Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.

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Bill Cochran's Outdoors

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If you live with a deer hunter or have friends and fellow workers who are deer hunters you are likely to be confronted with words like rut, racks, range and records. What do they mean? Here’s a glossary of deer hunting terms to get you through the season:

ANTLERS: The secondary sexual apparatus atop a male deer’s head that causes hunters to roll out of bed at 4:30 a.m. in order to sit in a treestand all day in bitter weather with the idea of removing the antlers from the deer and putting them on a den wall.

If you call an antler a horn, you will be pegged a novice. Antlers are shed annually; horns aren’t. And don’t waste time arguing with a hunter that size isn’t important.

BLAZE ORANGE: A $2.50 blaze orange vest is the best insurance policy that a hunter can buy. It’s also a reminder that a few hunters are too stupid to tell a deer from a hunter.

BONAS TAGS: The antlerless deer limit has been increased from one to three this season. In the past you could kill more than one doe, but you had to pay extra for bonus tags. The new limit is like getting two bonus tags free. Before you get too giddy about the generous limit, remember that the most difficult thing about using the second and third tag is filling the first one.

BUCKS: This is the term commonly used to identify male deer, but it also can describe the $1,532 a hunter will spend for guns, ammo, equipment, licenses, travel, meals and lost work. Don’t forget to include the processing fee for the 40 pounds of venison derived from two weeks of hunting -- that is, if the hunter gets lucky.

CAMP: A tent, cabin or old school bus where male hunters sleep in their underwear, eat onions, use an outside Johnny House, play cards, scratch where it itches and never shave as they teeter between civilization and savagery. Occasionally they will wander off from camp to hunt, and nearly every one will become the Prodigal Son on Thanksgiving Day.

CWD: This is short for Chronic Wasting Disease, a malady that wildlife officials are fearful could get into the deer herd and wipe it out. The past four years, Virginia has tested more than 1,200 deer for CWD and all have been negative. Even so, biologists are asking hunters to be on the lookout for deer that show signs of the disease. These include abnormal behavior, increased salivation, stumbling, poor coordination, excessive thirst, and excessive urination -- the same conditions you will see among your hunting buddies.

FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE: The vehicle of choice for deer hunters, its name derived from the fact that it costs four times more than what is reasonable to pay and it uses four times as much fuel as normal vehicles, which comes to about $10 per mile under current gas prices. Hunters need one on the outside chance that they might have to drive 2 feet off the hard road.

GET-A-BUCK: The universal greeting used to address hunters who haven’t killed a deer. If your hunting season has been unsuccessful, strangers will run you down to chant “Get-A-Buck?” When you do kill a buck, no one will ask, not even if you are wearing its antlers around your neck.

GOT GAME: When you kill a deer, no longer do you have to travel to one of the big game checking stations located in a country store on the opposite side of the county from where you hunt. You can report the kill by telephone, thus bypassing the inconvenience of buying a hotdog and drink, warming your hands, inquiring about hunting success and contributing to the local economy at a traditional country store check station.

Checking a deer by phone is easy, if (1) you can remember the number to call, if (2) there is a cell tower nearby, if (3) you fingers aren’t too cold to punch in all the required data, if (4) there is enough light to read the number of your big game license and if (5) you have a pen to write down your confirmation number. The phone number is 866 GOT GAME. Can you hear me now?

HARVEST: A hunter’s politically correct term for saying that he blew the life out of a deer with a 180-grain bullet from his .30-06. I haven’t used the word harvest in a deer hunting article since that time many years ago a certain managing editor yelled at me, “Cochran, you harvest corn; you kill deer.” He was correct. Kill is what hunters do -- or try to do -- so why be ashamed of it?

HORNING: During the Rut (see below) buck deer like to rip the bark off of saplings with their antlers. The idea is to impress some soft-eyed female. Think of it this way, it is like the kid with the muscle car burning rubber out front of some fast-food joint.

LUNCH: This is the sack of food you bring into the deer woods at daybreak, intended for your noon meal, only it never makes it to noon, or even close. My record for the latest lunch ever eaten on a deer stand is 9:52 a.m.

MAST: A fancy name for acorns that is preferable to “nuts.” Mast is the staff of life for deer, the manna from heaven. Clover is nice, but it is like a salad for deer. Acorns are meat and potatoes.

The well being of deer will rise and fall with the mast crop. An abundant crop will send deer through the winter in good shape, allowing them to grow big antlers and give birth to healthy fawns. Bad mast years do just the opposite.

Mast also will determine the movements of deer. In the western part of the state, this is a fairly good mast year, which means deer will be found in the woods crunching the fruit of oak trees rather than grazing in the fields. That’s bad news for the road hunting scum. In the east, the mast crop isn’t so great, but food patches and agriculture crops have done well, thanks to all the rain.

MUZZLELOADER: This is hardly your great, great grandpa’s gun. Manufacturers have turned these antique rifles into instruments that will shoot as far, flat, hard and accurate as a modern rifle. The only real handicap is that you have to remember to load a cap in order to ignite the powder, or you will get a dull click and a dirty look from a deer. But that’s another, more personal, story. The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries fortunately has leveled the playing field by providing a season just for muzzleloaders prior to the modern firearm’s season, at a time when the weather and rut can be perfect.

NOTCH: Gone from your big game license are the detachable tags that you were instructed, under the threat of imprisonment, to attach to the deer you killed so the tag could be lost when you dragged the animal from the woods. On your new license, the tags have been replaced with notches that you … well, notch when you make a kill. The problem, if you have one of the computer downloaded license from Wal-Mart, it is nearly impossible to make a notch even when you remember to take off your gloves.

RACK: Another term for antlers (see above) and sometimes used to describe the torture device known as a hunting cabin bed.

RECORD: Last year’s deer season resulted in an unexpected record harvest -- make that kill -- of 237,035 deer. I guess you’d think that Matt Knox, the state deer program supervisor, would get a bonus in his paycheck for a record; instead, he got cold stares. The state is supposed to be managing the deer herd to stabilize it, not increase it. High deer kills can mean there are too many deer, and too many deer can lead to destroyed crops and dead deer in the grill of your SUV.

RUT: A three-letter word for sex. Sex is something that causes male deer (bucks) and other mammals to do stupid things that can get them killed. If it were not for the fact that the rutting and hunting seasons occur at the same time, there would be no need for the State Big Game Contest. Hunters simply would never see a trophy buck.

The rut is behind those dead deer you have been seeing recently along highways. The anti-hunters will tell you that the deer get hit by vehicles because they are fleeing hunters. In reality the deer die along the roads as the result of an illness known as love sickness.

SHOTS: You sit in your deer stand on opening day and there are shots everywhere. You figure that you are the only hunter in the world not seeing a deer. There are six shots in rapid succession on a nearby ridge, two shots to your left, a single shot to your right, shots from .243s, 257s, .270s, .30-30s, .300s, .308s, .30-06s. It is one of the great mysteries of deer hunting, because at the end of the day when you walk out of the woods you won’t encounter a single hunter who will say he has fired a shot all day.

TWO HUNDRED: This is an important number for deer hunters, because every deer killed is going to weigh 200 pounds and it is going to be shot at 200 yards. Never mind that the scales say the deer was 75 pounds, obviously they were broken, and never mind the 200 yard shot came in the woods where you only can see 40 yards. Those 200-yard shots, by the way, always are running shots.