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DALLAS Opening day is Nov. 7 for most of Texas' 550,000 or so white-tailed deer hunters. By Friday, highways leading out of Dallas will be choked with pickup trucks and SUVs, all loaded with groceries, guns and camouflage clothing, headed north, south, east and west to hunting leases that range in size from 100 acres to 100,000 acres.
Whitetails are the world's most popular big-game animal. Unlike many other forms of wildlife, whitetails are wonderfully adaptive. From Canada to Central America, they're thriving in spite of habitat changes wrought by humans. In some cases, they're thriving because of the changes.
Many years ago, my friend Bill Carter called the whitetail buck "everyman's lion."
Carter owns successful sporting goods stores in the Houston area and equally successful hunting ranches.
His blue-collar customers will never hunt African lions, but most of them spend as much time as possible in the whitetail woods. Rather than a 500-pound "king of beasts" with a countenance accented by a shaggy black mane, they dream of a 200-pound buck with a thorny calcium crown.
Pragmatic hunters realize that the big bucks prominently displayed in hunting magazines and on contest Web sites are mostly bagged by hunters with big bucks to spend. They also know that some lucky hunter occasionally catches lightning in a bottle when a huge buck steps into an opening where he's not supposed to be.
Last season, it happened to Tim Coker of Carrollton. Coker was hunting on an inexpensive weekend day lease in Cooke County when he shot a nontypical monster that grossed 1972/8 Boone and Crockett points and netted 190.
For a whitetail hunter, trophies are a relative thing and most sportsmen are merely hoping for a bigger buck than they've taken before. Even if the elusive buck never shows up, deer hunting is more about trophies of the heart than trophies on the wall.
Here are some of the top trophies I've collected in more than 35 years of deer hunting:
Indelible memories of many days spent in the field with my son, my wife and my close friends.
Hundreds of mornings when I crawled into a deer blind well before daylight and sat there for 30 minutes or more with nothing to see, no channels to change and nothing to do but sit very quietly and contemplate my own thoughts. This is one of life's greatest privileges and an experience missing from our normally busy, in-touch routine.
The thrill of witnessing nature first-hand, whether the animals I'm watching are big bucks, green jays, bobcats, kestrels, gray foxes, badgers, coyotes javelinas or great horned owls. The best way to see elusive animals is to blend into their environment.
Temporarily escaping the pressures of deadlines, schedules, bills and whatever personal problems besiege me at the moment. To hunt is to trade those problems, real or imagined, for a primal focus that's as old as mankind.
Calls of the wild. The overhead trill of sandhill cranes, the covey call of bobwhite quail just at daylight, the soft hoot of a great horned owl, and my personal favorite the predawn yips of coyotes, which I view as the deer hunter's anthem sung just as it becomes light enough to let the games begin.
The realization is that the best thing about opening day is just that it's the beginning of an entire season in which to collect more trophies of the heart. Some of those trophies may even be the deer for which the season is set.
(c) 2009, The Dallas Morning News.
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Whitetails are the world's most popular big-game animal. Unlike many other forms of wildlife, whitetails are wonderfully adaptive. From Canada to Central America, they're thriving in spite of habitat changes wrought by humans. In some cases, they're thriving because of the changes.
Many years ago, my friend Bill Carter called the whitetail buck "everyman's lion."
Carter owns successful sporting goods stores in the Houston area and equally successful hunting ranches.
His blue-collar customers will never hunt African lions, but most of them spend as much time as possible in the whitetail woods. Rather than a 500-pound "king of beasts" with a countenance accented by a shaggy black mane, they dream of a 200-pound buck with a thorny calcium crown.
Pragmatic hunters realize that the big bucks prominently displayed in hunting magazines and on contest Web sites are mostly bagged by hunters with big bucks to spend. They also know that some lucky hunter occasionally catches lightning in a bottle when a huge buck steps into an opening where he's not supposed to be.
Last season, it happened to Tim Coker of Carrollton. Coker was hunting on an inexpensive weekend day lease in Cooke County when he shot a nontypical monster that grossed 1972/8 Boone and Crockett points and netted 190.
For a whitetail hunter, trophies are a relative thing and most sportsmen are merely hoping for a bigger buck than they've taken before. Even if the elusive buck never shows up, deer hunting is more about trophies of the heart than trophies on the wall.
Here are some of the top trophies I've collected in more than 35 years of deer hunting:
Indelible memories of many days spent in the field with my son, my wife and my close friends.
Hundreds of mornings when I crawled into a deer blind well before daylight and sat there for 30 minutes or more with nothing to see, no channels to change and nothing to do but sit very quietly and contemplate my own thoughts. This is one of life's greatest privileges and an experience missing from our normally busy, in-touch routine.
The thrill of witnessing nature first-hand, whether the animals I'm watching are big bucks, green jays, bobcats, kestrels, gray foxes, badgers, coyotes javelinas or great horned owls. The best way to see elusive animals is to blend into their environment.
Temporarily escaping the pressures of deadlines, schedules, bills and whatever personal problems besiege me at the moment. To hunt is to trade those problems, real or imagined, for a primal focus that's as old as mankind.
Calls of the wild. The overhead trill of sandhill cranes, the covey call of bobwhite quail just at daylight, the soft hoot of a great horned owl, and my personal favorite the predawn yips of coyotes, which I view as the deer hunter's anthem sung just as it becomes light enough to let the games begin.
The realization is that the best thing about opening day is just that it's the beginning of an entire season in which to collect more trophies of the heart. Some of those trophies may even be the deer for which the season is set.
(c) 2009, The Dallas Morning News.
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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