November days evoke memories of deer seasons past

By MIKE LEGGETT

Special to the Star-Telegram

Two things always converged for me in the falls of my childhood: football season and deer season.

At the time, I didn’t really understand that deer season would always be there after football was gone and that football would be a passing thing, shorter than a cheerleader’s skirt.

I started every football season with high hopes and pretty much ended each season early, either in the hospital or rehab.

There was the broken neck in the seventh grade. It was a broken arm in the eighth grade. In the 10th grade, it was a broken collarbone, and in the 11th grade, it was stomped-hand stitches and fingers that wouldn’t move. Truth be told, I can’t remember ninth grade, but it had to have been something.

Deer season lasted only two weeks back then, Nov. 15 to the end of the month, and we went no matter what. No matter whether we killed a deer. No matter whether we had to skip a class or two, or claim that we’d contracted camo flu. No matter if we had to leave a hospital bed in a cast and rest our shotgun on a forked stick and hope we didn’t have to shoot so that it wouldn’t break the bones again.

You could miss a football game, but you didn’t miss deer season.

The year I used the forked stick for a gun rest, I had the broken collarbone and was going to try shooting left-handed. I was sitting against a tree in the Allison bottom, down a little logging lane that ran north off a cleared area. Somebody jumped a deer, and I could hear hoofbeats pounding through the leaves as it headed directly for me.

Unfortunately, the deer was to my left and I couldn’t begin to swing around that far with the broken bone. Heck, I couldn’t even get out of bed without my dad’s help. I could only watch as the little buck carried off a Faulknerian leap across the road not 20 yards from where I sat, one that seemed to carry him 10 feet high and 30 feet far.

That image, that jumping deer, which I still see in slow motion, remains a part of my hunting legend, though I never fired a shot.

The only year of junior high and high school that I didn’t end football season, and start deer season, on injured reserve was my senior year. That was the year I killed my first deer. It wasn’t the lack of a football injury that made it possible, though. It was the lack of basketball shoes. At least, that’s what I was told.

Our basketball coach, Bill Tatum — behind his back, everybody called him "Goose" after Reece "Goose" Tatum, the Harlem Globetrotters star — came down through the locker room after football season looking for a few hackers to fill out his basketball team. We were turning in football equipment ,and he was asking the shoe sizes of everybody who wanted to play.

Tatum was writing everything down, making sure those trendy Converse All Stars would arrive in time for everybody to move over to basketball practice. Anybody who went to high school in the 1960s remembers the satisfying squeak a pair of All Stars made on a newly varnished gym floor, especially on those Sunday afternoons when we could manage to get into the gym for some surreptitious freestyle cage time.

If we were in the gym, it meant somebody had swiped a key or stuffed a sock in the doors just as the gym was closing the night before.

Tatum works his way around the room, finally coming to me and my best friend. Mickey LaGrone and I raised our hands simultaneously, expecting to return to the team as we had the previous year.

But Tatum stopped, kind of pointed his pen at us and said: "I don’t have shoes that will fit you two." Then he moved on. It was his way of saying "Beat it, kid, you bother me." We would have to look for another way to spend our time, and that way would be deer hunting.

It was just a couple of weeks after that scene in the locker room that I killed my first buck. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, while the basketball guys were practicing. And it was way better than any lay up I ever made or any bounce pass I got to one of the big guys who did all the scoring anyway.

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