Nancy Lawrence not only downed her first lunker buck but also her first wild turkey.
They don’t get much older than the 8½-year or plus buck shot by Nancy Lawrence of Plainfield.
The broad beam and high rack had six points, a great animal that went 184 pounds rough field dressed, with a live weight estimated at to 240 to 250 pounds.
Lawrence did her homework, spending many hours preseason scouting, checking scrapes and rubs as well as working a trail camera until some low life swiped it.
She had not hunted for 15 years or more but she said her boyfriend Billy White was an avid hunter and she decided to return to the sport.
Nancy not only downed her first lunker buck but also her first wild turkey this fall.
While the lady hunter appears to be able to do it all, she can’t. She had to get on the cell phone and have a friend help lift that fat fellow wearing the high hat onto her vehicle.
It looks like a high protein and low fat winter for her as both buck and bird fill her freezer.
There are some out there who believe an old animal, and they don’t get much older than 9 or 10, can be tough eating. No way.
Many moons over the horizon my late hunting buddy Shin Moran downed a huge buck at Dick and Terry Desmarais’s deer camp at Chickley Alps in Charlemont that pushed 275 pounds live weight. He gave the animal to me with the words, “It has to be tough it’s so old, so have it cut up into hamburger and feed it to your dogs.”
The butcher I went to said the venison did not look tough and cut it into steaks, roast, ribs and of course hamburger that with a few additives was turned into kielbasa and linguisa sausage.
It proved to be the best eating that I can remember in my world class chow downing career, which if they had an eating Hall of Fame your Mister Munch outdoor writer would be at the top of the heavyweight class.
Which brings to mind that as a full-time writer and part-time outdoor columnist many droplets out of the rain clouds ago, I covered both kielbasa and hot dog eating contests. The winners were always skinny-minnies with bursting belly buttons while the losers were the two-ton Tony Galentie types.
Tony was a short, fat heavyweight boxer of yonder years who was as tough as any piece of rawhide laced with barbed wire as you could find.
THE VOICE OF THE YOUNG: Fourteen-year-old Mike Morrissey’s note to this column started out “My dad and I go hunting a lot” and ended “Thanks Dad for taking me hunting.”
He wrote, edited tightly here for brevity, “Last Saturday my dad went bow hunting with his buddies. A friend and I went into the woods just to walk around, as a 14-year-old in this state needs a licensed adult to be able to hunt under his license.
“Well we saw does and a big eight-point buck. Boy was I excited.
“So I called my dad and he told me not to push it, just wait and watch what the buck was doing and we would figure him out together and we’d hunt him Monday after school. Dad figured the buck would stay in the area because of the does. It was a long day in school and every chance I got I texted him to make sure we were still going.
“We set up our blind where the does had been and a short while later along came a doe with a big buck right behind her. We did some grunt calls with no response.
“This is when I was thinking I was never going to get a shot. The deer headed up hill and we ran ahead, spotting them in a gully. Dad went to check them out and along came a small six pointer within seven yards. Dad asked me why I didn’t shoot it and I pointed at the big eight pointer down hill with the doe.
“A couple of small bucks came into the picture. The big buck hit one in the side with his antlers and chased the second small buck off. Then the doe and big buck headed to the other side of the hill. Dad said we had to get to the other side of the hill. My dad got below them causing them to walk up hill. The small bucks started following them.
“Then 20 yards out the doe appeared and I knew the big buck would step out from behind the tree and it did, broadside. And I let my arrow fly and it was hit. We stayed put for a while but it was getting dark and my dad’s friend was called in to help find it.
“I feared if left over night coyotes would get to it but we discovered it a short distance away. Thanks dad, for taking me hunting.”
OLD STUFF: Funny thing happened to me traveling that sometimes rocky road of life; you have to stop and ask, “How did I get this less than young age so fast?”
I always had a word over the years when some older gent cut me off. I never liked to blow my horn at people, so I would do the next best thing mutter to my audience, wife Char, “Did you see what that old flatulence did? He cut me off.”
Then one day Char said, “You can’t call him an old what-so-ever, you are older than him.”
WHICH IS WILDER?: Which has more wilderness, Africa or North America? If you said Africa, go back and repeat high school History One. Africa is 28 percent and North America is 38 percent wilderness.
A NOVEL OF A KID IN THE OUTDOORS: The first published novel written on a typewriter is “Tom Sawyer.” Tom and Huckleberry have been my heroes since I was a kid. I later added Ted Williams, Rocky Marciano, Bobby Orr, Bob Cousy, Wes Welker and Tony Deteso. So who is Tony Deteso?
Tony was my old high school football coach who told me that I would never get beyond being average if I were afraid to make mistakes. Well he caused me to make hundreds, perhaps thousands of mistakes. He also turned this then 138-pound two-way guard into a member of the Boston Globe all state team.
I know, I know this is bragging but it is also a word of advice to all of us – be the best athlete, student or best and kindest person you can be. The thing truly worse than failure is not trying.