Blogging for Fun: The Evolution of Hunting

You might be thinking about starting a blog purely for entertainment purposes (either your own, or your readers).  Sometimes sharing your own take on day to day topics can be fun for everyone.  Sometimes you may offend some people.  That isn’t really all that hard to do, but as long as you’re not mean spirited about it, most people can usually manage to laugh at themselves a little bit.  Sometimes you just happen to run into characters who are so entertaining in their own special way, that you have to write about them.  A couple of my neighbors fall into that category. Here is a story inspired by one of them.  I like this guy.  I really do.  Sometimes though, he’s so over the top that I have to just turn away and laugh a little bit.

The First Day of Buck Season

Well, it’s that day again.  Deer Huntin’ day.  The day when thousands of people, still filled with the bounty of turkey they bought at the local Shop n’ Save, head off to the woods to bag themselves a trophy deer.  I don’t know about where you live, but where I am, today is almost as big of a deal as Thanksgiving.  Truth be told, to some people it is the biggest day of the year.  You should see the folks running around in full camouflage gear.  They’re everywhere.  Faces painted, bright orange hats keeping them safe, and plenty of ice cold cheap beer in the cooler.  Yep.  Them’s good times Cleetus.

I never got into hunting myself too much, but I have nothing against it really.  I grew up surrounded by nature.  Our little house was nestled up against woods that went on for acres.  It really wasn’t all that exciting or unusual for me to see squirrels, pheasants, or even deer walking around peacefully, right outside our living room window.  In fact, it was standard procedure to make sure that the coast was clear before letting my dog, Delta, out to pee.  She was a mutt, but she was filled with hunting blood.  Retriever, mastiff, and I suspect some Bloodhound.  If there were deer out there, Delta wanted to take them down.  It was an instinct I guess.  I think my neighbor Robert has it too (more on him later).  Even with Robert carrying a hunting rifle though, I think my dog had a better shot at actually bagging a big buck.

Why I Don’t Hunt Anymore

Don’t get me wrong.  I really don’t have anything against hunting.  I know that the hamburger I ate for dinner didn’t come from a suicidal cow bent on self destruction.  In fact, when my relatives go out hunting, I’m always happy to take some deer jerky off of their hands for them.  My father-in-law is 100% polish, so we usually end up with some kielbasa too.  It’s good stuff.  I lost my taste for hunting when I was about 13.  I went through all of the hunter training courses with a friend of mine who had told me what fun it was to kill things in the woods where his grandfather lived.  I had my doubts, but I wanted to be a good friend.  So the big day arrived when we were going to do some small game hunting.  I left my backyard filled with squirrels and pheasants and rode in the back of a pickup truck for three hours to get to his grandpa’s house.  After another three hours in a tree stand, holding a shotgun, I had seen one nervous squirrel about 100 yards away.  No one got anything that day.   The whole thing seemed silly to me.

Back at that time, I was a pretty good shot with a hunting slingshot.  I think the one I had was called a Wrist Rocket.  A friend who was a little older than me had taken my money into K-Mart and bought it for me.  I would use iron pellets that fell off of the trains that ran by my house as ammo.  I could shoot a twig in half at about 30 yards, but I had never shot any animals.  It would have been too easy.  After we returned home from our hunting trip, for whatever reason, I walked into my back yard with my slingshot, and just to prove I could do it, I shot a squirrel out of a tree.  I guess I broke his leg.  He escaped, but I saw him dragging that bad leg around for weeks from a distance.  That really put me off of hunting.  I didn’t need the squirrel for food.  In fact the idea of eating him seemed kind of gross.  But I digress.

Robert Goes Hunting

Back to this week in “sports”.  Last Tuesday, I heard my neighbor Robert talking to another neighbor about his plans for going out hunting.  As he was standing there, hiking his belt up over his generous beer gut, I think I actually heard him mention something about putting deer pee on himself to disguise his scent.  Now this is a guy who spends 364 days a year as an accountant.  One day a year (today) he decides that it’s a good idea for him to head off into the woods with a high powered rifle along with about 10,000 other Robert-like individuals.  Wow.  Sounds like a good idea to me.  I’ll be inside writing a blog post.

So Robert was going on about how hunting is a man’s sport.  The way I see it, if he headed out to the woods in a pair of shorts, carrying a hunting knife between his teeth, it might be a sport.  Darn amusing to watch too!  I think that covering yourself in deer pee, using a rifle that can kill from hundreds of yards away, and adding on a $300 rifle scope to the mix, takes a little of the sport out of it.

So, that is where we stand now.  I guess we’ll see tomorrow whether or not there are any dead deer hanging off of the neighbor’s front porches.  That’s always a pleasant thing to explain to the kids.  No, that’s not Rudolph Sweetie.  That deer’s nose is red because its covered in blood.  At least maybe I’ll get some deer jerky for Christmas.

Got any good huntin’ stories?  Please share in the comments section.  I’m sure that there are a ton of  ”Roberts” out there!