The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

Deer hunting is here. Now is when the worst part of deer season starts. They have to go out there and do it. They have to. Now is when hunters get their money’s worth. Maybe they don’t want to. But they have to. Otherwise, they won’t be able to spend the rest of the year spinning yarns about how they got their deer. 

Deer hunters hunt just so they can talk about it.

Deer hunting is thus a 12-month season, minus the time they’re out there in the woods, with no one to talk to about being out there in the woods. There is of course the six months preceding deer season, when the hunter incurs the obligatory duty of reciting any deer hunting story he knows about, has heard about in his life, or maybe actually lived through, or any story that happened to anyone even remotely connected to him.

Then, in the six months following deer hunting season, there is the required duty to tell  everything all over again, while adding this season’s hunting tale, only better each time it is repeated.

But there is that two weeks when they have to be silent. This is an unfortunate period for the average hunter. They have to be tough to get through it, and that’s the truth

But, like they say, truth is stranger than fiction, and a good hunting story is often even better in truth than it is in exaggeration. Take for example the picture that ran in a recent paper in the area, showing a fillet knife entangled by its leather thong with complicated knots in a deer’s antlers. Now how did that happen? If only deer could talk. The tales they could tell. Stranger than fiction.

Probably one of the most expensive deer hunting tales I’ve come across came from a local auto body shop several years ago. The weather that fall was really cold, so cold that the two women—who insisted that they too should be out there hunting—needed a warm-up.  They had one of their husband’s four-wheel-drive pickup. Rather than unload the lever-action rifle outside, the hunter on the passenger side elected to unload her rifle inside the truck. Her fingers were cold. She was shivering. She dutifully kept the barrel pointed at the floor, just in case that one in a million thing should happen.

It happened.

I’ll bet that a large caliber rifle going off in a pickup is loud. It was not only real loud, it was real devastating, from the truck’s point of view. The bullet first killed the heater core, which you will note was the only thing these hunters’ cold fingers really needed. On its journey through there, it got the AC evaporator. Then the slug deflected ever so slightly, and it winged the alternator, tearing out a few little bits of pretty necessary wire. Then it blew a hole through the air conditioning condenser, which had the misfortune of being sandwiched between the radiator and the transmission cooler. They also suffered the same fate. Finally, just to add insult to injury, the bullet also put out one of the truck’s eyes, which shattered and destroyed the grill. Total cost, not including towing or future spousal harassment OR having a story anyone would want to tell for the next six months, ran close to five thousand dollars.

I get to tell this story because I was the guy who restored the air conditioning. What a great deer hunting story to tell.

And I didn’t even have to buy a license.