Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 16, 1993 TAG: 9311160073
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Gene Smith was beginning to wonder if he was the only hunter in Bedford County - and maybe beyond - who wasn't getting a shot at a buck when the deer season opened Monday.
Just as dawn gave shape to the woodlands, shots began to sound, on Onion Mountain, on Headforemost Mountain, around the edges of Flat Top Mountain, and down in the low lands where orchards climb from the floor of the valley to finger into the tall timber.
Smith, who lives in Bedford, started counting the shots from his tree stand well up the side of rugged Headforemost Mountain. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Shotguns, .243s, .270s, .300s, .30-06s. Within an hour his tally had reached 42.
Then the wind got up, a warm, summer-type wind, not the kind you expect, or want, on opening day. It blew fitfully across the mountain, gathering up dry leaves and rattling them against the naked branches of trees before crashing them to the dry duff.
"I said, `Well, I'd better start paying close attention,' " said Smith, who knew the wind had robbed him of any opportunity to hear a deer's approach. He had put too much effort into the hunt to let a deer slip by undetected.
Smith had worked the night shift at USAir, leaving at 5 a.m. and driving through the dark Bedford County landscape, where soft, butter-yellow lights were shining out the kitchen windows of frame farm houses. He turned up the mountain by Vernie Kennedy's place and climbed into his tree stand after dousing the ground with Tink's Doe-In-Heat lure. It was 6:14.
At 7:14 he looked through the wind-tossed woods, the same place he'd looked moments before, but this time there was a buck.
"He was browsing through. He stopped and was scraping a tree. At that point, he was only 15 yards."
It was a dandy buck, with eight points and a 17-inch spread. Its body was fat and compact, and its hooves were large, as if the deer were wearing shoes a couple of sizes too big.
Later in the morning, Smith was checking his buck at North Side Supply, along Virginia 43, where knots of hunters, in short sleeves and blaze orange hats, gathered to watch what was being drawn out of the back of pickups and four-wheel drives.
Just before Smith arrived, John Merritt of Bedford had checked a 10-pointer, with an inch bigger spread. He had spotted it in a pine thicket where last week he'd discovered a set of big tracks and some rubs.
"It came out right at light," said Merritt, who didn't hang around too long in the bright sun before trucking his buck to the apple cooler at Arrington's Orchard.
"If they don't hang them up today, they will be spoiled tonight," said Barry Arrington, who only could remember maybe one other time when opening day had been so balmy.
A couple of hours after Smith scored, David Boush of Roanoke watched an eight-point buck stride his way the next mountain over.
"You could tell he had a destination," Boush said. "He was going straight for it."
Boush wasn't certain what the buck had on its mind, but he figured it was a doe.
An hour before Boush dropped his eight-pointer, his buddy, Ferrell Neice of Hardy, killed a four-pointer about 500 yards away.
At the North Side Supply check station, Jay Jeffreys, a wildlife biologist supervisor for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, was expressing satisfaction over the quality of the deer hunters were toting in.
"It appears that the average weight of the yearling buck is in excess of 100 pounds," he said. A couple of the yearlings carried eight-points, and others were five-to six-pointers.
This is the third season Bedford has had either-sex hunting every day of the two-week season, a regulation that Jeffreys believes has resulted in a healthier deer herd.
Botetourt County went to a full either-sex season for the first time Monday. About half the deer being checked at the Old Mill Grocery in Fincastle were does, said David Steffen, a research biologist supervisor for the game department. Steffen hopes the more liberal regulation will bring the deer herd into better balance with its food supply.
"Really, antler development isn't good and body development isn't good," he said of the deer he checked. "They are coming off a bad mast crop last year and a drought this year."
Hunting pressure was low in several areas. A state game warden working Giles County said it was the slowest day he'd seen in years.
Jeffreys believes opening day may not be as big as it once was because hunters now have the option of using black-powder guns two weeks prior to the firearm's season.
"We no longer have a two-week season for deer. We have a four-week season," he said.
by CNB