Sherry Chandler » Bring out the big guns
Bring out the big guns
We’ve just passed that time of year when driving to my mother’s backcountry Owen County farm is a bit like maneuvering through a combat zone – everywhere you look, men in camo with big guns.
I grew up among hunters, though there wasn’t much big game in Kentucky during my childhood. Mostly it was rabbits and quail, .22s and 12 gauges. Mama used to brag that she could shoot a squirrel out of a tree with a .22 bullet right through the head. But there’s something disconcerting about walking out onto her carport now and seeing three camouflaged strangers with heavy arms strolling through her pasture.
I don’t remember that ever happening before, but then back in the day it would probably have been a neighbor whose face and walk and purpose I knew or trusted. Nowadays, I guess Owen County has become a bit of a mecca for out-of-town deer hunters, as I learned reading Dave Baker’s “Deer Camp” essay in Of Woods & Waters (University Press of Kentucky, 2005).
I bought a copy of that book at the Maysville Book Fair mostly because it contains some poems and stories by local writers I admire. I am not much on any outdoor sport other than hiking. As for my mama, well, she’s 88 and tends to think of the deer who come to eat her pears more as entertainment than food. But I am learning things, among them that Dave Baker and friends on a deer hunt once camped out on an Owen County farm in a panel truck that had been used to haul ammonium nitrate. Not the smartest move, apparently.
“Overgrown hill country,” he called it. And so it is.
Big game hunting takes on a slightly different face down in Nicholas County where things are more civilized. Or so Charlie Hughes would have us believe. Check out the story of how he took his Trophy White Tail.
- Sweet Owen
- Watching the river flow
- Guns and money
- Bring on Your Tall Buildings. I’ll Leap Em!
- Brown’s Bottom
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2 Comments
1. Charlie replies at 15th December 2005, 2:30 pm :
Apparently, my youth experience with hunting is about the same as yours. I never saw a deer in the wild until I was grown. I had left home, served a hitch in the navy and been back a couple of years before seeing my first deer. I never got over this and it is the reason that I have never hunted deer. I just can’t get passed the memories of not seeing them as a youth, and of how elated I was the first time I saw one.
The following poem is basically from my observations of others and my own experiences.
Life And Limits
People who own the land never hunt much.
Mostly, they save the game for youngsters
Who need to learn about the struggle of life,
And develop a feel for nature’s limits;
When to take, and when to leave alone.
Hunters come from their town lots having never
raised a mower blade to spare a rabbit’s nest,
Or nursed an orphaned fawn back into the brush.
T V wise, and magazine sure they try to apply
the brutality of football to delicate woods.
It’s hard to explain that you can’t just come to nature cold;
Purged empty of conscience like the linebacker
Who roams the field eager to destroy,
And then receive his applause.
charles m. whitt
2. sherry replies at 15th December 2005, 2:53 pm :
Very nice poem.
Thank you for sharing that, Charlie.
I may have given an unfair impression of Dave Baker in this post. His essay was meant to be humorous. But I’m like you. I didn’t see deer until I was grown or turkey until I was middle aged and I’m not inclined to kill what I find so delightful, even though I understand that deer adapt very well to humans and easily get overpopulated without some predation.
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