Highlight of the deer season?

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
October 1, 2004
It was out in the middle of what we call a green field (though it was not yet green; I was just trying to make it green) and it was hot and my tractor was broken, when I stopped for a moment and had this thought. I am plowing up half the county and strowing fertilizer and lime and seed and missing all the football games and for what? Last season I collected one doe deer from my five green fields for my similar efforts. Is this where I am headed again this year?
Not waiting to get an answer from myself, I headed for the house to get my truck and tools and come back to fix the tractor.
So now that I have completed the plantings and, having survived the labor once more, I can take a deep breath and reflect on my toil out there with the yellow jackets and the snakes and the ticks and the mosquitos and the dust, I am moved to ask myself why. Why do I torture myself so?
Don't ask why
I wish I didn't ask why so much. I wish I could just do it and not question myself. But there it is; that annoying question that raises its incriminating head when I struggle with an exhausting task that nearly kills me in the name of having fun. I don't know the answer but something drives me to try to find it.
We hunters need something to do with ourselves, something pertaining to hunting, in the long days just prior to hunting season and so we kill weeds with bush hogs, buy up all the fertilizer that the industry makes and we go afield and sweat a lot.
Don't misunderstand. There is plenty to do in our lives; jobs, family and community activities and the like. But we despair in the early fall because we want to be deer hunting but the deer season is not here yet.
So we go out to where we hope to be hunting deer and we prepare to hunt deer. We go do part of the hunt, which is getting ready to go hunting. If we have time and the cuts and bruises and sprains from the green field battles are sufficiently healed to allow mobility, we will scout.
Scouting is a word we use to mean we go into the woods and look for deer sign because all the green field preparation has failed to adequately scratch the itch. Scouting is hunting without the rifle. It helps.
When the deer season finally arrives and we are sitting there in a shooting house and freezing our toes off looking at that fine green grass we planted under the hot sun of September, there is time to sort things out a little. The world record buck is not going to stroll into our green field. At least not during the daylight as it did for Tony Fulton a few years ago up near Louisville.
The hunt
We will wait day after day in the rain and the cold until the season is almost at an end. Then we will take a doe for the freezer and go home and make packages of venison to eat during the months we are waiting to go out and make green fields again.
During those long January days on stand we wonder if the getting ready was not just about as rewarding as the actual hunt. Do we hunt deer in order to have planted green fields? Or is it the other way around as we have long told ourselves?
There, I have tried and failed once again to explain to myself why the heck my back is sore and my knuckles are skinned and my ears are full of field dirt. All I have done is raise more questions.