We're Gonna be FAMOUS!!!

If only it could make us rich. Hero Guy was up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning on the prowl for Bambi's dad. Bow hunting season opened in NY and Hero Guy gets testosterone overload just with the thought of stalking something and then being able to drag it out of the woods. It makes it all the better if it's really, really mammoth, like this one was.

As a little background, the bigger the antlers, the older, wiser and more seasoned the deer, thus the tougher the chase. In addition, bow hunting requires you to be closer to the deer, so no noise and no human scent are of critical importance. That explains the grass-scented shower gel and the gross female deer pee that gets squirted on the boots before Hero Guy goes traipsing out in the woods.

Anyway, 5:30 am came, Hero Guy went and didn't peep until 7:00 pm when I got an excited call from the woods stating that he had bagged a big one. I'm always leery about claims made from the woods because adrenaline causes things to inflate in appearance. It took about 1-1/2 hours for Hero Guy and Hunter Bud to drag the monster up out of a ravine. It took another 1-1/2 hours for him to make it the 3 miles home because he kept detouring to every place he could think of to show it off. Show places included several friends houses, the gas station, the fire station and even church on Sunday morning. The unofficial word is that it will probably score as the 2nd biggest typical buck taken by a bow in our county ever. There's actually a book that records this stuff, if you can believe it. For the record, it is a 12-point (meaning 12 branches on the antlers) and weighed 195 field dressed. I'll let you guess what that term means.

And let me tell you a little tidbit about measurements. The buck measured 163. I'll explain it like this....you know when you go to the gym and you've lost 5 pounds, but the trainer says "Congratulations, you've lost 27 inches!" What the trainer means is that they measured your neck - you lost 1/4-inch. They measured your upper arm, you lost 1/3-inch. They measured your knee, you lost 1/2-inch there. They add up every possible place on your body where you may have shrunken a bit and they add them all together to come up with an enormous number of inches gone for your five pounds lost. Buck scoring is the same way.

This is all callous-sounding, I know, but I was quickly squashed in the wee first moments of my motherhood when I suggested that perhaps we would want to raise our children to think that shooting any living thing was bad...."Tree hugger" I was called so I quickly moved over to the dark side. So now, I've gotta start entering Hero Guy's name in every Big Buck Contest to try to make a buck or two off his hunting prowess, especially if there's a money reward. Bummer that he didn't get entered in any contests this year, so we'll be springing several hundred dollars for the big mounted deer head that he could've gotten for free. And I really had my heart set on those curtains at Pier One Imports.