The enemy within

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
The enemy within				August 27, 2008

Natty Bumppo is coming to Stonehouse.

In case you burned the notes from your high school English class in great American authors, Natty (or Nathaniel) Bumppo is the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Deerslayer.” He was awarded his descriptive accolade as a result of his ability to consistently whack off deer with one shot.

He was also heavily into Native American life, and it was he, along with his Delaware friend Chingachgook, who rescued a damsel in distress (Chingachgook’s beloved) from the nasty New York Hurons who were holding her captive.

Natty, of course, never bumped off deer because they were munching on his tomato plants or feasting on his azaleas. No, he was a man of the woods and his aggressiveness was defined by his need for food or his friendship with beset-upon Mohicans.

Nevertheless, if you will think of our Stonehouse residents as the damsel in distress and the deer population as the wicked Hurons, you’ll understand why Natty is coming to the rescue.

What happened is this.

Not long ago, the county encouraged some developer to bulldoze acres and acres of land in upper James City that were home to acres and acres of deer and other critters. What resulted is a subdivision that’s now home to over 1,000 good and decent human citizens.

These good and decent citizens in turn spruced up their property with shrubs and other seemly vegetation.

Unfortunately, the deer, whose former lunch bucket is now kaput, are looking for something to replace the food they used to get in their forest home. So they have assailed the succulent plants installed by the good and decent citizens and are now eating their way through the subdivision.

Enter Natty Bumppo.

At a recent meeting, the Stonehouse board of directors introduced a proposal to hire Bumppo and the Oak Tree Hunt Club to pop off the deer in a “managed” hunt.

According to club member Tom Turner, the war against the enemy deer will be waged in broad daylight, though no one will know that the attacks are taking place. Unless, of course, you find a wounded deer slumped over in your front yard some afternoon.

Furthermore, the Oak Tree boys will commence hostilities using only bows and arrows, which may put Bumppo at a distinct disadvantage. But it’s the humane way to go.

Much like the duck blinders, our deerslayers will lurk behind stationary tree stands that will assure their invisibility until the enemy takes a shot at a pepper plant. Then they will emerge from their blinds, arrow up and let fly. Deer dies, peppers live.

Evidently the description of what happens to the carcasses had some good and decent citizens swooning and begging for less descriptive explanations. Suffice it to say that the hides will be sent to Jamestown to keep the colonists warm this winter, while the recently harpooned venison will be distributed among the families of the stalwart warriors.

As an aside to my friends up in Stonehouse, I should confess that I’ve lived in this part of the county for over 40 years and have planted a rather extensive vegetable garden every year. Every year I’ve been visited by deer, raccoons, rabbits, woodchucks and other critters who delight in chomping on my plants. This year things got so bad that I had to put a fence around my tomato patch.

Angry though I become, I have never considered summoning Natty Bumppo or some hunt club to come in and blitz animals whose habitats are constantly being eroded for the sake of human development.

This summer has been especially hard on the animals, since the drought has killed off grasslands, clover and other food stuffs they would normally depend on.

How sad it is that the apparently normal human reaction to such predictable faunal intrusions is not pre-planning or accommodation, but rather an aggressive agenda of slaughter with painful weapons of managed destruction.

Certainly there are more humane answers to the problem. Products such as Deer-Off or Rabbit-Off do the job if applied consistently. Fences or chicken wire will protect vegetable gardens. Some flowering plants also deter critter invasions. A season with normal rainfall would help immensely.

Now that I think of it, I suppose that Bumppo might be just as outraged by the obliteration of a native deer habitat as he would have been by the forced acquisition of land formerly occupied by his beloved Native Americans. Maybe we could just round up all the deer and consign them to barren and squalid reservations.

Instead of what we euphemistically refer to as thinning deer herds, perhaps we should seriously consider thinning our penchant for eradicating the green spaces that have always been their home.