The Rites Of Autumn

THE ARMED INVASION

On the Monday following Thanksgiving in the state of Pennsylvania a good many commercial, governmental and educational enterprises are shut down or critically understaffed because most of the males over 12 years old have grabbed their guns and left. Some of the men are in convoys of covered trucks and miscellaneous motorized carriers that clog the highways and back roads; hundreds of thousands of others, more than can be mustered by the U.S. Army, are already skirmishing through the countryside. They blaze away more or less at will. The sound of small-arms fire is incessant. At dusk they fall back to rude bivouacs and commence the body count.

Appearances aside, the Commonwealth is not in the grip of foreign invasion or civil insurrection but only of Opening Day, an event of such magnitude that in the Quaker State nobody asks the opening day of what? Phillies? Steelers? Nittany Lions? Opening Day is the first day of the buck-hunting season. It may be the wildest and woolliest—and it is almost certainly the largest—participatory recreational event extant. Pennsylvania has about a million and a quarter hunters pursuing a herd of 700,000 deer, and the result is a kill of some 150,000 in a good year, with about 60% of the animals usually being scragged on the frantic Opening Day.

Because white-tail deer are commonly distributed from the Philadelphia suburbs to the strip-mine-scarred hills above the Ohio River, the Opening Day uproar is general. However, it rises to a crescendo in Potter County, a mountainous, semiwilderness district in the extreme northern section of the state. Every year some 50,000 sports go deer hunting in Potter, and among them they do in 7,500 animals, year in and out the largest harvest of any county in the state. As this kill total implies. Potter has a lot of deer; in fact, the common wisdom is that the 16,395 permanent human residents of the county are outnumbered by at least two to one by the white-tails.

In pragmatic terms, however, Potter leaves something to be desired for both deer hunters and deer. As to the former, some 500,000 acres of the county's gnarled mountains are covered by dense stands of hardwoods and evergreens, a region known locally as the Black Forest. There are a lot of places for deer to hide in this terrain, and actually shooting one is complicated by the fact that 50,000 hunters all have this as a common purpose. Furthermore, once a Potter deer is taken it is not likely, by conventional sporting standards, to be a very impressive animal. Popular myths aside, heavy forest doesn't make particularly good deer country, offering less in the way of forage than more open and developed land. From the standpoint of deer, Potter County is something of a ghetto in which a lot of individuals are constantly competing for an inadequate food supply. One result is that the Potter deer, though numerous, are fairly scrawny. According to the records of the State Game Commission, Potter is, in terms of deer quality (based on body weight, antler size and reproductive rate) a Class III county. There are 25 Class I and II (excellent to good) Pennsylvania counties in which game managers feel the deer are "better" than in Potter.

To such statistical information the deer-hunting fraternity reacts in a kind of facts-be-damned manner. Potter continues to be what it has been for half a century—the deer-hunting mecca. All over the state—in fact all over the country, because there are those who make the pilgrimage from as far away as Quebec and California—there are sports who regard getting up to Potter for Opening Day as one of life's annual imperatives.

THE HUNT AS PSYCHO-HISTORIC DRAMA

Somewhat like the Masters golf tournament, the Potter County deer hunt has a mighty, all but mythic, reputation. Both reputations are based on a complex of traditions and illusions so powerful that they overwhelm dull, disparaging facts, creating an independent, more or less metaphysical, reality.

On the Sunday afternoon before Opening Monday, on a ridgetop that is the continental divide between the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico drainage systems, a fellow by the name of Hank Mason is standing in two feet of snow, talking about the intangibles of deer hunting, which is what he will be doing in the morning, and of Potter County, which is where he is. In real life Mason is a plumber from York County, which, located between Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Baltimore, is part of the Eastern megalopolis. There is some remaining farmland, woods and preserved open space around York, but it is well mixed with Interstates, shopping centers and residential, commercial and industrial centers. Despite—and in ecological truth because of—such development, York has quite a few deer, including some very good ones, being one of the state's Class I white-tail counties. Mason might better have stayed home, but he is up in Potter, up to his knees in snow, explaining his preferences and position.

"What it boils down to," he says, "is that I'd just as soon shoot a 120-pound buck, or maybe none at all, up here as a 150-pounder down home." Mason is a burly, crew-cut, exceedingly active hunter, even though he lost a leg during his military service. Among the crowd he regularly hunts with there is a standing joke that they will not have to worry about firewood as long as they have Pegleg Mason. "It's wild enough up here to make you think about how it was when we had to hunt and take care of ourselves—when we were more independent. I suppose that is part of the idea behind those God's Country signs." (For some time tourism promoters have been distributing T shirts, bumper stickers and other literature asserting that POTTER COUNTY IS GOD'S COUNTRY.)