There are very few disadvantages to living in the countryside. For every minor annoyance one can think of (like the inability of pizza restaurants to deliver) there are several major bonuses (like not having to listen to neighborhood dogs barking 24/7, or watching helplessly as they crap all over my lawn). But there is one disadvantage that never occured to me before Carrie and I moved into our remote house a few years ago: hunters begging for permission to shoot creatures on my land.
I shouldn’t call them hunters though, because what they’re doing isn’t hunting. They’re shooting. They’re driving around looking for game to shoot from the road. That’s not hunting. That’s shooting. They might as well be shooting traffic signs or pop cans, because they would be applying the same amount of hunting skills: none.
Of course, I have a pretty strong opinion about this because I grew up a bowhunter. Bowhunters don’t shoot, they hunt – they have to hunt if they want to kill anything. And hunting isn’t simply a matter of wandering around until something comes within range to shoot. If that were ‘hunting’ we bowhunters would never shoot anything.
No, hunting is much more than shooting. It’s an art form all it’s own. It requires a deep and intimate understanding of the animal, it’s behavior, it’s habitat, the terrain, the effects of weather, scent, wind, and concealment. I’ve probably left something out, but you get the point – hunting isn’t as simply as cracking open a Bud Light and driving the backroads. To truly hunt requires a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things. Ingore any one of them and you’re going to come up short. Pay attention to all of those things though, and you’ll find yourself doing more than shooting – you’ll find yourself hunting, and gaining a huge admiration and respect for nature at the same time. Shooters don’t respect nature, they just seek to blow holes in it.
And this is precisely what irks me about the bozos who show up at my house on a Sunday morning, with me in my jammies watching NFL pre-game shows: they aren’t really asking for permission to ‘hunt’ on my land, they’re asking for permission to ‘shoot’ on my land. There’s a big difference.
Two such bozos showed up to our house the day after Thanksgiving. They saw our pheasants across the road, near a tree next to one of our barns. I call them ‘our’ pheasants because they live on the land around our house – we see them every day and they are like pets to us. They are the ideal non-pet pets. They are always around, like a pet, and we become attached to them like pets, but we don’t have to feed them or clean up after them. They’re the best of both worlds.
And some road-rangers wanted to leap out of their truck and ‘hunt’ them. Yes, they actually asked, “Hey, we saw some pheasants over by that barn and we were wondering if we could go hunt them.”
Hunt them? Do you even know what hunting is? Are you aware that hunting from the road is not really hunting? Are you aware that I see those pheasants every single day and I don’t really want some redneck jerk like you coming around and shooting my beautiful birds? Do you honestly think I would let you shoot anything on my property when you just now showed up to my house asking permission?
That’s the other thing that irritates the hell out of me about road hunters: they think it’s perfectly acceptable to ask permission after they see game on your land. That is not how I was brought up in my family of bowhunters. I was taught hunting. And part of hunting is scouting – going out before the season starts, figuring out where I wanted to hunt and then asking permission from the landowner before the first day of the season. You don’t ask permission the same day you go out hunting, and you sure as heck don’t ask permission after you see game! It’s like asking a woman to marry you after you see her bank account. Not cool.
So, I sent them away – politely of course, although in my heart I wanted to go off on a rant right then and there, and completely lambaist them. This sort of thing happens at least a half-dozen times each fall, and every time it makes me want to throw the Deliverance DVD in, since you can plainly see our TV from the front porch steps. Queue that puppy up to Ned Beatty’s scene, and then put some gnarly, stained false teeth in before I answer the door in my backwoods coveralls and low-IQ drawl… Maybe word will get around to the other ‘hunters’ and they’ll quit asking, eh?