The pickup trucks rattle into the parking lots of lighted country stores long before dawn and rattle away with steaming cups of coffee and foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches. These are the day hunters, guys with no time or money to own a camp and spend weekends there. You see them several hours later, dressed in camouflage, leaning on the edges of a truck bed as if to keep it from floating away, and swapping stories. If somebody’s been lucky, a brown head with antlers will be lolling casually, but conspicuously, on the tailgate.

Other hunters disappear for days, some even for weeks. In my contracting days, I learned never to agree to a hurry-up-has-to-be-finished-by-Thanksgining job. Without warning (on the assumption that I should have known), a plumber, electrician, mason, painter, carpenter – or all of them at once – would disappear as if into thin air, reappearing some time later, without apology, and simply pick up where he’d left off. The most avid of them hunted in several states, following the archery, muzzleloader, and rifle seasons from Maine to New York. I used to go myself, paying everybody who showed up on Friday morning and then jumping into my truck for an intense weekend in the Adirondacks. But I was always haunted by thoughts of Monday morning, and almost invariably started home after breakfast on Sunday morning.

In dairying country, farmers who hunt hang their duds in the barn, on the theory that their human smell is thus masked when they put them on to sally forth. In technically advanced camps, ultraviolet lamps betray clothing that’s been washed in phosphorus-bearing detergent, which supposedly make them glow brightly to a deer. There are scents, both artificial and natural; calls that imitate a doe bleating or a buck challenging; and magazine articles by the hundreds full of advice how to find a trophy buck.

In the days when I brought home about $50 a week and generously gave Mother $8 for groceries, venison hanging frozen in the woodshed was a godsend. At the saloon up the street, the annual buck pool collected a dollar from each of us, which was displayed with several hundred others in an old pickled egg jar on the bar. The biggest buck of the year collected half of the pool. The year that I won the pool, I marched home triumphant with $165 and about 200 pounds of meat. We ate venison all winter in dozens of different disguises, and were pretty sick of it by spring. But it beat by a long shot the alternative of scrimping and starving.

Hunting as a way of life has fallen upon hard times recently. License fees, which fund many of the important functions of fish and game departments, are down significantly. Fewer parents take their kids hunting, and the sport often dies in that generation. More and more land is posted every year by owners, often from away, for whom hunting is a disagreeable practice at best. Newspapers with depressing frequency report grisly accidents in which one hunter mistook another for his prey. I often wonder, as I look at my own togs, whether anyone could think he saw a legal buck wearing an orange fleece jacket, a bright red tuque, and a red fanny pack. But I know it happens. There are too many armed men in the woods who need, for some reason or another, to come home with a trophy, and they often see what they want to see.

Because some hosts have been found liable for their guests’ subsequent accidents, cocktail parties, too, are vanishing. So we aesthetically inclined hunters have fewer of those delightful debates with folks who find our sport barbaric. A rustic friend of mine who worked for IBM had an opposite, averse, reaction to the arguments – he hated them – and had a T-shirt printed to shut everybody up. It was bright orange, with words on the chest in large black letters: Happiness Is a Warm Pile of Guts!” It stifled debate, all right; he didn’t get asked to any more parties.

There are other factors, too, which contribute to the difficulty of maintaining the tradition. I personally feel that the National Rifle Association, with its intransigent knee-jerk reaction to any mention of the regulation of firearms, even those designed primarily to kill human beings, paints all gun owners with the same black brush. Slob hunters, who leave cattle gates open, ride ATVs aggressively across private land, and scatter bottles, cans, and cigarette butts, are doing their utmost to ensure that more hunting territory is posted every year.

But I reserve my keenest contempt for men who need so badly to kill something that they consider caged or baited animals to be game. The October 28 Sunday Times Argus/Herald carried an article about a bear-hunting guide in Minnesota who mixes up gobs of sweets and fats for bait, which he places at each of the tree stands he supplies to his clients. He even bangs his bait bucket against a tree after he empties it, shouting, “Dinner bell!” I don’t know what you’d call that, but it isn’t hunting – any more than is the proposal by an elk farmer in northern Vermont to permit people to shoot, for a hefty fee, the elk that roam his large pens. Those are far cries from the country father who got his son up and finished chores early on opening day; then took him out, showed him how it was done, and taught him why it was done – just that way.