Maine's iconic bootmaker turns 100 this year, and it's planning quite a big party. I've been privileged to be among the planners, as I write this month over at the day job. Down East Books helped produce an anniversary edition of Leon Leonwood Bean's classic guide to the outdoors, Hunting, Fishing and Camping in collaboration with L.L.'s great-grandson, Bill Gorman. The book is really a hoot, containing as it does bits of Bean's wood wisdom like, "If you get lost, come straight back to camp." I've owned an old edition of this guide for years, so working to update it for the twenty-first century was a dream come true. It's one of those classic titles that really does belong on the shelf of every outdoorsperson.
When Deer Hunters Kill People
Karen WoodAt Maine Crime Writers today I have a post about Karen Wood, the Hermon housewife who was shot by a hunter in 1988 who said he mistook her white mittens for the tail of a deer. The story has attained folklore status in Maine—largely because a jury refused to indict the hunter—and in my post I attempt to explain why I think the incident continues to haunt us today.
A Bloody Deer Season
Deer-hunting season got started in Maine a little more than a week ago, and as the clip above from Maine Public Radio explains, there have already been three human casualties, including one death. John Holyoke, of the Bangor Daily News, has a frank assessment of the consequences of these horrible incidents:
On Monday, I was trying to explain [to my non-hunting friends] how responsible most hunters are. I was trying to tell my friends that a single tragic weekend doesn’t mean that the Maine woods are inherently unsafe during November.
And I expect my words sounded less than convincing.
Consider: Over a two-day period spanning Friday and Saturday, three hunting-related shootings were reported to the Maine Warden Service.
• On Friday, a Portsmouth, N.H. man who was target shooting in the woods of Casco was shot in the stomach by a hunter. The victim was taken by LifeFlight to a Lewiston hospital.
• Also on Friday, a Hebron man was shot in the leg by a hunting companion as they tracked a deer that had been wounded in Oxford. The wounded hunter was also transported to a Lewiston hospital.
• And on Saturday, 46-year-old Peter Kolofsky of Sebago was shot and killed while hunting in that southern Maine town. The alleged shooter, 61-year-old William Briggs of Windham, was hunting nearby but was not a member of Kolofsky’s hunting party.
All it takes is a single weekend, however, to convince plenty of people that the woods of Maine are full of wild, gun-toting folks who don’t care what they shoot at, whether it’s a deer, the family pooch or another hunter.
It doesn't matter that statistics show that hunting in Maine is a safer pasttime than boating or snowmobiling or many of the other outdoor activities we engage in these days. What matters are stories like the ones Holyoke describes. It's human nature to extrapolate greater meaning from narratives, even fragmentary ones like those above.
Ultimately, the image of man in the woods clutching his bloody stomach is simply more convincing to us than any chart stacked with numbers.
Only in Maine
Bambi Was a Maine Deer
OK, he was a German red deer first. But the Bambi that the world knows and loves—friend to Thumper, wooer of Faline—was actually a white-tailed deer from Baxter State Park in Maine, as this article in the world's best magazine proves definitely.
PS. Among hunters, Walt Disney's Bambi is the most hated movie ever because they blame it for transforming what had formerly been a socially accepted pastime into a perceived bloodsport pursued only by closeted homicides. My own take is: Bambi isn't all that pernicious (man does enter the forest, after all), but anthropomorphizing animals is naive and an expression of humanity's abiding narcissism. Also, most of the hunters I've known are highly moral people who are far less likely to inflict violence on other human beings than the urbanized Major Nidal Hasans and Seung-Hui Chos of the world.