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When he was younger, he ignored game and fish laws when necessary, always thinking of it as bending rather than breaking the rules. As did his youthful companions.
“It’s not God’s law we’re breaking – we’re not killing anybody or nothing …”
Nothing big, mind you, just the occasional turkey which offered an easy shot two weeks prior to the legal season. Or a fat springtime rabbit, two months after regular season ended.
And trout; Lord, the trout they all caught.
His grandpa often talked about the old days, when men caught trout 100 at the time, rolled them in salt and packed them on their backs across the Smokies to Knoxville town. Where they brought a penny apiece, the old man said, back when a dollar was good pay for a whole day’s work.
Shiny, flashing little brook trout, “specks,” only trout really native to these ancient mountains. Not much bigger than sardines they ate working in the woods, logger’s lunch, washed down with saltine crackers and sweet black colas.
These days he’s found easier work, and for a lot more pay.
Military behind him, and good reference it was, he got hired as a local town cop. Wore the badge, drove the cars and only rarely had to arrest anybody. And never for poaching.
Sometimes he had to just smile at the memory of the bygone days when his wife would drive him high up into the Great Smoky Mountain Park, where hunting was strictly forbidden by the rangers. Let him and three good dogs out of the car and he would hunt alone in the vast wooded ranges under a full moon.
He’d be at the meeting place at dawn with the dogs, good wife smiling with coffee and a biscuit. If he was lucky, there would be back-straps and hams from a tender young bear in his pack. The rest left to nourish creatures in the woodland that had produced the animal.
Now as a lawman, his best talent proved over the years to be his easy manner with folks. He could naturally talk and joke with the baddest drunk, white or black or Indian, and convince the man to ride peaceably to the county jail, no resistance.
And he got along better with the wild-eyed, drugged-out teens than any of the other officers, kids trusted him.
Even the new Republican sheriff liked him, and though he was a known Democrat, the sheriff made him a deputy. More pay, his very own car, mostly serving papers. Because he knew the county and its people so well.
“Ride down in the lower end of the county tonight,” the sheriff said. “Check on the school houses, getting some vandalism, want ’em to see your car parked in a place or two.”
He nodded, and the sheriff turned back to a conversation with two young game wardens, strangers. Which was normal since town cops, highway patrolmen, game wardens and all were a constant stream through the jail. Where they booked their prisoners, only jail in the whole county.
Somewhere around midnight on a two-lane blacktop in a rural farming area, the headlights of his cruiser swept across a pasture and old instincts took over, those of an alpha meat-eating predator.
He stopped, slowly backed up about two car-lengths and quietly rolled down the driver-side window. He had never cared for the new plastic pistols most of the younger deputies carried.
As he drew the heavy Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and steadied it on the window frame, he was grateful for the weight of the gun and the rock-steady sight picture.
His finger tightened on the trigger, the gun roared and bucked … and all hell broke loose.
Three days later, the weekly paper – “Only Newspaper in the World that Gives a Darn for Vance County” – ran his mug-shot photo on the front page under a hateful headline reading: “Deputy Sheriff Arrested For Shooting Game Department’s Decoy Deer.”
The story detailed how a veteran employee of the sheriff’s department, in his official car and uniform, had fired his service pistol at a dummy deer. The fake doe was placed by game wardens who arrested anyone shooting at it for illegal night hunting, hunting out of season, shooting a female deer, shooting from a public roadway and reckless discharge of a firearm.
“Godamighty,” the sheriff moaned. “Didn’t you see me talking to them two fellers … didn’t you even know what they’re doing?”
When he calmed down, it got worse.
“I got to let you go. No question about it. Shooting a doe deer don’t mean a thing to me, one way or another. But it’s in the paper and next year is election time.
“Yore buddies in the Democrat Party will hang this around my neck if you’re still on the payroll. You’re a good man but I just cain’t afford to keep you. You done it to yourself.”
He moved into town then and, with the help of a wife’s relative, got a good job in a local manufacturing plant. Daytime work, good pay.
Of course, his fellow rednecks at the factory kidded him about his circumstances. And his laid-back personality let him endure their taunts, smiling all the time, and sometimes giving it right back to them.
“How do you cook one o’ them plastic-foam deers?” they hooted. “What do they taste like?”
Sorta like a river otter, he said with a mock solemn tone. And they howled at the inside joke.
The government had stocked otters, long disappeared from local rivers, and fishermen complained the damn otters were eating all their fish. It was illegal to shoot an otter, much less eat one, but the factory workers figured the ex-deputy might have done it.
They didn’t know he’d found a new game, and it gave him fresh wild meat and some of the poaching thrill.
Like most other small urban areas, the town had a good population of pigeons. They flew everywhere and could not be shot legally. But their presence tempted him. and a mail-order pigeon trap proved very effective.
Life turned out to be good, very good.
This is fiction, as Wally Avett of Martins Creek usually writes it, although inspired by true events. Names deleted for a smoother read. Wally’s four novels and Real Mountain Tales series, composed from 10 years as the Cherokee Scout’s “Hillbilly Ranger” columnist, are on sale at the Murphy Art Center on the square downtown.