Straight shooting.(COUNTRY LIFE)(hunting)

IT is a convention of popular art that animals welcome their own demise. The merry grilling pig decorates many a rib shack. Now is the time of year in my valley when bars, diners, and motels sprout orange banners, decorated with buck heads, and the message: WELCOME HUNTERS.

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In The Pioneers, by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, aging icons of the French and Indian Wars, get in trouble in the 1790s for taking a deer out of season. Their plight symbolizes the grave march of civilization. Two hundred plus years later, civilization has marched on, with a web of hunting regulations. In my county big game may be taken with bow, muzzleloader, handgun, shotgun, or rifle. Certain subspecies of these weapons are off limits--no arrow, for instance, may have barbs. Dates and bags are prescribed (hunters with bows and muzzleloaders get a head start and a late finish, to offset anachronism). Close to New York's major cities your options diminish. In the five boroughs no hunting of any kind is permitted, though people use handguns to hunt one another.

Big game in my county is deer and bear. Deer are ubiquitous. I find their scat in the morning, I see the pressed grass where they have paused during the night; they have a favorite path, down the hill from the hemlocks, through a clump of mountain laurel, that you can just make out; it is where your feet naturally go if you are coming downhill. I have seen only one bear. My wife and I were by the stream one day when she said, "Rick, there's a bear." So there was, ten feet away. It was four to five feet long, perhaps 300 pounds: not the nemesis of Grizzly Man, but it could ruin your day. So we walked, with due deliberation, to the house. We never had sight or sign of it again, so it must have been passing through. A few years ago, a bear passed in front of a local woman hunting deer. It was in season, she had a permit, so she took him down.

The local paper ran a picture of hunter and quarry, with a light feminist spin. This brought an enraged letter, demanding to know how anyone could celebrate slaughtering God's creatures. This in turn brought a snort from a lifer, of the sort who normally does not write letters, asking rude questions about the protester's general knowledge of the world. As the valley fills up with second-homers from the city, there are more people like the first letter-writer. I can't agree, considering how many hunters surround me. At night I hear coyotes, doing the cowboy howl or ghastly rapid yips. Like most predators, they prefer the small, the weak, and the old; deer can fill all those niches. The barred owls, shouting "Who cooks for you?" are unearthly to us; to voles they are death. There are fishers in my neighborhood, a ...