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BuckshotDecember 09, 2006 Deer Week ended a half hour after sundown today -- except we can't call it Deer Week any more because now it's 12 days long: the Monday after Thanksgiving through December 9; no hunting on Sundays. I don't think Deer Fortnight will catch on. When we don't slip and call it Deer Week, we usually say "shotgun season." How about "The Twelve Days of Deer Shoot"? On the sixth day of Deer Shoot a hunter from my town got hit by two buckshot pellets in the state forest. Nothing like this has happened in at least 20 years, but what's shocked everybody is that the shootee called out that he'd been shot but the shooter disappeared, heard but unseen, into the woods. When no one came to his aid, he walked back to his car and drove himself to the hospital. One pellet had entered and exited his arm; the other was surgically removed from his back. He's OK. My first thought, of course, was that Dick Cheney was paying an unannounced visit to the Vineyard. Not bloody likely: in summer the place swarms with Clinton-loving liberals, and in the off-season we pride ourselves on our ability to pretend we don't recognize famous people. My second thought, Wayne Swanson, was even less likely, because Wayne, though quite capable of shooting a fellow hunter and bugging out afterward, exists only in my imagination and the memories of the three dozen or so people who've read The Mud of the Place. When Wayne took a shot at his ex-brother-in-law, it wasn't any kind of hunting season, and besides, cars on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road are never fair game. In lieu of third thoughts I've been singing Tom Lehrer's "Hunting Song" -- you know, the one about the guy who "went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow: two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow." I knew all the words by the time I got to junior high, and I remember most of them now. The good news is that it's reasonably safe to ride in the state forest again, as long as your horse doesn't spook at dirt bikes. They aren't legal in the state forest, but that sure doesn't mean they're not there. A 12-day open season on dirt bikes might not be a bad idea. Non-lethal weapons, of course. I might start learning to twirl a lariat.
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