decide where on the scale of hunters they want to fall.
Growing up in East Texas, I learned about deer hunting first through my friends, who often accompanied their dads on trips to the Sabine River bottom hunting camps that dotted the Piney Woods of Panola County. My dad didn't really hunt deer. He just didn't have the heart. He once wounded a deer that got away and never really had an interest in going deer hunting again.
So I relied on people in the church where he preached to take me early on. Later, I would hitchhike with my shotgun over my shoulder to get to the woods. People picked me up, too, which is another way the world has changed.
Try to imagine not calling law enforcement — on your cell phone — if you encountered a guy walking down the road with a gun while trying to flag you down, much less actually stopping and giving him a ride in the dark to some place out in the country.
People did stop, though. Sometimes because they recognized me. Sometimes because they felt sorry for me. I would welcome the warm air of the inside of the car for a little while, maybe even sleep a little in the dark if the cigarette smoke wasn't too bad, then walk down off the road into whatever area I was hunting. Somehow, I always got home.
I was 12 years old when I saw my first deer, a buck, out by the old feed yard, across from the airport on Highway 79 east of Carthage. The auction barn is gone. Nearby sits the Jim Reeves Memorial, but I can never drive by the spot without remembering that deer. I literally dreamed of him year after year.
I first killed a deer in 1966. I was 18 years old and hunting over the Thanksgiving holidays because I wasn't playing high school basketball for the first time. The coach, whose daughter I had been dating, told me at the end of football season that he didn't have shoes that would fit me so I went hunting that weekend.
I killed that first deer — a 5-pointer — with my trusty Model 12 Winchester, loaded with Number One buckshot. He was running in front of dogs and it took two shots to do the job. I didn't even know how to field dress a deer, so I waited for my best friend's dad to come and help me. Then we drove around the square in Carthage and showed him to anyone who would walk over to the pickup bed. Then it was down to the locker plant for sausage and chicken-fried steaks.
A friend once told me that after the first time I hunted South Texas, I would never be able to hunt anywhere else. He was partly right. The Brush Country just has this mystique that no place else can match. I never want to lose the feeling of watching the sun come up over a prickly pear flat, watching blue quail skitter across the ground and a big buck chase a doe into the mesquites.
But I've never lost that stomach flutter I felt from that first deer I saw, or from the distant sounds of the dogs ringing through the woods as they were running my first deer to the spot where I was hiding near a creek that was the only place I could find without getting lost.
Now I have a GPS unit and a cell phone so I can't get lost. Unless I want to, just for a little while, down in the river bottom, where I can listen to the crows and the wood ducks. Maybe take a nap against a pin oak and dream of five-pointers and buckshot.
Mike Leggett
Saturday, November 06, 2004
EL INDIO — One day. One morning, actually. About two hours to be very honest about it.
That's all the time I've spent deer hunting this year. I took my bow last weekend and sat and watched a couple of does and some noisy javelinas gobble corn in a nearby road. Then I went and changed clothes and caught up with my quail hunting buddies.
I've not given up on deer hunting. It's just been too hot and miserable to go sit and sweat. I'll sweat for a quail or a bunch of squirrels, but I don't like to feel like I'm melting into a hunting bucket for a deer. I've canceled half a dozen different trips because of the weather, thinking things had to get better.
They have and I'm going to start playing some catchup on the deer, although — except on management hunts — I'll only be bow hunting this year, just like last year. It changes the numbers, but enhances the experience. For me, anyway.
And I was thinking about that as we approached this weekend, the traditional opening weekend of deer season. I was thinking about the experience of deer hunting, and how it's changed and what that means to hunters in Texas.
The basics of hunting — man chases deer, man shoots deer, man eats deer, man draws picture on wall — hasn't changed since humans first walked upright and carried a club on offense and defense. But the way we do it and how we approach it has changed, nowhere more so than in Texas.
We used to sit on boards in trees or on the ground, but now we luxuriate in heated, carpeted blinds. The cots on which we slept have been replaced by king-size beds, and the open-fronted, retired Army Jeeps of the 1960s are now decked-out Suburbans with drink boxes and upper floors for seeing over the brush.
That's not all bad, mind you. The older I get the less I enjoy being cold and uncomfortable. But still, there's a certain discomfort and rustic charm I want my kids and grandkids to know, so they can maybe appreciate how good hunting is and decide where on the scale of hunters they want to fall.
Growing up in East Texas, I learned about deer hunting first through my friends, who often accompanied their dads on trips to the Sabine River bottom hunting camps that dotted the Piney Woods of Panola County. My dad didn't really hunt deer. He just didn't have the heart. He once wounded a deer that got away and never really had an interest in going deer hunting again.
So I relied on people in the church where he preached to take me early on. Later, I would hitchhike with my shotgun over my shoulder to get to the woods. People picked me up, too, which is another way the world has changed.
Try to imagine not calling law enforcement — on your cell phone — if you encountered a guy walking down the road with a gun while trying to flag you down, much less actually stopping and giving him a ride in the dark to some place out in the country.
People did stop, though. Sometimes because they recognized me. Sometimes because they felt sorry for me. I would welcome the warm air of the inside of the car for a little while, maybe even sleep a little in the dark if the cigarette smoke wasn't too bad, then walk down off the road into whatever area I was hunting. Somehow, I always got home.
I was 12 years old when I saw my first deer, a buck, out by the old feed yard, across from the airport on Highway 79 east of Carthage. The auction barn is gone. Nearby sits the Jim Reeves Memorial, but I can never drive by the spot without remembering that deer. I literally dreamed of him year after year.
I first killed a deer in 1966. I was 18 years old and hunting over the Thanksgiving holidays because I wasn't playing high school basketball for the first time. The coach, whose daughter I had been dating, told me at the end of football season that he didn't have shoes that would fit me so I went hunting that weekend.
I killed that first deer — a 5-pointer — with my trusty Model 12 Winchester, loaded with Number One buckshot. He was running in front of dogs and it took two shots to do the job. I didn't even know how to field dress a deer, so I waited for my best friend's dad to come and help me. Then we drove around the square in Carthage and showed him to anyone who would walk over to the pickup bed. Then it was down to the locker plant for sausage and chicken-fried steaks.
A friend once told me that after the first time I hunted South Texas, I would never be able to hunt anywhere else. He was partly right. The Brush Country just has this mystique that no place else can match. I never want to lose the feeling of watching the sun come up over a prickly pear flat, watching blue quail skitter across the ground and a big buck chase a doe into the mesquites.
But I've never lost that stomach flutter I felt from that first deer I saw, or from the distant sounds of the dogs ringing through the woods as they were running my first deer to the spot where I was hiding near a creek that was the only place I could find without getting lost.
Now I have a GPS unit and a cell phone so I can't get lost. Unless I want to, just for a little while, down in the river bottom, where I can listen to the crows and the wood ducks. Maybe take a nap against a pin oak and dream of five-pointers and buckshot.