"Antlers in All of My Decorating..."

On the one hand, I know a lot of really great guys who are hunters. Many of those guys show up on my door and offer my wife and me choicest cuts of their forest kills, and we gratefully accept. (I think they secretly pity my wife for having a husband who doesn't bring her dead animals.) I don't begrudge them the sense of manly accomplishment that must come with providing meat and proving their status at the top of the foodchain. There's surely something satisfying and primal about stalking, killing, and eating a wild beast without any help from anyone but the good folks at Winchester. I get that. Too many people are too far removed from the earth. They're completely out of touch with their own food sources, and they'd be lost without the industrial food business. (That rant belongs to a different blog, but you gotta read The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.)

On the other hand, why is it that so many guys believe that they aren't allowed to go into the woods unless they're armed with deadly weapons? And whenever you ask a guy 'why' he hunts, most of them will tell you, "I just love being out there in the woods."

Anyhow, I came across this really cool hamlet of hunting camps on a little patch of private land surrounded by the national forest. Just four simple cottages that sit there all year and wait for the hunters to come back in the late fall. This cabin was called "The No Tell Motel." (What are those hunters doing out there that they can't tell their wives?) I don't know what the name implies, but this place clearly hasn't seen a woman's touch in a few years. The racks above the door made me think of Gaston, the hunter in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast." There's a scene where Gaston is singing a tribute to his own superior manhood, and he sings, "I've got antlers in all of my decorating."

Ah, hunters. They make us flee the woods every fall, for fear of their stray bullets, and they're trying to take Sundays away from us, too. But I gotta say, most of them are nice enough guys.