A story found in the turkey woods
By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
April 4, 2003
Pesky undergrowth was impeding my travel as I made my way from a large opening in the woods where I had been making hen talk in hopes of attracting a wild turkey gobbler. I had to zig zag through the tangle of mostly bush-size trees laced with vines. I knew the creek lay ahead, but I had to travel the ridge top for a ways before dropping into the hollow where I could wade across it.
Dodging thorny vines is not my favorite pastime, but it is hard for me to complain about most any hardship in the woods while hunting. There are others far away today where there are no trees or vines in sight, only sand, who are hunting with quite a different purpose; and a dangerous one at that. How could I complain about being scratched, tripped and detoured by a few vines and bushes?
Instead, I chose to note the different tree species in the thicket that were causing the inconvenience. Trees are just one of a whole bunch of neat stuff to see in the woods while turkey hunting or hiking or just poking around. Huge beech trees had caught my eye first in the area because they were shedding their spring flower parts that had completed their duty of pollenation that would set fruit for the growing season. Little fluffy greenish balls covered the forest floor beneath each of them.
Many types
This ridge had quite a diversity of species. Besides the slick bark beeches I found huckleberry, sassafras, various oaks, poplars, elms, bays, maples, sweet gums, dogwoods and of course pines both loblolly and spruce pines.
I was enjoying a mental inventory of various trees when something on the ground caught my eye. It was a buck deer skull complete with nicely shaped six point antlers. I picked up the skull and looked it over. Its story came to mind almost immediately. Because no one really knows its story for sure, my version is just as likely true as any.
The skull lay less than 200 yards from a ryegrass field with a shooting house at its edge. Late one evening during the 2001-2002 deer season, the young buck had stepped into the field to graze the ryegrass before departing for a night of rambling. He chose an evening when a hunter was in the shooting house. He also let hunger cloud his judgement, causing him to step into the field before it got completely dark.
Lost buck
Whether because the hunter got a case of buck fever or because the oncoming darkness hindered his aim, the shot was off just a bit and the buck dashed from the field. Or maybe the shot was true and the deer made a typical last dash, flying through the brush while dead on his feet, dropping lifeless within just seconds.
The hunter was inexperienced in the behavior of fatally wounded deer, or he or she truly believed the shot was a miss or the hunter looked hard but never found the deer in the thicket. For whatever reason, the deer was lost and became a feast for the local coyotes, possums, buzzards and myriads of insects and microscopic organisms. Thus it was not a waste. Such a death never is. The hunter didn't eat, but millions of other life forms did. That's the way things work out here in nature.
So I brought the deer's fine antlers and skull out of the woods with me. I'll nail it up out back somewhere to remind me of beautiful bucks and their captivating antlers, and hungry critters that feed where they can, and life and death to which we are all bound, and a happy day in the woods admiring trees, and many other reminders of the wonders of nature.
