Hunting Hunters

NEWTON F. TOLMAN

SPORTSMEN from other states sometimes complain that New Hampshire deer behave in a singularly baffling manner. Whether or not this is true, there can be no doubt about the unpredictable and elusive nature of the deer laws. Actually the wonder is that any New Hampshire laws make sense. This little state is far down the list in population yet has one of the largest legislative bodies in the world: four hundred representatives and a twentyfour-member Senate, with a corps of attendant officers such as councilmen, doorkeepers, and many others. We also have a governor.

Yankees are great for everybody’s having a hand in government, and our system ensures it. Just about all of us get “sent to Concord” at some time during our lives, Concord being the capital and the home of the penitentiary and mental hospital. Several high officials have made the trip in two capacities, and one or two in all three.

By no means do all our citizens hunt deer, but every single one of them has an idea for a new hunting law. At each session of the legislature, it takes a parliamentary wrangle to sift out all the deer bills and clear the decks for such minor items as education and budget.

At present we have an east-west line through the state, with one deer season above the line, another below it. There is some danger we may split in two, like Uruguay and Paraguay, over this line issue. But as all New Hampshire roads run only north and south — another of our unsolved mysteries — interdependence still holds us together.

Most people outside New England assume that the annual parade of cars carrying deer down the highways means that the cargoes were bagged in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine, whose publicity experts plug the idea. My own conclusion is that all these deer come from Canada, where they are bought in a large supermarket catering to hunters. Most of the animals are of Japanese origin, quick-frozen and exported to Quebec via the Panama Canal. This carrying of deer on car fenders has caused the mental breakdown of several cartoonists, unable to think of a new twist for the fall magazines. They have run through just about everything, from equipping the deer with tail fins to having the cartoonist lashed to the car with the editor driving.

It so happens that fewer deer have been killed recently in our neighborhood than in past years, but there is a definite increase in deer hunters. There are also more partridge hunters and fishermen and campers, and nobody knows where it will all end. We had to abandon one of our oldest bird covers last fall because of all the empty shells; our feet kept slipping out from under us.

Tracking, as we used to do it hour after hour, is no longer feasible. Today even in our wildest woods you cannot follow a deer more than a few minutes before several other hunters will cut in ahead. About half of them have no idea how to tell which way a deer is traveling, and they will likely as not be backtracking toward you. (I often find myself whistling or singing quite loudly while tracking.)

One day we saw a deer which had been tracked by so many hunters all going in different directions that after a while the deer itself didn’t know which way it was going. Finally the bewildered animal just gave up and sat down.

ONLY about fifty years ago here in New Hampshire deer hunting was no problem at all. A contributing factor may have been that there were no deer. They had been killed off by our forefathers, who objected to having all the vegetables nibbled out of their kitchen gardens and having their apple trees chewed up every summer. With the advent of cheap canned goods this no longer mattered, and the ruminants known as Virginia white-tailed deer were reintroduced, with stringent protective laws.

Something similar happened in Vermont, but it is noticed by the curious that these two states — like as two peas except in the eyes of their inhabitants — always enact deer laws as divergent as possible. Over across the river, for example, they have a “buck law.” Nobody can legally shoot a doe. We hear that this has resulted in runty stock. In fact, rabbit hunters have been shooting a good many deer lately, mistaking them for hares. One Vermonter told us he didn’t even bother to cut up his deer this year, just put the whole thing in the kettle and made a stew out of it.

My wife and I seldom find time to hunt deer these days, but we hunt deer hunters more than ever. Years ago it was rare for a man to get lost in these parts; now it is a rare day when one doesn’t. Personally I find hunting hunters the more rewarding sport. No bag limit, and a greater variety of quarry. Deer, by comparison to hunters, are quite easy to outguess. Also it is against the law to hunt deer after dark, but you can keep right on tracking hunters all night.

Recently we have been finding the lost hunters in our area to be in rather poor condition. They lack proper equipment, in spite of all that is written on that subject every year. Some were visibly undernourished.

Greenhorns would do well to emulate a veteran hunter of my boyhood days, Uncle Sim. Once when he first took up hunting just after he was married, Uncle Sim managed to get lost. The neighbors did not find him until near midnight, somewhere over in the White Swamp. After that his wife never let him go out without the following equipment, in addition to his snowshoes, rifle, ammunition belt, and about five yards of bright cloth sewed on coat, pants, and hat: compass (navigating type), whistle, pocketknife, sheath knife, waterproof match case, newspaper for kindling, belt camp ax, sandwiches for two meals, week’s emergency rations, thermos of hot tea, flask of spirits, fifty-foot rope, flashlight, kerosene lantern, extra gloves, socks, first-aid kit, map of the county, and a package of toilet paper.

