“Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that you do not create idols to worship.” - Amak Imani Nkosazana.
“A trophy’s value isn’t measured by the worth of the metal but by the amount of work that’s required to obtain it.” - Johannes Sciefer
It’s deer season. I can feel it, and smell it, and I can even hear deer crunching through the recent drought stricken dry leaves. I haven’t been yet, but the bow is finally in tune and I’m waiting on a decent rain.
Aside from just knowing that it’s deer season, I keep getting relentlessly bombarded with pictures of monster bucks and stories about massive strokes of luck from hunters I’ve never even heard of.
This kind of unsolicited and free news is both good and bad news at the same time. (I don’t think all of it’s actually fake news, just better than half to three quarters of these ‘success’ stories are surely fake.)
Whether you believe the majority of it is fake news or not, it’s free, and all of the ‘success’ stories are compliments of the legacy outdoor media trophy hunting machine. And, it comes daily via a mobile, handheld computer/phone to remind use that another deer season has arrived. That is the good news.
I look bug-eyed at these trophy shots that the outdoor media is selling, and gaze longingly at these massive racks. They all look like they’ve been photo-shopped on some scrawny little deer. All manner of definitions for the word trophy come to mind. Years of retold trophy hunting stories bubble up out of the fading memory bank.
I know more than one good hunting buddy that spent the better part of his young adult and middle aged life in search of a trophy wife. Most of these guys gave up the quest somewhere about the third or fourth wife in that particular hunt for a trophy. A good many of these intrepid hunters now reside in a van down by the river. The lucky ones live in a shed out back with one of the kids that liked them before mom kicked the old man out on the street. The thrill of the hunt is long over for these good old boys and all that’s left are multiple and expensive pictures of trophies bought and paid for.
There are more than a couple of pay-to-hunt-a trophy stories:
One was from a good old boy that used to help some folks up around Madisonville where they had a pay-to-hunt business for the mighty and fierce, Wild and Fierce Smoky Mountain Russian Boar.
The way this high fenced trophy hunt worked was the penned up pigs were fed each morning in one corner of the hog lot. The morning feed included closing a gate so the pigs couldn’t wander off at their leisure after breakfast. For the evening meal, the pigs were fed in the opposite corner of the hog lot, where they peacefully spent the night in gated comfort so they wouldn’t wander off in the dark. Hogs, being Russian or not, are pretty bright creatures of habit and these Madisonville pigs were relatively easy to train so they could settle into a dependable two-a-day feeding routine.
So when my buddy got a party of trophy hunters booked for a “Trophy Smoky Mountain Hog Hunt Extravaganza,” (he claimed most of these ‘hunters’ were almost always from some state far north of Kentucky) the stage was set.
His job as a highly qualified hog hunting guide was to walk the excited ‘trophy hunters’ around in circles all day until they became winded. After the party was successfully worn out, he would hide them in a comfortable blind, smack dab in the path the well trained and hungry porkers took every day to their evening feeding frenzy.
He would whisper in hushed tones to the dudes fidgeting in the blind that at any minute now the hogs would appear and the glory seekers needed to be ready for a deadly charge from the most dangerous leader of the pack. Many a man had nearly been gored after a near death encounter with this one angry 400 pound Russian boar.
When the hungry hogs were released from the morning feed lot, my buddy said you could hear them coming, squealing, grunting and stampeding, hell bent, shaking the ground for miles. My friend said nine times out of ten, the dudes were so shook up by the stampeding and frenzied gaggle of hogs that most terrified hunters went home empty handed after emptying their weapons. The majority of these trophy hunters were all just glad to still be alive.
Then there’s the story about the turkey hunter helpers. This one comes from deep up in Fentress County. My buddy held the pen raised turkey in his arms all morning. The sacrificial turkey required a sock over his head to keep him quiet. His accomplice played the turkey call. These three, the two guys and the turkey with the sock on his head, who was about to die, hid unseen and well camouflaged in a crack in the rocks high above an old logging road.
One guy in the hiding spot with the turkey call, gobbled lustily to the guide and the dude below, who unwittingly thought he was on a legitimate guided turkey hunt. This was an expensive, guided trophy hunt.
So the dude and the guide hunted all morning. Calling, sneaking, looking and listening for wild turkeys to no avail. Somewhere about right before a lunch break, the guide steered the dude down the old logging road by this massive outcropping of boulders where the turkey holder and the caller were hidden.
They were watching for the guide to give them the signal to launch the poor bird. Lo and behold, the guide immediately struck up a lusty conversation with a trophy gobbler high up in the rocks above the road. At the appropriate moment my buddy flung the pen raised turkey out of the rocks where they had been hiding and drinking moonshine all morning. He and his accomplice tried not to die laughing while the startled dude missed the flapping bird only to be spared embarrassment by the expert shot of the guide.
Then there was this guy that was doing some work for me on the ranch one day and he was eye balling the deer on my wall. He started showing me pictures of the deer he had recently killed. The pictures of the bucks he and his buddies had harvested were generally stunning.
There were pictures of five or six guys with bucks that had more points than I could easily count. It was legacy outdoor hunting media stuff on steroids. I looked at the racks on the wall and looked back at his pictures, and I was almost ashamed. It took awhile, but after some amount of in-depth questioning, this guy finally confessed to hunting in some high fenced, pay-to-hunt deer pen somewhere up in Wisconsin.
He told the story of hunting for two days and not even seeing a deer. On the last day, apparently the owner of the establishment had to drive around to the corner of the deer lot where all the deer had been hiding so he could stamped the wily whitetails over the hunting party for the last big hurrah.
The guy with the big pictures said he could hear them coming at a dead gallup, massive horns, banging through the trees. There were so many deer running at him that he hugged a tree in fear of being gored to death by the scrambling heard of twenty pointers. Everybody in the party scored on the last day. It was epic. He said I should do it. I said I don’t think so.
I assume the lack of desire to hunt pen raised trophy deer is because I came of hunting age in an era when every good eight point buck was ceremoniously strapped to the hood of an old beat up car. They called these old beaters sedans in those days. When you had your deer securely strapped to the hood of your old car, you would drive around the courthouse square four or five times slowly honking the horn and drinking a six pack. All of the town would come out of the shops and stores and stand on the sidewalks and stare at you and the deer. Women, men and children, would all stop what they were doing and just gawk in amazement.
Someone standing in the gathering crowd would inevitably say;
“Who in the world is that?”
And someone else would reply;
“Why, that’s Buddy’s boy Bubba!”
“That’s one fine 8 pointer! Wonder where he got it?“
And someone who actually knew Buddy would say;
“Buddy says Bubba don’t much care for a steady pay check during deer season. Seems like all he does is hunt deer all winter.”
Everybody in town, except the women on the street that fall day, would seem to understand that Bubba had things pretty much figured out.
It wasn’t unusual for Bubba to get his picture in the local small town paper’s sports page. It wasn’t internet level fame, but small town fame was just good enough back then.
Those were the days when 8 points was about all you needed to claim a trophy buck. Now days trophies are measured in inches. Trophy bucks are now measured in inches instead of points. It seems to me to be a rather convoluted process, counting inches instead of points. Now days you have to posses some pretty impressive skills with mathematics to be able to claim a trophy before you go to the media for your dose of fame.
I’m not sure that inches are really all that necessary now days. Maybe it’s a sign of the times. Nobody drives old rusty sedans around the courthouse square with a deer strapped to the hood anymore. Especially around courthouse squares where old men sat for hours and shaved on pieces of red cedar while they swapped old Case knives like they did back before a high level of skill with mathematics was required.
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WOMR Note: Good hunting! Send Pics.
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