(HOST) Writer, storyteller and commentator Willem Lange can’t help but notice there are fewer hunters in the woods these days.
(LANGE) It’s deer season. Hunters rattle into the parking lots of country stores long before dawn and leave with steaming cups of coffee and foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches. You see them hours later back at the store, leaning on the edges of a truck bed as if to keep it from floating away. If somebody’s been lucky, a brown head with antlers will be lolling conspicuously, on the tailgate.
Other hunters disappear into camp. In my contracting days, I never took a hurry-up job in November. Without warning (on the assumption I should have known), guys vanished as if into thin air, reappearing some days later, without apology, and simply picked up where they’d left off.
In the days when Mother and I got along on $8 a week for groceries, venison in the woodshed was a godsend. The annual buck pool at the saloon collected a dollar from each of us in an empty pickled-egg jar on the bar. The biggest buck of the year collected half the pool. The year I won it, I marched home with $165 and almost 200 pounds of meat. We ate venison all winter in dozens of recipes. We were pretty sick of it by spring, but it sure beat starving.
Hunting has fallen on hard times lately. License fees, which fund many functions of fish and wildlife departments, are down significantly. Fewer parents teach their kids to hunt. More land is posted every year. Newspapers with depressing frequency report grisly accidents in which one hunter mistook another for his prey. I often wonder, as I look at my own togs, whether anyone could think he saw a deer wearing an orange fleece jacket, a bright red tuque, and a scarlet fanny pack. But I know it happens. There are too many armed men in the woods who need to come home with something, and too often see what they want to see.
Other factors, too, contribute to the declining health of the tradition. I personally feel the National Rifle Association, with its knee-jerk reaction to any mention of the regulation of firearms – even those designed primarily to kill human beings – tars all gun owners with the same brush. Slob hunters, who leave gates open, ride ATVs across private land, and scatter bottles, cans, and cigarette butts, are doing their utmost to ensure that more hunting territory is lost every year.
There are even some who consider shooting caged or baited animals to be sport. A bear-hunting guide in Minnesota mixes up sweets and fat, which he places beneath tree stands he supplies his clients. He even bangs his bait bucket against a tree after he empties it, shouting, "Dinner bell!" I don’t know what you call that, but it isn’t hunting. It’s a far cry from the country father who got his son up to finish chores early on opening day; took him out, showed him how it was done, and taught him why it was done – just that way.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.