Such were the main items as I remember them. When his wife finished getting him loaded up for the day’s hunt, he was not likely to travel far enough to get lost again. And there was the extra safety factor of the noise he made rattling and jangling through the brush.

Strange as it may seem, every season finds more and more hunters coming up here — eager to follow week-old deer tracks into strange territory — equipped with nothing more than a rifle and some shells. They start off in zero weather, whistling happily, never leaving word in what general area they plan to hunt. Often their light shoes and clothing are about right for gathering blueberries in August.

Last season, after bringing in two exhausted specimens on two successive nights, we put up notices asking those wishing to be rescued on weekends to phone in advance for reservations. Even Red-Ears, our little no-good white setter, had a rescue to his credit. One very black, cold night a young ex-air-force man came crawling up to our house and rapped feebly on the front door. He was minus all survival equipment, as usual, and his flying boots were full of snow. When we got him thawed out enough to talk, he explained that for three or four hours he had been desperately working his way toward the sound of a dog’s barking. This was Red-Ears, whom we had never been able to cure of shrill and frequent yelping at nothing in particular.

Late in November, my wife and I were bird shooting with a friend in a cover we had guaranteed to be virgin territory. It was in an uninhabited valley on a road that showed no sign of travel since Franklin Pierce was President. Janet and I took the dog through the cover, while Jim was posted on the road. At the end, when we reconvened, Jim said, “ Maybe you think there’s nobody in this country, but two characters just overtook me here the like of which you wouldn’t believe!”

On the way out in the jeep we saw what he meant. Trudging ahead were two figures, one large and stout, the other small and wiry, dressed all in Lincoln green. Their green hats sported feathers, giving them a jaunty air. Slung over their shoulders were quivers full of fine, knife-tipped shafts for the stout longbows they were carrying. I was just bethinking to ask these merry men the way to Nottingham when we remembered our newest law, which provided a week of deer hunting for archers before the December 1 start of the gunpowder free-for-all.

Later we were to find that the arrangement would improve the deer hunting considerably. All the deer, on being chased around for a week by the archers, are well distributed and have caught their second wind by the time the riflemen take over.

In some parts of the country they now have special seasons for muzzle loaders as well as for bow and arrow. One of the Western states has just opened a third season for slingshots, and some agitation has been started toward still another for boomerangs.

With ever-increasing armed hordes scrambling through the thickets, it is inevitable that a few will snipe at each other — though usually by mistake. Almost all nonhunters work themselves into a perfect frenzy over this every year. Letters and editorials demand that something be done.

All the noise is wasted effort. So long as deer abound there can be no way to get rid of hunters. And so long as deer lovers abound there can be no way to get rid of deer. Deer lovers should be grateful that the hunters shoot not them but each other, thus at least eliminating some of the hunters. Then too, every time a hunter shoots a hunter, another deer is spared.

It has become the smart thing for the all-yearround set — who now outnumber our “old natives” — to make a great fuss over the deer season. They don’t dare go for a walk, they don’t dare let the dog out. They might as well be inside the stockade at the height of the Mohawk massacres. All conversation revolves around the question of why licenses are issued without some sort of examination and their opinion that all deer hunters are 1) factory workers from Massachusetts who never shot a gun before, or 2) ex-service boys whose military duty has hardened them to a point of utter abandon with firearms.

The nonhunters tell each other the same old stories at every party: the hunter who tracked a sheep all day, the hunter who shot the hog, the hunter who shot his mother-in-law, the hunter who was hauled into court and asked how he could have mistaken a horse for a deer and replied, “I didn’t mistake it for a deer — I thought it was a cow.”

Vainly deer hunters may plead, “We too are lovers of nature,” but they never get away with it (“Anybody who would shoot a deer just couldn’t feel for wild animals the way I do”), and let’s not have any remarks about the deer lovers’ fur coats and doeskin gloves.

Living as we do in a large blank space on the map inhabited most of the time by only the deer and ourselves, we get a good look at the hunters pouring into our woods every fall. Even the ones who do not pour out again without some help from us are usually people we enjoy meeting, except for the two who built a fire on our boathouse floor and chopped a hole in the roof. And, unpopular conception though it be, we have long known deer hunters are no more obnoxious than any other dedicated group. They are also just as intelligent as golfers, stamp collectors, or Democrats, in the main.

Furthermore, it all makes for a sort of holiday feeling with these people out roaming around, up on the mountain and down in the swamps and all over the place. Most of them are having a whale of a good time and getting nothing. Bang, bang, boom, boom, echoing through the hills — those early, cold, dark winter weeks would indeed be empty and lonesome without a deer season.