Hunting season

Our neighborhood has been invaded by gangs. These bands of heavily armed men slowly cruise our gravel roads as they peer out of the darkly tinted windows of their powerful sport utility vehicles.

This can only mean that it’s pheasant hunting season once again.

Hunting is an entrenched ritual in this part of the world. It’s something we do every fall, sort of a carryover from our primitive past when we celebrated autumn’s arrival by sacrificing a chaste young maiden.

Many things have changed since then. For one, equal opportunity has made it so that young maidens are now likely to be holding a shotgun while riding shotgun in those SUVs.

No annual hunting ritual is complete without a visit to a sporting goods store to stock up on such hunting-related items as camouflage trousers, camouflage shirts and camouflage underwear. Camouflage clothing can render a man virtually invisible, an invaluable feature whenever a guy’s wife decides it’s high time he got going on her “honey-do” list.

A hunting buddy of mine and I recently made our annual pilgrimage to a certain megastore that specializes in hunting, fishing and other outdoorsy merchandise. I won’t say which store it was, but the letters of its name can be rearranged to spell either “able sac” or “lab case.”

The store proved to be a mecca for outdoor people of every age, size, shape and gender. Even though it was still more than a month until hunting season, the place was packed with hunters hunting for hunting stuff.

All I personally needed was a new scope for my old deer rifle, a seemingly simple mission. The trouble was that there were way too many scopes to choose from.

“This is a very popular model,” cooed the salesclerk as he handed me a rifle scope that was the size of a 55-gallon barrel and had a magnifying power roughly equal to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

I peered through the scope and immediately put it back down. The thing nearly sucked my eyeball right out of its socket.

It was certainly a nice scope, but its value far exceeded that of my old deer rifle. I opted for a cheaper set of optics.

My buddy had a shopping list that was as long as his leg, so I was free to roam the store for a good long while and was thus able to observe hunters in their natural habitat. I perceived that they weren’t simply hunting for hunting gear; they were after an ideal hunting experience such as those seen in the videos playing on the large TVs strategically scattered throughout the store.

In the videos of ideal hunting experiences, the weather is always perfect, the stalk is always stealthy and the hunter never misses. Such films make guys like me — guys who, according to our wives, are incapable of hitting even an immobile porcelain target — believe we are also capable of bagging an ideal hunting experience.

The ideal hunting experience videos were backed up by a panoply of mounted trophy game animals placed high along the perimeter of the wall. Here is an excellent elk, there is a winsome whitetail, that is a crafty cougar and there’s a ... Labrador Retriever?

False alarm. The Labrador was, in fact, a plastic facsimile used to display a hunting vest for dogs. What’s next? Doggy tuxedos for those nights out on the town with his comely canine companion?

I eventually stumbled upon what must have been the high roller’s room. The guns on display there were engraved, inlaid and gilded. They were works of art; it would have seemed like a sacrilege to shoot any of them.

In the midst of it all, perched saucily atop a display case, sat the thoroughly macho machine that would have guaranteed me an ideal hunting experience: the .50 caliber Barrett 82A1.

Shooting cartridges the size of beer bottles, the Barrett makes Dirty Harry’s .357 Magnum look like a peashooter. Its range of 2,000 yards would enable me to simply sit on my deck, peer through its Hubble-like riflescope and scope out deer for miles around.

After carefully selecting a 30-pointer, I would tickle the trigger, and the Barrett would suddenly buck and roar. Motoring out to where my trophy had fallen, I would find that the deer had been tenderized, cut into steaks and chops and shrink wrapped — all thanks to the Barrett’s phenomenal firepower.

My buddy roused me from my reverie. “I’m done,” he said. “You ready to go?”

“I am now,” I replied with a grin, basking in the warm afterglow of my better-than-real-life ideal hunting experience.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.