Many years ago, living in Texas, I would occasionally go hunting with a family member in Colorado. He had a large property west of Colorado Springs and he had built a small cabin that would accommodate four hunters at a time. If you went with him you walked a half mile up hill from where you had to park your vehicle. He wouldn’t allow one closer to the cabin. You could only take what you packed in. Hunting with this relative, you hunted game by walking, slipping up on an elk or a deer as close as you could get with out spooking the animal. You could walk all day and not get a decent shot, one that a hunter would take. You needed to be both a good shot with whatever weapon you were carrying and a pretty good stalker if you wanted to bring home the bacon, as it were. That’s the way I grew up hunting. And I have hunted black tail in the Marfa and Ft Davis areas of Texas the same way. So I remember the first time a couple of friends took me out to check their feeders in the Texas white tail countryside. They put out corn and other feeds before deer season so the deer would walk up to the feeders and eat and they kept checking and restocking the feed troughs so the deer would keep coming back and therefore would keep feeding from those troughs well into deer season. I didn’t know hunters did this and I didn’t know they built blinds as close to the feeders as they could get them so they could get a direct, pointblank shot as the deer fed. After going out with them and listening to their conversations, I wrote this poem. It’s just a poem and doesn’t reflect my thinking, on guns or hunting, merely my thinking on blinds and feeders. It would be a different if we needed these animals for food but we don’t. This could as easily be about big boy’s toys. It’s just a poem, of sorts. The Hunt Sportsmen on a hunt for small white-tailed deer, big rough men, sporting tattoos, hunting knives, thirty-ought-sixes with scopes, nine millimeter side arms, and big men’s boots with long sleeved shirts and expensive wrist watches wearing big hats and give-me caps. Capable men herding four-wheel drive pickup trucks and SUVs down winding, dusty ranch roads to blinds set up close to feeding troughs, death camps for timid deer who come quiet and unsuspecting to feed on pellets when hunters hid in blinds wait in ambush at point blank range for their helpless prey. Afterwards men brag of skill and exceptional shots as they rehash their endurance of hardship and patience in cold weather, under stress as they haul their gutted kill to lockers to be turned into sausage and roasts before heading home to celebrate the holidays and good cheer with family and friends over big meals of turkey and dressing with cranberry sauce and all the trimmings of a bountiful harvest. Men who unwrap and show off new rifles and shotguns dropped off by Santa on his quest to bring Christmas joy and happiness to children everywhere. Sportsmen ready to defend the Constitution the Second Amendment And next year’s kill of white tailed deer lead unknowing to their Christmas slaughter.
My grandson-in-law hunts deer. They eat what they kill so I guess it is justified. He brought me a roast and I wrapped it in foil with some beef fat that I got from the grocery store. It was good. My son used to hunt but he quit. Around here, some hunters hunt with dogs. They let the dogs out at one area and the dogs chase the deer through the woods to where the hunters wait. To me, that is worse than a still kill. Plus, a deer that is chased has a bad taste. It gets some kind of hormones stirred up in their blood. But I still wish somebody had shot that one that ran out in front of my car a couple of weeks ago and did almost $4000 worth of damage.
The sport seems to ebb & flow in popularity. I went hunting (sort of sat in a swamp) over 45 years ago , and got nothing but cold. I would at least like to learn how to dress deer, rabbit and squirrel, just to have the skill. As @Shirley Martin said, there are some hunters that run dogs through an area and the humans sit on the other side waiting to ambush. That's not really a sport, but I understand why. The folks in my area hunt to eat, not as a form of entertainment. I allowed them to hunt on my property when I first moved in (I did not want to be the outsider who shrank their territory), but they refused to comply with the most basic of courtesies, so I put an end to it. I just got an email from our state's game department (Dept of Wildlife Resources, as they recently rebranded themselves.) The following figures are for the 2020/2021 season, and are reported kills: Bear: 3,464 (just shy of last year's record season of 3,535. The highest ever before then was about 2,800.) Deer: 208,131. Lots of years have been higher than this, the highest being 260,000 in 2008/2009. Turkey: 2,092. Back in the 1989/1990 season there were over 16,000 harvested. Lots of variables affect this besides the number of turkeys and the number of hunters. If I ever decided to take up the sport, all that would be required is to open my patio door:
If one does not accept the term Prose Poem, then this piece, The Hunt, would be flash fiction or if it were non-fiction, a short, short story or tale. I misused the the term 'blacktailed'deer. My word should have been Mule Deer. There is a Black tailed species in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. Nothing special, merely a piece of Prose.