OUTDOORS

WITH LUKE CLAYTON

This Saturday marked the opening day of deer season! Of course, we bow hunters have had the opportunity to hunt for over a month now and, on some ranches under Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) management plans, hunting with any legal means is allowed beginning with archery season. But Saturday was THE OPENER of firearms season, a date I have eagerly awaited since I was a whipper snapper growing up in the northern part of Red River County. Deer numbers were precious few back in the early sixties, but I was after them hard on the patch of woods behind our little farm. Armed with my Mossberg bolt action .410 shotgun loaded with rifled slugs, I was cutting my deer hunting teeth! I never saw a deer back in those woods, only an occasional track but remember jumping off the school bus, feeding my horse a coffee can full of horse and mule feed, feeding my chickens, grabbing a cold sweet potato or something mom left on the stove, and heading to the woods!

Hunting on opening day is a tradition that I wish to continue as long as possible. Granted, I obviously no longer am hunting that back forty behind my boyhood home but the tradition continues. I’ve already taken a buck this fall up in Oklahoma and opened the official season with plenty of sausage and deer steaks for camp. I was still hunting close to home for opening weekend, actually only a mile from my house, with my good friend Kenneth Shepherd. Kenneth is a decade and half my junior in age but our love for hunting and fishing created a strong bond several years ago. We’ve been friends now for several years and have shared a great deal of good times in the outdoors – everything from elk hunting in the Rockies to deer and javelina in the Cedar Break country of north Texas with lots of fishing thrown in for good measure. When it comes to hunting deer, our goals parallel. I’ve taken some good whitetail bucks in my lengthy career, and these days I target mature bucks and absolutely love heavy horned bucks that many would call ‘culls’.

Where we hunt, there is a potential for a sure ‘nuff wall hanger, and when we are hunting together I make it clear if one of the monsters comes out chasing a doe, my buddy does the shooting. Now, if a heavy body old buck with some nontypical head gear eases out of the brush, say a big six- or seven-point or even a giant fork horn, it’s ole’ Luke’s time to do the shooting! I stopped mounting deer for the wall years ago. I now keep the antlers for display on my little ‘hunting cabin’ situated in the oaks behind our home. I like to put two or three deer in the freezer each year and share the meat with friends and family. I usually do the cooking at fishing and hunting camps, and most of my friends expect me to show up with a skillet full of venison, rice, and gravy or venison BBQ. As long as a buck is packing lots of good meat and has some age, I won’t hesitate to settle my sights on him!

I’m certain many of you share my love of hunting deer and of opening day! Looking back through my more than sixty years of hunting this majestic game animal, it’s the people I hunted with more than the encounters with deer that I remember best. Oh, I do recall many of the hunts and, around the campfire of a crisp fall evening, can recount the events to you in great detail. How could I ever forget that first little buck I shot with my lever action 30-30 or the first time I watched a seven-point slip under a barbed wire fence and stand broadside for my first harvest with a bow, or that big North Dakota buck that I arrowed at 33 yards during the last few seconds of legal shooting light as he came into a truckload of corn piled up in front of a pop up blind?

I could go on and on with details of many of the hunts, but I more readily recall the people I was hunting with than the mounts on the wall. I honestly cannot recall all the details of the many hunts; they all seem to fade into one big happy memory. But more vividly than the hunt, I remember the companions I spent time with, many of which have passed on. It’s memories I made with the Bob Hoods, the Poppa Dinkins, Dubb Wallaces or David Dowlings that I shared such good times with I now consider the true trophies of these hunts of years past. I truly miss spending time afield with these great old friends, but when one can look back on sixty years of hunting, losing past companions becomes a fact of life.

I now enjoy spending time with a totally different group of friends that mean as much to me as those I spent time with in my younger life. I still have a couple of old friends that remain active hunters, but many are a decade or two younger. I have now become one of the designated ‘old timers’ that is sometimes too full of advice but, I also think, appreciated for having spent so many years in the outdoors and having a great many tales to tell. So around the campfire, I make sure and try not to dominate the conversations with tales of hunting back fifty or more years ago. I try to keep my stories short and to the point and give my younger companions plenty of opportunities to tell of their past experiences.

It’s difficult to put into words what opening day means to me, and I make a good part of my living putting words together for folks to read. But if you are a deer hunter, you probably share many of the feelings about deer hunting as I.

So, best of luck to all of you this season and remember even if you don’t shoot that heavy horned old buck or fat doe for the freezer, you were out there making memories with family and good friends. Way down the road many years from now, you will look back on the memories you make with fond memories. They, the memories, will mean more to you than the mount of the biggest buck in the woods on your wall!

Luke and Larry Weishuhn’s new book “Campfire Talk” is now available through www.catfishradio. org.