Tuesday the woods remember their manners
THE RIDGES — On Tuesday the woods put their church clothes on. Archery deer opens. Fall archery turkey opens on the same bell. The cameras that Missouri researchers left out for the Smithsonian, the ones that have already confessed to young turkey and young coyote and the usual white-tailed congregation, will keep working whether anyone climbs a stand or not. The night shift does not require a permit.
Inkhorn has walked enough fence lines to know the shared calendar. A goat does not hunt. A goat does occupy the same edge a doe uses at dusk: the place where fescue gives up and the oaks begin their argument. Orange is not a fashion on a farm road this week. It is a sentence you wear so a stranger with a bow does not have to guess.
The policy weather has shifted too. MDC has said the old CWD zone map is gone and that this winter will not be a winter of targeted removals. Sampling still has its counties and its November manners. Hunters and landowners are the plan. That is a lot of plan to hang on people who also have to remember water.
We will not invent a harvest. We will not put a tag on an animal we did not see. What we will invent is the Monday night conversation in a kitchen that faces a woodlot:
Tell someone which stand. Fill the goat tubs before you leave in the dark. The woods are allowed to be two things at once — a pantry and a neighbor.
Black bears are still estimated around a thousand and growing, with their own October window. Feral hogs remain the unpaid extra in every meeting about disease and dirt. Coyote pups on a camera are not a crisis. They are a reminder that the ridge is employed.
Professor Gruff’s grease pencil: “Opening day is a human holiday. The deer have been in season all year. Print the dates. Print the courtesy. Leave the antlers to people who earned the walk.”