The joy of the hunt is to be shared

I am looking forward to the upcoming deer season — and next spring’s turkey season — much more than I have in the past couple of years.

The reason? My long-time hunting buddy is back in business.

For years, I documented some of our more interesting outings in camo and blaze orange in a newspaper column, masking his identity by using nicknames. I had to do that because the first time I used his real name, somebody wrote him a nasty letter and said he deserved to have a deer carcass dumped on his driveway.

Anyway, some business and personal issues have kept him out of town and out of the woods the past two deer and turkey seasons. I told him the other day that I held him personally responsible for my failure to tag a turkey the past two seasons after a run of better than a dozen years in a row filling tags. Obviously, I said, his absence put a big jinx on me.

He moved back to town a few days ago, and we started making plans. I told him about the 150-class buck I saw last year on our hunting land and how many gobblers I left in the woods in May. Cementing our little deal again with his landowner buddy was his first assignment.

Deer hunting and — to a certain extent — turkey hunting are sort of solitary sports. You can walk behind a brace of good bird dogs with someone, sit around a dove field with friends or crouch in a duck blind with buddies. Deer and turkey hunting are different, yet it’s the fellowship before and after the hunt that I value as much as anything.

My buddy taught me to turkey hunt over a period of six or seven years, right after our daughters were born in 1990. In fact, we were supposed to go the morning my wife went into labor; he went by himself and killed a longbeard. At the end of every morning hunt, we’d meet back at the truck, and I’d admire his gobbler while trying to figure out what went wrong on my end. We put thousands of miles on his truck going to deer hunt my family farm in Georgia over the past 15 years, and every trip was entertaining — and not just because the hunting was so good, but because at the end of the day, I was among family and hunting buddies, some of my best friends.

I’m actually not sure my heart was really in it the past two deer seasons because he wasn’t along for the ride. The past two turkey seasons, I missed being able to ride home discussing my failures and get his opinion on how to deal with an old bird that turned me inside out several times — or turn the bird over to him and get it killed.

This fall will be different. He has a new job that may not allow him to hunt quite as much, but there probably won’t be many opportunities we miss — because I’ve missed too many the past two years.