Killing Season

Bright & early on Thanksgiving morn, as usual, the poor man's hunting season got its start in North Carolina. Short-legged, flop-eared beagles sniffed into brush-piles and thickets, set up a howl when they flushed a rabbit, worked it back before the hunters' guns. Some wistful old rabbit hunters were willing to settle just for the music of the hounds' high-pitched cry; others set their mouths for rabbit stew. The guns blazed away.

Farther north, the biggest and noisiest hunting show the U.S. had ever known was already well under way. There were few pheasant, practically no ruffed grouse, few duck, but the guns roared anyhow. On Chesapeake Bay, duck hunters cussed the "bluebird"weather --balmy days when the redhead and canvasback like to sit on the water, and the men in the blinds see few duck overhead. In Washington, an unseasonable freeze-up sent birds hightailing south through the state in two days. But there were plenty of white-tailed deer, plenty of ammunition, and plenty of hunters (some ten million in all), many of whom had never held a gun in their hands before. Red hunting caps were no guarantee of safety in 1946.

Deadly Sport. In Wisconsin, where the deer season was at its height, hunters shot at everything that moved, including each other. In five days, 14 hunters were dead -- five by gunshot wounds, nine by heart attack -- and many another woods man was grazed by bullets. William Brown spent eight days in Michigan's upper peninsula, trying to get a shot at a deer; on the way home, he ran down and killed an eight-point buck with his automobile. At Boulder Junction, Wis., a rifle bullet crashed through a school bus and the trigger-happy hunter explained that he thought the white lettering on the bus was deer's tail.

Mild Weather, Noisy Leaves. But enough city marksmen were getting their deer to keep a steady stream of autos roll back from Maine and Michigan with carcasses slung over the fenders. The day before the Michigan season opened, an eight-mile line of autos waited to get on the ferry at the Straits of Mackinac, to head for such choice spots as Turtle Lake Twenty Acres Domain. The weather had been too mild for ideal hunting ; there was little tracking snow and the leaves were noisy. But there was so much venison on the hoof that a record 90,000 bucks had killed in Michigan by last week. In Maine, where hunting is a $4 million-a-year business, the season ended last with a record 1 7 fatalities. Game officials blamed it on the increased number of hunters. One Maine hunting columnist, Gene Letourneau, took up coon hunting because it was a nighttime sport, said he no longer dared go into the woods in daytime. He is campaigning to make hunters, motorists, pass an examination before being allowed to play with firearms.

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