Editorial-Opinion December 2024

That’s a monster buck killed at Piedmont Refuge a few weeks ago. If you didn’t see it, look back at the picture on page 48. It’s not the first time this historic piece of Georgia hunting dirt has thrown out a big buck, and I’m betting it won’t be the last.

Like so often when GON publishes a story, it tends to stir the old memory bank. Three and a half decades of living and breathing Georgia hunting and fishing through GON will do that. There are lots of bits and pieces stored in this noggin of mine.

This buck was killed on special dirt. The tens of thousands of acres of big woods in Piedmont Refuge and the nearby Oconee National Forest were an origin and epicenter for the reemergence of Georgia deer hunting around the middle of the last century.

When I think of Piedmont Refuge, I think about a man named Arthur Truelove. About the time my days at GON were just beginning, around 1990, it was during one of the Piedmont hunts when I first heard of a legendary hunter named Arthur Truelove. I may not be remembering it exactly as it happened 35 years ago, but I vaguely recall a 70ish-year-old man commanding attention and stares from other hunters at the check station. And this was a minute or two before the advent and rise of social media hunting celebs.

Who was this man?

Brad Bailey, my GON editor mentor at the time, said something along the lines of… That’s Art Truelove. He kills big bucks…. Carries nothing but a single bullet to the woods.

Arthur Truelove was a woodsman, in the purest sense. This was a hunter who could slip off into the woods on public land with simply a rifle and a bullet, and often he was the hunter bringing a good buck to the check station.

Think about being a pure woodsman back in 1990. The very first grunt calls were just hitting the market. Doe pee was a thing, and I’m sure a few of those Piedmont Refuge hunters back then were covering their human scent with fox urine, but that was about it when it came to newfangled advantages a hunter could carry to the woods. Little was available to hunters who wanted to be the cutting edge, particularly compared to what’s available now.

Poachers back then used Q-beams that plugged into cigarette lighter sockets. Now poachers use drones that send live video, and they shoot rifles equipped with thermal night-vision with silencers… for goodness sakes.

Back then, Cuddeback had just come to market with the first trail camera for hunters—it used D cell batteries and 35mm film you had to drop off at a store to get developed—one-hour if you were lucky. Widespread use of trail-cameras would take a while to gain traction in the hunting community—Moultrie didn’t produce their first trail-camera until 1998.

It’s human nature to lean into new technology and advantages. A basic truth and fact of life is that life gets more convenient with each passing year.

That’s true of hunting, as well.

While it’s certainly gotten easier, woodsmanship is still important. That’s not an indictment of hunters who lean into the newest and latest cutting-edge advantages that make hunting more convenient, and in many cases, much easier. Far from it… if it were an indictment, I’d be guilty. I love my cellular trail cameras. I’m addicted to getting that notification on my phone. I was equally addicted back in the day when I’d go pick up my developed roll of film and flip through the photos one by one—hoping to see something with antlers, rather than doe after doe and a few squirrels. Time passes, and new ways become the norm. Such is life.

But for sportsmen, especially those of us getting a bit long in the tooth, we owe it to the younger generations to pass along some lessons in woodsmanship.

The ability to read deer sign, knowing a white oak tree when you see one, understanding the value of pinchpoints and natural funnels… these are skills that need to be passed along.

They are skills that might just come in handy one day.

Filling the feeder and checking the phone app for when a buck finally daylights is a great way to kill him. But what happens if one season feed isn’t available… or maybe it’s not affordable.

We learned four years ago that crazy can come on quick and out of nowhere.

Like that prophet Hank Jr. said in his song released in 1981, “A Country Boy Can Survive.”