| Hunters who use bow-and-arrow
can hunt deer in Kentucky from October until the end of the year. But
for most people, the "real" deer season begins on a Saturday morning in early
November and lasts for a little more than a week. That's when hunters
can use modern rifles to kill deer. Most deer killed by hunters in
Kentucky are shot during that week, and probably the busiest day of the season
is opening day. This picture was shot behind B&N Market, a general store in northeastern Shelby County, at about 11 a.m. on the first day of "gun season" in November 1994. The two men in the photograph were skinning deer, getting them ready to be cut up, packaged and frozen. At the time I took the picture, I counted a total of 19 deer carcasses lying on the ground. One of the men told me that earlier in the day there had been more than 40. Hides from the skinned deer made a pile three feet high on a flatbed trailer behind the men's pickup truck. I assume they planned to sell the hides to a tannery.
From this you can tell we have a lot of deer in our part
of the country--so many, in fact, that most of my neighbors have hit deer
running across the road. A deer ran in front of my wife's car in 1990,
wrecked the car and killed the deer, but my wife and kids were okay. One
night last fall, a big doe jumped in the way of my pickup. That deer,
too, was killed; but oddly, my truck didn't get a scratch, nor did I. -November 1996- |