hunting

I've been thinking about hunting all week. Thanksgiving morning we woke up to shooting on two sides. For a half-hour or so it sounded like a Baghdad fire fight. Upstream, to our west, ducks and geese were probably falling in a series of shotgun volleys, and to the east, downstream, somebody else had mounted a tree stand to shoot a few holiday rounds at some of South Carolina's estimated 800,000 deer in the dawn's early light.

I've been thinking about hunting all week. Thanksgiving morning we woke up to shooting on two sides. For a half-hour or so it sounded like a Baghdad fire fight. Upstream, to our west, ducks and geese were probably falling in a series of shotgun volleys, and to the east, downstream, somebody else had mounted their tree stand to shoot a few holiday rounds at some of South Carolina's estimated 800,000 deer in the dawn's early light.

Last week Richard Rankin visited our Rural South class at Wofford. Richard's a headmaster of a private school up in Gastonia, but much of his passion and pleasure is found in the subject of hunting in the South. He's got a PhD from the University of North Carolina in history, has edited an anthology of North Carolina nature writers, and compiled a history of a vast hunt club on Hilton Head Island that survived until vacation development became the chief industry of the island and sport hunting was pushed elsewhere. He's probably thought longer and deeper about hunting than anyone I know.