One Heck Of A Ride

34 government imposes huge fines and long jail sentences on hunters who travel across state lines and violate a game law. That evening over dinner the rancher announced that hunters on his place could shoot as many javelinas as they wanted. However, they had to gut and clean each animal and deliver it to the ranch’s skinning shed. The next morning, he accompanied me and a hunter from Wisconsin who wanted a javelina when we drove to where I’d shot mine. When the rancher reminded him he was expected to gut and skin every javelina he killed, the guy from Wisconsin changed his mind about hunting them. Javelinas have beautiful white meat with a distinctive taste, but field dressing them is more than some people can take because the musk gland on their backs can make handling them downright odoriferous. Some say they smell so bad they make the guys who mop tar on roofs in the summer smell like lilacs. I was the only hunter on that ranch to take javelinas that week. That evening,Wally and I drove to SanAntonio for dinner at the restaurant he owned there. The food was great, but it was a young woman dressed in a short 1890s costume swinging back and forth over a huge bar who contributed to the ambiance of his place. Some of his patrons had trouble taking their eyes off the lady. The next morning, Wally and I drove to his ranch in Kendall County where I shot a beautiful Corsican sheep. You can read more about this hunt in another chapter. I’d had a great introduction to Texas-style hunting. On the trip home I decided if I had to leave central California, I could do no better than to move to San Antonio, Austin or anywhere else in the Hill Country. Don’t Tell The Waitress, But... Bud Dyer was high bidder when John Kohl, a car dealer in Nebraska donated a hunt in his state for what now are called “midwestern white- tailed deer” to one of the SCI Central California Coast Chapter’s fund-raising auctions. I’d always wanted to hunt one of the big whitetails the Midwest produces, so I asked John if I could hunt with Bud. After a deal was struck, Bud and I booked our flights and arranged to hook up with John the day before the 1984 season opened. John said he had been watching a good buck and had been flying his plane over the area every week to keep track of it. The buck had a tall and wide, but thin, rack with three long tines and an eyeguard per side, he said. An hour before first light, John left us at a fence row where he had been seeing that buck cross nearly every morning at sunrise. Sure enough, there was only a hint of the sun rising on the horizon to the east when I spotted the buck trotting straight for me. I was ready when he jumped the fence and when I shot he ran only about twenty yards before he wobbled and went down. It was the only shootable buck we saw that morning. I gutted him and John and Bud and his guide helped me load him in John’s Suburban, and we drove a short distance down the road to a cafe for breakfast. “Looks like you guys have been hunting. How’d you do?” the waitress asked when she greeted us. “I got one,” I said. In 1984, deer season still was a big event in small-town America. Unlike many people in urban areas today, most rural Nebraskans did not view hunters as pariahs. “Good for you,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of a big buck for the last three years. He’s an eight-pointer and real wide. He lets me feed him when he comes around.” Someone, I think it was John, changed the subject and we ate our breakfasts and left without letting her know that her buck was in the back of Everyone’s Deer