RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ALL THE BEST HUNTING STORIES HAVE BEEN TOLD

Here are a couple of tales to fill up one of those rare silences that occur when men group together into deer-hunting parties and go forth in search of meat for the dinner table.

Hunters hereabouts know full well that deer season is here. For a veteran deer hunter, the rest of the world comes to a stop. Deer season is when you get to match wits with the nimblest ruminant of all. Man and his rifle against a fleet animal with big, brown eyes. To a deer hunter, the lap of luxury is spending several hours without moving or making a sound while sitting on a flimsy wooden platform perilously perched high enough on a tree to command a view of the woods and to cause a fairly serious injury if a fall should occur -- all this after having had several cups of strong, black coffee in that magic hour before the sun comes up.

OK. That's the version you hear from deer hunters. In reality, of course, deer season is mostly an excuse to take off from work, get with the guys at some hovel in the deep woods so forlorn it can't even be called rustic, play poker all night, stumble among the trees at dawn pretending to look for quarry and wondering what you would do if you actually shot a deer and had to field dress it and lug the carcass back to civilization.

Oh, sure, there are some straightforward hunters who load a gun, go into the woods, find a deer, shoot it, get it to a butcher shop somewhere and fill the deepfreeze with venison steaks. There are enough of them, in fact, that they manage to keep the deer population under control for the most part. But there are lots and lots of hunters who view deer season as an excuse to do man things with other men with no intention of shooting anything except maybe a few soup cans or beer bottles to justify cleaning the rifle once the season is over.

When you were growing up in the Ozarks, deer season was a sacred time. For one thing, the one-room country school dismissed classes during the season, mainly because most of the students big enough to carry a rifle would be hunting anyway, and also because walking to and from school was too dangerous during deer season.

Every student at Shady Nook School on Greenwood Valley knew the story of the quarter-size hole in the side wall of the white frame schoolhouse. That was where a hunter, one of the Mann boys perhaps, had shot at a deer while on the opposite side of the valley. The bullet, so the story went, went through the neck of a good-sized buck and continued whizzing across the fields, over the creek and through the wall of the schoolhouse. That's why, everyone understood, you had to close school during deer season. For some reason the hole was never patched but remained as a memorial to student deer hunters everywhere. Sometimes the youngest students would hear the story for the first time and listen as their mouths fell open and their eyes became as wide as the hole in the wall, which very likely was a knothole. The deer-hunting story was much preferred.

Deer hunters in those days often relied -- in violation of the strictest interpretation of the law -- on dogs to track and chase deer into the clear-shot fields of the valleys. These were massive hound dogs that generally resided in small, earth-bare pens for about 360 days of the year. So when they were set loose on the scent of a deer, they could run and yawp (don't you just love that word?) for hours on end until the targeted deer would stumble into a mown hayfield, staggering from fatigue and fright, only to be confronted by a regiment of armed riflemen all aiming their weapons in the direction indicated by the wailing dogs.

The best story about eating venison happened two or three years ago when the newspaper in Topeka, the capital of the Sunflower State, held its annual wild-game dinner the week before Christmas. The chef of a nearby hotel had been turning deer, pheasant, quail, wild turkey, rabbit, elk, prairie chickens, trout, salmon and crappie into succulent delights for more than 30 years for this get-together. You sat at the same table with the newspaper's advertising director and started eating.

"How do you like that?" he asked, pointing to a portion of meat on your plate.

"It's really good," you said. "I'm not sure what it is."

A sly grin curled the corners of the ad man's mouth. "It's road kill." he said.

Then he explained how he and some friends were headed for pheasant hunting in north-central Kansas in the wee hours of the morning when his four-wheel-drive truck smashed into a deer crossing the highway. After contacting the sheriff's department, a nearby farmer agreed to take the dead deer to a butcher while the pheasant-hunting party kept its date with the ringnecks.

Everyone at the table stopped eating for a moment, contemplating the idea of taking so much enjoyment from -- well, he was right. It was road kill.

After just a few seconds, everyone started eating again without saying a word. Finally, someone remarked how good the salmon was this year.

"Yeah," another diner said. "And it never tried to cross a highway."

Hunters love to tell tales. The problem is getting them to stop.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.