I was telling one of my neighbors
the other day I have seen more deer on my land and during my walks in the woods
this year than in all of the past years combined.
“Well, I’ll bet you won’t be seeing any more deer now
until at least January,” he said. “It’s hunting season, and the deer instinctively
know it, so they’ll make themselves scarce.”
I could just picture the deer gathered around a calendar nailed to a
tree in the woods and saying, “Yep, Bambi, it’s hunting season, all right. Come
on, we’d better head on down to the hideout now and lay low until January.”
“Is it really hunting season already?” I asked.
My neighbor nodded. “Bow and arrow. Then in late October it’s
muzzleloaders, and finally regular firearms. If you’re going out walking in the
woods, you’d better wear bright red or orange, just to be safe. You don’t want to end up with
an arrow in your butt.”
I groaned. Every year at this time, I have to don my Great
Pumpkin outfit, which consists of so much fluorescent orange, I swear people
all the way up in Quebec can see me.
Even worse, I also have to deck out my dogs in orange,
especially since I was warned on more than one occasion that my Rottweiler looks
like a deer from a distance. I’ve never seen an all-black deer with a tan face and a Sumo wrestler's body like my Rottweiler has, but then, I’m not a hunter.
So I bought orange vests, orange bandanas, and even orange collars for my dogs, just to be safe. If I could hook up flashing neon lights that spell out “DOG” and hang those on their backs, I’d probably do that, too.
Years ago, I used to bring a boom box with me on my daily hikes and blast rock-music so hunters
would hear me approaching and not mistake me for a deer. I’d thought it was a
pretty good idea…until I mentioned it to my husband one day.
“You go around making all of that noise in the woods?” he
asked. “It’s a wonder the hunters don’t shoot you for scaring all of their deer away!”
That probably would explain why I thought I heard a bush
cursing at me one morning.
The thing I like about deer hunters is they usually wear bright
orange, too, so I can spot them from a distance and not be startled by them.
Bird hunters, on the other hand, in their camouflage outfits, blend right in
with the scenery and become invisible. I can’t count the number of times I’ve
been out hiking and walked by a tree trunk that suddenly said hello to me. The
first time it happened, I nearly needed a change of underwear.
Over the years, however, I have learned how to tell when
hunters are around so I can keep an eye out for them. First of all, there will
be pickup trucks parked along the edge of the woods. You can just about
guarantee that for each one of those trucks, there will be at least one
weapon-toting person roaming around.
And then there is the toilet paper. During hunting season,
clumps of it seem to magically appear in the woods along the trails. I’ve never
actually witnessed how the toilet paper got there (and I pray I never will),
but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t due to the animals being on a sudden
personal-hygiene kick, like those cartoon bears that wipe with Charmin in the TV commercials.
Of course, when there’s snow on the ground, it’s a snap to
tell where the hunters are because their footprints are a dead giveaway. I
don’t know if this is a proven scientific fact or not, but I have noticed, from
years of studying hunters’ footprints in the snow, that most of them walk with
their right foot turned outward.
I don’t know which is weirder…the fact that they walk with
their right foot turned outward…or the fact I even noticed.
So as much as we hate to, my dogs and I will be wearing our
bright orange ensembles for the next couple of months. That way, we hopefully will be able to make it through another hunting season with all of our body parts
still intact.
That is, unless we happen to startle a hunter who's actually in
the process of using some of that toilet paper (and by “startle,” I mean my
dogs have really cold noses).
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
