By WES MURPHY

I shot my first deer way back in 1974, when I was 14. In the 35 years since then, I have probably shot another 60 or so deer, but not the first one was big enough to even think about putting on the wall.

I realized a long time ago that I was unlikely to ever kill a big buck because I don’t put in the time and effort needed to do so. Almost every member of my family that deer hunts has at least one nice deer on their living room or bedroom wall. Most of them have several. My 17-year-old son has killed three bucks that are bigger than anything I ever shot at, much less killed.

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By DR. JOHN RHENEY

The only thing that has really changed in hunting over a million years is the technology. We’ve seen more on this type of change in the last two decades than in the last 100 years. Firearms are basically the same as they were in 1909. I guess the first time I realized what was in store for us and the evolution of hunting was when dog clubs first started using CB radios in the 1970s.

I was watching a show on the Outdoor Channel the other day and noted hunter Jim Shockey said that in his opinion the greatest advancement in hunting was the invention of the trail camera. We have come a long way. Twenty years ago I bought a few trail timers that were just basically sewing thread attached to cheap little battery-powered clocks. You pulled the thread across a trail and anchored it to a tree. When an animal of appropriate size came through and pulled the thread, it cut the clock off and gave you a time. Of course you had no idea what kind of animal tripped the clock or even if it was an animal.

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By WES MURPHY

A year and a half ago, my wife, Robin, and I took a trip to the mountains of North Georgia. We fished, walked to waterfalls and went sight-seeing all around the area.

One of the places we discovered was a small shop that sold homemade jams, jellies and syrups. A jar of cranberry-pecan relish caught my eye because of the pretty colors. I don’t particularly care for cranberries, but the young lady working there said it went good with meat, so we decided to try a jar. It seemed like it might be good on deer tenderloins, so I stuck it in the back of the refrigerator and waited on fall, and deer season, to get here.

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By DR. JOHN RHENEY

I’ve always been a bow hunter wanna-be. My first bow “kill” was a very unlucky quail that Eddie Wolfe and I cornered next to our garage when I was in the fourth grade. We shot it with an arrow that was broken in half and I pushed back together in order to make the semifatal shot at the extreme distance of 3 feet. All of the theatrics just served to make that quail taste that much better.

I guess it could be said that is why we bow hunt. It is one thing to take a deer at 200 yards off of a solid rest with a scoped rifle. It is quite another to take a mature buck browsing through an acorn ridge with a bow.

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By WES MURPHY

While I was growing up, the people I hunted with were, for the most part, poor to middle class and their guns reflected that.

Get in the back of a pickup truck for a dog drive on any given Saturday and you might see anything from an old double barrel with all the blueing worn off and the butt stock taped together with electrical tape to a J.C. Higgens pump gun with one of those butt-ugly polichokes on the end of the barrel. There were plenty of Browning A-5s and Remington 1100s also, but the kids I hunted with pretty much had to use what we could get, which meant a ragged assortment of single shots and even an old bolt-action 20-gauge.

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By WES MURPHY

When I was a kid, South Carolina had turkeys in the upper state and at Frances Marion National Forest. If you lived in the Lowccountry and didn’t have a driver’s license, you weren’t going to see a wild turkey.

I can remember seeing a turkey vulture sitting on a tree limb early one morning while on a dog drive in Colleton County, back in the ‘60s. When I saw it, all I could see was the silhouette through the morning fog. At first, I thought I was seeing my first turkey. Once the sun rose a little higher in the sky and I got a better look, I realized it was a buzzard. I didn’t see my first turkey until 25 years later, at Dr. Rheney’s place, while working for a local land surveying company in the middle ‘80s.

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By DR. JOHN RHENEY

It was the early ‘80s when I finished dental school. I had just decided that I wanted to come back to Orangeburg to be close to my family and friends. With the help of Clarence Evans, my partner Jimmy Gardner and I were in the process of building a dentist office on the North Road. It was pretty intense stuff for a 26-year-old with $600 in the bank.

It was going to take the better part of a year to build the office and get into practice, so I had a lot of time on my hands. Bobby Shuler and David Hewett (the owners) of Stack’s Inc. asked me if I wanted to help out in the store until my practice got into full swing. For those of you who are 20 years or younger, Stack’s was a great sporting goods store and a real treasure for Orangeburg area outdoorsmen. I worked there on and off for a year. Some of my best days were spent in that store with Bobby, Jerry and David.

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By Dr. John Rheney

We call him Bucky. Late last season when the deer on my place had become nocturnal, we had pretty much given up hunting the oak flats and scrapes to return to the feeders and the food plots that had been freshly planted in oats, rape, kell and clover. As to be expected, only does and yearlings along with a few straggling young bucks (that were still trying to find their station in life after several months of being dominated by larger deer without their mother’s protection) came to the feeders during the daylight hours.

The most consistent visitors to one feeder were a medium-sized doe and her two yearlings. I call them yearlings, but they were very late-born fawns that had just lost their spots. The doe didn’t know it, but the presence of her two young ones prevented her from becoming a “Hunters For the Hungry” donation. As I mentioned, these two were only about 40-45 pounds and they could be counted on to make an appearance at the corn feeders about the time the turkeys left and went to roost.

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By WES MURPHY

I write about hunting, with a little bit of fishing thrown in for good measure. Let’s be honest, hunting often involves dead animals and blood. There is the occasional wounded or lost game animal. Our job, as ethical, caring hunters, is to do everything in our power to minimize the chances of these things happening.

Sighting-in our rifles before the season lessens the chance of a misplaced shot. Shooting only at animals that we are sure are within the capabilities of our weapons and our shooting abilities is a must. Honest assessment of these abilities is the least we can do for the game that we all care so much about. Just because the hunter next to me in the dove field can regularly hit birds at 60 yards or the guy standing in line with me at the grocery store claims to have killed a deer at 450 yards with one shot doesn’t mean I should try it. I can’t kill doves, ducks or turkeys much past 40 yards, or deer from farther away than 200 yards, so I don’t try.

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By WES MURPHY

My Uncle, Bill Hall, and I talked for some about taking a float trip down the Edisto River. One thing or another kept getting in the way, so several years passed without us getting on the river together. Recently, thanks to the downturn in the economy, I had two weeks off from work.

Uncle Bill is retired, so we finally had a day off, during the week, at the same time. It’s very obvious from the river traffic I see when I am at the club on weekends, during turkey season, that most people don’t mind sharing the river with big groups of people. I, on the other hand, would rather stay home than go to the river when I know everybody and his brother is going to be out there. If I want crowds, I’ll go to a ball game, so a river trip during the middle of the week is the only way to go.

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