The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

Since I came out in a column a few weeks ago about my indifferent–yes, even blase’– approach to deer hunting, and the fear that I’ll be kicked out of The Guy’s Club because of it, I’ve been getting support from Other Guys. (Okay. One Other Guy.) So I guess I have to write a column about deer hunting. Here it is. (Kind of.)

I’ve also gotten lots of disbelief about stuff I’ve written. Remember? I came out about taking weak decaff coffee out to the stand. I once confessed to the neighbor lady that I cannot drink coffee; that I like my coffee to be “pretend” coffee. She’s of Finnish descent. I could see her thinking: “Pretend coffee?” My admission about coffee brought forth from her a reaction much the same as if I had told her I wasn’t wearing any underwear. 

“Look,” I told her, “I’ll drink real coffee, but I have to have it like this.” I then went on to describe how I needed one part coffee to one part milk or cream, with two teaspoons of sugar and ten parts of hot water. My mouth waters just thinking about how scrumptious that tastes.

Her eyes watered in sad disbelief. Black. That’s how you drink your pot of coffee in the morning. A pot of coffee? You’d have to peel me off the ceiling. And Lord, should I drink a pot of coffee? I’d need more underwear.

Then she changed the topic to deer hunting, and she told me about some person who wanted to know if he could plant some deer plots on her land to attract deer, come hunting time. Uh huh. I might not know much about what deer want, but I know a little. (That’s because I’ve got mineral blocks and salt caches strung around this farm beyond count. During the rut, I have yet to see a deer at any of them.)

It was explained to me that, at this time of year when deer hunting comes, boy deer and girl deer have only one thing on their mind, and it isn’t food. Or salt. Or deer plots. Boy deer have girl deer on their minds. Smaller boy deer have keeping away from larger boy deer on their minds. It’s quite possible that girl deer have had enough attention from larger boy deer that at this time of year, they just want to hide in the woods and be left alone. That Finnish neighbor lady and I are not close enough for me to tell her that.

Eventually, I’m out there sitting at the edge of a cornfield that looks like it’s been trampled by elephants fleeing a jungle fire, so many deer have been feeding there. Until all this was explained to me, sitting there in my stand looked like a good bet. Which explains why I don’t have any deer hanging in my yard.

It must take a lot of energy to be a deer this time of the year, being as they’re too busy to eat.

My cousin, two of his sons, and two of his son’s sons were up hunting this fall. In the process of them taking all my money at nickel-dime poker, it came out that the 14-year-old had sent 5,000 text messages last month.

Good Lord! I did the math in my head. “That’s 166.67 texts a day!” The teenager just smiled, didn’t look up. He was focused on something in his lap under the table. It was nighttime, and he maybe still had twenty or thirty texts yet to send. I wondered if he had blisters on his texting fingers.

Then I realized what was going on. Why he was so thin. He was too busy to eat. I’m guessing most of these texts involve girls. I’m also guessing that this month his text plan has been severely reduced. But you know what?

At least the deer only have to go through all this boy-girl stuff once a year. Think about these poor teenagers. They have to go through it all year long, for years and years.

You heard it here. The text rut.