The week the woods remember us
THE OZARKS — Teal open Saturday. Archery deer and fall turkey open Tuesday. The regulation booklet says this in the calm voice of a department that has survived a million opinions. The fence line says it differently. The fence line has already seen the bucks changing their errands.
Inkhorn does not cover hunting the way a hook-and-bullet desk covers hunting. He covers the part where a goat farm and a deer woods share a property line and pretend they have not noticed each other since July. A Smithsonian camera string pulled off Missouri ridges this summer caught the honest census: white-tailed deer, young turkey, young coyote, two kinds of squirrel, eight kinds of bird. The scientists were measuring what is left of Lewis and Clark’s mammal list after we subtracted bison and wolves and added ourselves. The goats, who were not on that original list in quite this density, declined comment.
What the cameras do not catch is the human weather that starts September 15. Trucks on the gravel before light. A thermos that thinks it is coffee. A stand that was a good idea in June and a creaking one now. MDC has said it will not run targeted deer removals this winter for chronic wasting disease and will lean on hunters and landowners instead. That is policy. Policy does not change the way a doe looks at a garden that still has tomatoes out of stubbornness.
Cows are already on the early hay. Deer will be on the oak mast if the oaks remember their job. Wild hogs, where they have not been pushed out of a watershed, will be on everything and then some. Black bears — about a thousand in the state, still growing — have their own October. This page does not confuse a goat column with a hunting forecast. This page notes that the same hills have to hold all of them without catching fire.
Print the dates so Saturday cannot pretend it dreamed them.
Teal: the 12th.
Archery: the 15th.
The woods have been practicing since June. We are the ones who need a reminder.
Inkhorn walked the inside of the fence, not the stand. A goat followed for three posts and then remembered she had a reputation. The deer on the other side did not follow. They have a week to finish the apples that hung too low. After that the contract changes, and everybody — hunter, goat, armadillo on the night shift — goes back to reading the same ground in a different font.
Professor Gruff wrote in the margin: “Do not make a season into a morality play. Make sure the people coming off the ridge still shut the gate.”