Year of the Pig

13. Old Growth

13 old growth We came to break the bad. We came to cheer the sad. We came to leave behind the world a better way. —Avett Brothers, “Salvation Song,” 2004 White oak (Quercus alba): Although most hunters’ tree identification skills range from weak to nonexistent, they can almost certainly identify a white oak. Although many foresters in the Southeast have little concern for anything that is not a pine tree, they will go out of their way to leave a white oak during a timber harvest. White oaks are beautiful, long-lived, graceful oaks that produce occasional heavy mast crops (acorns) that draw deer, turkey, squirrels, and all matter of wildlife. When the wood is cured, it is so hard that nails cannot be driven into the dry lumber. Mississippi had fallen through and Florida was a bust . . . again. Hopefully, things would turn around in Missouri and Arkansas. My sister had a game camera set up on the family farm, and she’d gotten pictures of some decent bucks. Since it is a danged long drive to Missouri, it made sense to combine the trip with an Arkansas pig hunt. If time allowed, some Corps of Engineers property around Lake Wappapello, Missouri, was also worth investigating for hog sign. The year before (2006), one of Lake Wappapello’s personnel gave a presentation at the First Conference on Feral Pigs in Mobile, Alabama, describing 152 cHaPter 13 how feral hogs had become a serious problem on Corps of Engineers lands in south Missouri, so my interest was piqued. The trip north from Pleasant Home began at 5:00 p.m. on November 8. Because I have been reseeding the home place for years, I made frequent stops along the way to pick up acorns and other tree seed: three thousand northern red oak in Tennessee, thirty pounds of sawtooth oak, red oak, and basswood in Kentucky, and ten pounds of cherrybark and black oak in Illinois. It was 8:45 p.m. on the 9th when I finally turned off Highway D onto the farm property in Chariton County, Missouri. After almost twenty-eight hours of driving and nut harvesting, my middle-aged body was saying, “Please don’t do this anymore.” But after a decent night’s sleep, I was up early, settling into the tree stand by 5:55. Comet Holmes was visible in the night’s sky. The morning hunt didn’t produce much so I wandered out to check my trees. A profound depression settled over me as I surveyed plantings from the last three years. Mom had hired a couple of people to mow between the rows of planted trees. The rows were laid out perfectly straight and exactly twelve feet apart. In the first three fields I examined, the tractor operator had cut down thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of two-year-old trees. Sometimes, large blocks of the field were mowed clean. In these areas, there were no unmowed strips and every single sapling had been cut off. Such is the nature of tree planting. It’s basically a long-term gamble. In this case, hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars invested establishing these plantations were devastated by an uncaring or ignorant tractor operator. A neighbor pulled into the field with his son and a friend while I was still tallying the carnage. They had three deer in the back of their truck: two does and an illegal six-point buck. Rudy (I’ve changed his name here) told his friend, “Don’t worry about Mark. He’s done his share of poaching.” Rudy was right. I was a bit of an outlaw as a young teenager. But experience, knowledge, age, discretion, and a conscience helped clean up my act. Over the last couple of decades, my concerted effort to help the environment and many wildlife populations has, I hope, outweighed my youthful indiscretions. old growtH 153 I addressed all of them. “No, I don’t care what you kill, but I wouldn’t drive around too long with that buck in the back of your truck.” Rudy explained his rationale for shooting the six-point buck. “We’re finally starting to get some good bucks around here because we’ve been thinning out these ‘scrub bucks.’” Rudy’s reasoning was not uncommon. Many hunters lack a basic grasp of biology and how deer develop. Other hunters have told me, “I...