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November
is probably the best month of the year to the adult Southern male in
Alabama. November is the month of deer season, Iron Bowl and all the
turkey and dressing you can eat.
Just when
it seems that November cannot get any better, you realize that opening
day of deer season and the Iron Bowl are on the same Saturday. Talk
about going to bed on Friday with visions of sugarplums!! Some years it
is a wonder our wives don’t send us to bed with a lump on our head
from our sleeping bat, er, pill.
The
opening of deer season is just about the greatest day of the year to me,
it was a day that I didn’t think could get any better. Opening day of
deer season is kind of like the first day of football season in that all
teams are equal.
Before
sun up, the big deer are still walking. As sunrise approaches you still
have the confidence that not only might this be the year you kill
"The Big One" but that this is going to be the best day to do
it. Things will only get worse from here on down. The deer will get
smarter, the weather will get colder, the stand seat will get harder and
the hours of sleep will become less and less.
But on
opening day, none of this matters. As I have said before, most of the
male population around here spends 70 days hunting deer and 295 days
talking about it.
For many
years I figured that it would be hard to improve opening day of deer
season, but I was wrong. I became a father on January 23rd, 1995. My
deer hunting buddies told me that I had shot hunting the peak of the
Alabama rut forever. They said that now instead of sitting in a deer
stand watching trophy buck after trophy buck chase does past my stand
until I decided to take one of them, I would be sitting at Chuckie
Cheese, or at least at home, listening to screaming children, putting up
with doting grandparents and a nagging wife forever. Yep, they predicted
right, hunting the rut was over for me until college and the child left
home.
I refused
to give up hope. As the first birthday came around I was able to stay
and celebrate for a couple of hours because the baby didn’t really
know what was going on and didn’t really care what she got as
presents. The grandparents wore out early and were happy just sitting
around sipping coffee with my wife. When the "down time" hit,
I was out the door and gone to the woods. That time proved that if you
sit around and whine enough, your wife will be glad to let you go
hunting.
As the
years progressed, my daughter started going hunting with me.
Taking a
child hunting is a big, royal, inconvenient pain in the backside, and I
recommend it to everyone.
Probably
the best thing about it for me was that I now truly appreciate my father
taking me fishing with him when I was a kid. Kids just don’t
understand what a chore it is for an adult to get them ready, get them
set up, get their snack, assure Mom that they won’t get shot or freeze
to death.
In the
woods I have had to try to teach my daughter to go to the bathroom in
the bushes (and not being real sure how women do it anyway), carved a
spoon for her pudding snack, listened to a thirty minute lecture on how
twirling a oak leaf with a pine needle jammed through it can call
deer, and tried to explain that: no Daddy cannot shoot a deer with you
on his shoulder.
I had no
idea what Dad had to go through, but I am glad he did. Those are some of
my best memories of my Dad. I now realize how easy it is to get out of
taking my child to the woods. The excuses are ready made and believable
and partly true.
But the
memories are unbelievable. We have seen turkeys, hawks attacking
squirrels, lizards and birds of every shape and size. We have heard
turkeys fly down from the trees, a doe snort, and a hawk’s cry as he
soars over a clear cut at sunup. Last year is when my daughter heard for
the first time the crack of dawn and now she knows what it means.
By far
though, the neatest thing I have ever heard on a hunting trip with my
daughter was on a rainy, windy, cold Butler County day. We had been
sitting on a food plot watching an old doe that was being way too
cautious. Had we wanted to harvest her, we could have done so several
times and she never would have seen it coming. Eventually the old girl
winded us and took off as though the devil was after her. We sat there
getting colder and wetter and we never saw another deer that day.
That’s
when my daughter looked at me and said, "Well Daddy, we didn’t
get a deer, but it sure beat sitting at home watchin’ TV."
That it
did Savannah, that it did.
Ralph
Ricks is the manager of Quality Cooperative, Inc. in Greenville. |
