By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

Like most of the deer in southeastern North Carolina, I’m stuck in a rut.

Mine does not produce the insatiable urge to mate; rather, I’m stuck in a scheduling rut which prevents me from chasing the aforementioned single-minded deer.

And they know it.

I am not sure how they have kept it a secret, but I think game animals may have sneakily begun using technology against us. Just as more and more hunters are using GPS systems and radio trackers on their dogs, it seems fewer deer have been killed this year, at least in my neck of the woods. Anyone driving after sunset along our road can testify the deer are there – they just aren’t ending up in the back of a pickup truck somewhere.

I think the deer have gotten smart and are using radio-detection devices to figure where the hunters are working, then avoiding that area.

One of the sleeping pill commercials had a beaver carrying one of those Blackberry smart-phones, so why couldn’t deer have a central digital listening post?

How else, pray tell, could Buckzilla still be walking around chasing does like a former president at an intern convention?

I met Buckzilla the other night at precisely (I checked) 11 minutes after legal shooting time. Now, I don’t have permission to hunt where he was feeding, so I couldn’t have legally or ethically shot him, but I’ll admit, had I seen him standing on the shoulder of the road in daylight, I would have been tempted.
Of course, when I met Buckzilla, he was standing in the road.

I am not kidding, nor am I telling a tall tale, when I tell you this was the biggest buck I’ve ever seen on the hoof in eastern North Carolina. He was far larger than a 16-point monster one of my neighbors popped last year.

And he was standing in the highway.

Now, I am not a horn hunter; I have never been able to figure out how to make antlers edible, so I’m not that concerned over whether I shoot a doe or a buck during hunting season.

But with Buckzilla, one could only stare at the antlers.

I don’t know how many points he had, but they were everywhere. I counted 14 tines before he moved off into the shadows, as magnificent an animal as I’ve seen in my life. He was testing the air in that odd way deer have, curling his upper lip to find the doe whose eyes lit up in my headlights a few yards away. I hope they had a properly romantic evening and produce several babies with who take after Old ‘zilla’s side of the family.

Romance aside, I hope Buckzilla survives the season.

I cannot understand the people who drive past a field, shoot a deer, and leave it; whilst I joke about going out to kill something, I despise waste of any game animal, and don’t understand the thrill of literally just killing something, then driving on to the store. It strikes me as more than a little nuts, to be real honest.
A fellow did that the other day almost in front of a friend of mine; it could be the shooter was planning to return later to pick up his purloined kill, but instead he fled like the lazy coward he was. The deer was salvaged, I think, but avoiding the waste wasn’t as much a concern to me as the people who just have to kill a deer, at whatever cost.

We joke in my community that friendships are sundered the second Saturday in October, and don’t heal again until New Year’s Day. Regrettably, that seems to be truer than anyone would like to admit. I’ve had any number of folks refuse me hunting privileges because of (a) behavior of some deer bums, (b) fear that a deer bum may “get back” at the landowner for allowing someone else to hunt, and (c) a general disgust with people who call themselves hunters.

Yet sometimes I can understand.

I am a still-hunter and a stalker. I don’t use dogs, trucks, or ATVs to chase deer. I respect property lines and the laws, and try to leave absolutely no trace of my presence when I leave a stretch of hunting ground.

And it grumbles me greatly when I’m lumped in with the deer-bums, although I understand folks’ hesitation.

When folks are frightened to go into their own yard during deer season, when a teenage kid gets threatened for hunting on his grandfather’s farm after some club members were refused a lease, when people turn hounds loose on a 10-acre tract to have an excuse to chase deer through the surrounding 300 acres – I don’t blame landowners for painting responsible hunters with the same tarbrush as the deer bums.

I know fellows in some darn fine hunting clubs, people who care about their deer herd and would no more trespass than they would slap their mommas.

Then I know the ones who don’t see or don’t care about the posted signs, who don’t give a hoot what’s behind their target, and who would really like to see hunting on Sunday legalized, so they could squall tires through a country church parking lot whilst chasing a deer.

So I guess I don’t really mind if Buckzilla has an early warning system comparable to anything owned by the U.S. government.

Maybe it’ll give him a few more years to produce more smart deer, and when the deer bums either ruin it for themselves or get tired of not killing anything, the real hunt can begin.