re: Went on my first deer dog hunt this afternoon....

Sounds exactly like every time I went with my dad and one of his co-workers in the 70's. Just driving around, talking on CB's about where to go. My dad's buddy was chain smoking in the truck. I was 10 or 11, needing to pee and hurting, while I waited for the next time we stopped.

Craziest thing I experienced was while we were parked on the side of a road in a creek bottom, listening to the dogs. A guy that looked just like Richard Nixon pulled a rifle out of the back of a station wagon and shot a doe at the top of a hill probably a quarter mile away. She fell, we all jumped in our cars and drove up to it. He had clipped her spine, and she was flopping around screaming. It sounded just like a woman. The guy that shot her was just standing there not knowing what to do. Some guy came up, said aren't ya'll going to kill her, and cut her throat with a knife. The guys we were hunting with didn't know who the guy that shot the deer was. It felt like the Wild West, just a free for all.

When "The Silence of the Lambs" came out, and Clarice talked about them killing the sheep, it reminded me of that deer screaming.

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Back in the day my old man was in a group of folks, mostly farmers and farm hands and they all hunted with dogs and hunted each others land or land they farmed, etc. Also had a few fairly large clubs around, we were members of one, that ran dogs, too. All that land and the clubs are chopped up with different landowners, lessee's etc. now. Times they do change.

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Exactly. My dad worked for IP when they owned huge tracts of land all over Louisiana, and Mississippi, when we live there. All you had to do was get a permit from them to hunt their land. If they caught you hunting it without a permit, they didn't do anything except tell you how to get one. My dad said they didn't want someone getting mad, and burning down their timber. It was really rare to see posted land in the 70's. Not a whole lot of fences in the woods either.