ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, November 18, 1996 TAG: 9611190002
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: OUTDOORS
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
We spent most of a cold, but sunny, afternoon building a new tree stand for deer hunting this past week.
The spot we selected was where the hardwoods march sharply up a hillside, then dip over a skull-shaped knoll into a thicket of pines, wild grapevines and brush.
We had seen plenty of deer on the knoll, mostly does whose sharp hooves had bared the black soil with a network of trails. Any buck, we figured, would be showing an interest in the does, but he would be smart enough to stick to the thicket while doing it.
We discovered a sizable tree that a buck had horned, a tree so big it took two hands to wrap around it. The shredding of the bark hadn't been done by a spike; we knew that.
A least one-quarter of our time was spent sizing up the terrain and looking for just the right tree to erect our stand. We wanted to be able to watch the knoll, and also peer down into the thick stuff.
We narrowed our choice to four trees, then selected one with three forks where we could build a triangle-shaped platform.
It took two hard trips up the knoll to carry the building materials, tools and aluminum ladder to do the job.
The measuring, sawing and hammering was accomplished with the smug feeling that our labor would lead to a moment when we would spot the outline of a buck in the thicket and be able to make out the bone-color of its antlers in the eerie glow of dawn or the fading rays of the afternoon sun.
Hunting is filled with more moments of preparation, scheming and dreaming than it is killing. Killing lasts only a few seconds, if it occurs at all. Hunting is more a matter of feeding the spirit than the stomach.
I was proud of our accomplishment when we completed the stand, but when my companion climbed into it, I could sense he felt something wasn't right.
``I don't know if I like this thing or not,'' he said.
``You mean you can't see down into the thicket good enough''? I asked.
``It's not that'' he said. ``If you were to make one little slip up here, you'd be hurt.''
He was preaching the gospel. Nearly every deer season, hunters are leaving the woods on stretchers, often never to walk again, the victims of plunges from high places. Some seasons, there are more people hurt from tree-stand falls than from firearms accidents.
The victims are neither naive nor numb-brained. Many are woods-wise and well-educated. In a split second, they can be transformed from an outdoorsman agile enough to climb a tree in pre-dawn darkness to a wheelchair-bound paraplegic.
For Barry Arrington, a Bedford County orchardist, it happened two seasons ago when he unhooked his safety strap to cut some shooting lanes. For Dr. Bob Martin, of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, it happened last week when he reached to retrieve his coat.
``It was not like I was out there for the first time doing something that I didn't know what I was doing,'' said Arrington. ``I had hunted for 20 years. It can just happen to anybody, any time. Just a couple of seconds of carelessness or nonthinking.''
A survey of nearly 2,500 hunters by Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine revealed one in three users said they had fallen from a tree stand. It is fortunate some were protected by safety belts and the injuries of others weren't the vertebrae-snapping kind.
Arrington has battled back and is in the deer woods again, becoming one of the first crossbow hunters in Virginia this season. He exhibits a profound appreciation for the simple things in life, such as watching for a buck, but he can't change the fact that someone has to take him to his stand and cock his weapon. Those of us who know Arrington seldom climb into a tree stand without thinking about him.
I am happy my hunting companion didn't conceal his uneasiness over our new stand. He could have forced pleasure, because we'd spent a good bit of time working on it. The most important first step in tree-stand safety is the realization that accidents can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime and under any circumstances.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB