Did you go deer hunting or deer shooting last weekend?  I often get criticized for making a distinction, but it is an important one to me.

    I grew up going to dove shoots and going quail hunting. That shows the difference pretty good.  Dove shoots are hiding on a field or water hole waiting for the doves to come to you. Quail hunting means going out to look for the birds, usually with dogs.

    To find quail, you must know something about their movements and habits. To shoot doves, you only have to know where they feed or water.

    I admire anyone willing to put in the time and effort to learn the habits of a big buck and do everything needed to get a shot at him.  It takes hours of study and work. 

    I have no problem with folks putting out a corn feeder then shooting a deer that comes to it. It is legal. But it is shooting, not hunting. I don’t think I could be real proud or brag about such a “trophy.” 

    Planting food plots is the same thing, it just takes more effort. You plant something the deer want to make them come to you to get shot. If you like that, I have no problem as long as it’s legal.

I worry young folks are taught to place all their emphasis and efforts on killing, not the whole hunting experience.  I see pictures of kids five and six years old with their first deer. Great. But hopefully their training will go past that point. At that age all they did was sit where told and make a shot. At least they probably have some training on hitting the target.

I am proud of the first buck I killed when I was 18 years old. I had actually patterned him and placed a climbing stand in the right place to get a shot.  Some of it was luck but it did take some effort.  I spent the whole archery season and the first three weeks of gun season learning about him. Back then that was a lot – each season lasted four weeks!  No corn involved. His full shoulder mount hangs on my office wall.

I have killed much bigger bucks, but they were all just by accident, or “luck.”  Linda and I both love venison so for years I preferred shooting a doe. I would shoot any legal deer. I still do.  And I wait near a corn feeder. I do not hunt them I wait for them to come to me to go to my freezer.

The biggest is a big nine-pointer I shot on my hunting club years ago. And I was a little embarrassed.  In 1985, I nailed two boards between forks in a sweetgum tree and put in spikes to climb up to the simple stand of one 12-inch-wide board.

That stand was on an old fire break between a hardwood bottom and a pine hillside.  And I killed more than 30 deer from it, it was on a natural feeding area transition to a bedding area.

I had a slight view of an old logging road about 100 yards up the hill but had never taken a shot at any deer on it. And it was rare to see a deer walking down such an open road.

That day during rut I was about to climb down from the morning hunt. I glimpsed movement on the road and when I looked in my scope I could see a deer walking along. I glimpsed horns, so I waited on a clear shot and made it. When I got to the deer I was surprised by the size of the rack.

As I loaded the deer another club member stopped, looked at the deer and said “You got him.”  It was a big buck he had been hunting all season, had seen several times but had never had a good shot.

I had killed his trophy with no special effort; it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And I do have the antlers – on the wall of my garage. I take no pride in killing that deer.

I learned to hunt squirrels growing up so I’m somewhat prejudiced.  It took time to learn their habits and what to expect at different times and even on different days.  That training helped me kill my first deer and some more after it.

I encourage parents to take their kids hunting. And even take them shooting. But please teach them that there is more to hunting than just killing something.  Video games teach them enough of that!

After deer season, try squirrel hunting. It can extend your time in the woods and is great teaching tool.

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“Schools out schools out, teacher let the mules out.” On the last day school back in 1962 I was not too sensible but was as excited as a twelve-year-old could be so I sang such nonsense.

    All I could think of was seemingly endless days ahead of fishing, building treehouses and huts, damming Dearing Branch, camping out, swimming, climbing trees and just generally growing up wild in Georgia.

    At that age I would climb anything without fear. Dearing Elementary School was an old brick building and each corner had decorative recesses about two inches deep every three feet or so going up the side. 

    I usually hung around school to ride home with daddy, the principal of the school. For several years, as soon as everyone else left the last day of school, I would go out and climb up on the roof. It was like my own private world, with many toys lost up there during the year.

    I also found a way to get into the area above the ceiling. I had to be very careful to step on the rafters, a misstep would put me through the fiberboard ceiling tiles.

    I found the old school bell there, suspended in front of a vent to the outside. It was long unused, I never heard it ring.  I wonder if it still hangs hidden out of sight.

    I think I tried to climb every tree on our farm.  One “fun” activity was to climb a small sweetgum maybe 20 feet high and get one of my friends to chop it down. It was a crazy ride as it fell and you had to be careful since your body weight would make the tree turn as it fell, making you hit back first under the tree if you didn’t jump to the side at exactly the right time.

    I am surprised I lived through some of those years and one tree climbing almost killed me. I had climbed a big sweetgum at the corner of our hog pen fence.  The wire fence had boards and post holding it up and had been patched by old barn boards.

    A limb broke or I lost my hold and fell, back first.  I hit the ground looking up at the top of jagged 2/4 that I had missed by inches. I came “that close” to impaling myself.

    Most of our activities were not so dangerous, although many required hard work, more than we would have wanted to do if productive around the farm.  But we were having fun, not working.

    Dearing Branch came under the fence at our property line, widened out in a sandy area then got narrow where it ran between two trees.  Every summer we tried to dam it to make a pond, the narrows at the trees made a natural place for it.

    We tried piling sand for a dam but the natural flow would soon wash it away.  We improved our efforts by bringing croker sacks and filling them with sand. They held up longer but the water flow would soon eat under and around them.

    We spent endless hours dragging an old railroad crosstie a couple hundred yards through the woods to the branch. We would drag it about ten feet and stop to rest. Those things are heavy!

    It made a great base for our dam.  That summer the crosstie and sandbags worked to make a pool about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. And it was deep enough to come up to the chest of a skinny-dipping 12-year-old.

    Our swimming hole lasted several weeks until a heavy summer thunderstorm dumped enough water into the branch to wash even the crosstie away.

    I fished Dearing Branch a lot, too. I made myself a “fly rod,” a stick with some fishing line tied to it. My hand tied fly was made with chicken feathers and some of mama’s sewing thread on a #6 bream hook.

    I have no idea what it looked like but I caught many tiny bluegill and hornyhead chubs by dabbling it on the surface of deeper holes in the branch.  I guess my trembling it made it look like a bug on top of the water.

    I had a wonderful childhood outdoors.  It helped that our tv got only two channels and those black and white shows were not much interest until after dinner, when I watched a couple hours of such shows as Bewitched, The Flintstones, Twilight Zone, Bat Masterson and The Beverly Hillbillies.

    At that age, I don’t think anything would have kept me inside though! I am sorry most kids nowadays don’t get to experience such fun outside.