Bill Cochran

Recent columns

• Laurel Bed Lake being drained; no money to repair dam
• Kerr is king of Virginia's crappie fishing -- but it's no pushover
• More feathers fly at National Wild Turkey Federation
• Bill Cochran reflects on 39 years of Optimist Club fishing tournaments

• Column archive
• Bill's Mailbag
• Bill's Field Reports
• Trout stocking schedule

On Saturday, I drove across a big chunk of Virginia, from table-flat Eastern Shore to the blue-hued mountains of the Southwest. It was opening day of the deer hunting season, yet unless you were a hunter you probably wouldn’t notice. You had to look closely for evidence.

I spotted three pickups bearing dog boxes in the edge of a field in the Piedmont. Occasionally I would see a guy wearing a blaze orange cap going into a convenience store. On the highway were a few ATVs jammed into pickup beds.

Most startling was what I didn’t see. Not a single dead deer in the bed of a pickup or strapped to a vehicle, soft fur to hard metal. Nor would there be a story and pictures of first-day results in the Sunday Roanoke Times.

My, how opening day has changed.

I am certain there were pockets of intense activities, say in Southampton County where deer clubs were turning their hounds loose, or on private farms tucked into the fringes of the Blue Ridge in Bedford County, or on national forest property in Bath, Highland, Craig and Botetourt. But you’d have to look far and hard to find anything like the concentrations of deer hunters that once were common.

I recall 35 years ago you’d see a steady string of red taillights as a convoy of deer hunters headed north on U.S. 220 in the predawn darkness. They would late in the day, a 55 mph conveyor belt of deer in every grotesque shape of death you could imagine. A big buck on a Bonneville; a couple of spikes bouncing in a homemade trailer; deer lashed to hoods, to fenders to rooftops, eyes glazed, stomachs slit, tongues frozen in last-gasp positions, legs broken, blood for all to see, even those who didn’t want to see it.

What you couldn’t see in the dark interior of the vehicles was the joy of hunters who had gotten the job done quickly and were headed for home or the butcher shop or maybe a drive through town to show off their buck in a celebration that was as much life as death.

I remember one morning in Bedford County counting more than 100 shots fired the first hour of daylight. In the national forest, places like Patterson Creek, Tub Run and the narrow, gravel roads that traverse Potts Mountain, the big task could be finding a place to park.

Opening day was on a Monday, and deer season lasted a scant week or two. Schools were closed and workers either took vacation or became skillful at calling in sick. You’d better hope you didn’t need a plumber or mechanic or even a lawyer.

Wood smoke drifted from the chimneys of backcountry cabins, and campgrounds were filled with tents and trailers that had rusted wheel wells.

I once stopped at Blowing Springs Campground in Bath County and talked to a man who said he knew every one of the more than 200 people in the site. They had traveled from the coalfields of far Southwest Virginia, where deer were a rarity. They had brought their wives and kids and grandma and coon hounds, and the weather had turned hot and you could smell the stench of ripe deer hanging in the trees of the campground.

That’s how it once was. It is no longer like that, not because of a decline in deer hunters as much as the fact that deer hunting has been expanded across the state and across the calendar.

No longer do you have to drive from the coalfields to Bath County, because the coalfields have big bucks of their own. No longer do you have to crowd into national forest areas, because you are more likely to see a good buck flash around a barn in Roanoke, Botetourt or Franklin county than you are to see one in the wilderness. No longer is being out on opening day a must, because by using a variety of tools and seasons you can hunt deer from the first Saturday in October into January. That explains why I was driving, not hunting, opening day.

Deer hunting has become more methodical, more businesslike, with hunters spending an hour or two in a treestand before heading to work, or leaving the office a couple hours early. If they go to camp, some take a gun case in one hand and a laptop in the others. Many of the old cabins that housed deer clubs and harbored the aroma of smoke and greasy food have crumbled. Hunters nowadays are more likely to eat dinner at home, sleep in their own bed and shower regularly, rather than spend a week tethering between civilization and wilderness.

Gone are the red-clad crowds at country store check stations. A cell phone or computer is all you need to register a deer nowadays. Bites on a country store hotdog have given way to megabytes, and the store proprietor longs for your business.

Deer hunting isn’t the high testosterone, harsh language, hard drinks, men-only affair it once was. Chances are that the hunter on the next stand over from you is a lady.

And that’s pretty neat.