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The John Deere tractor pulled up next to Isabel’s truck, and Jamie shut it off. Using an old wooden cane that had been in his grandmother’s house forever, he climbed down and limped over to the truck. He grabbed a bottle of water out of the cooler in the back. It was late afternoon. He…
“Did you hear that?” said Dewitt as he rose from his camp chair. He stood away from the crackling fire to listen. Hamp, Dewitt’s older brother, sitting on his heels by the fire to pour coffee from a smoke-blackened pot hung over the campfire, shook his head. “Didn’t hear it,” he said. “Me neither,” said…
“Leia!” Hamp shouted across the dark food plot. “Leia!” His voice was choked with worry and rising panic about what had happened to his granddaughter. The hunting blind was empty, but puzzlingly, her rifle was still propped up in the corner. Hamp Varner and his brother Dewitt had hurried from their hunt camp to the…
Brent was afraid to climb down from his stand. The teenager had never seen his father in such an angry rage. George Gentry stood beneath his 17-year-old son’s deer stand, soaking wet, water dripping from his face, glaring upward toward Brent’s stand and shouting in an utter fury. “Brent, you fool,” he screamed, his voice…
Long before daylight on the opening day of archery deer season, Hamp stood alone at the edge of the camp. Overhead a million stars twinkled and blazed in a black, moonless sky. The air was stone still, and for mid September, cool. Radar, the border collie, stood beside him, looking up quizzically, wagging his tail.…
Mr. Jesse appeared disoriented when Paul and Hannah arrived. “We heard the shot, Mr. Jesse. Are you OK?” Paul asked. Mr. Jesse stared down the hill gazing at the wall of thickness that made up one side of the beaverswamp. “It was the boy,” Mr. Jesse said. No hindsight ip unit displayed. Just down the…
In the spring of 2010, WRD Law Enforcement rangers used a call out to the public to solve a bear case in which poachers killed a mother bear and one of her cubs. But as it turned out, the case they solved was not even the one they set out to. In early March 2010,…
The four hunters stood around Paul’s camper. It was a few minutes after dark on the opening day of deer season. David was thrilled about killing a doe, and Nathan shot his first squirrel while hunting with Hannah. However, neither the dead doe nor the squirrel were on the minds or lips of the four…
Cpl. Freddie Hays and Ranger First Class Billy Bryant were on routine night patrol at about 11:45 p.m. last Oct. 23 when they encountered a pair of poachers doing something a little out of the ordinary. The officers were patrolling Clybel WMA, at the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center in Jasper County, when they saw a…
When the bullet hit, the animal buckled from the sting and went crashing back into the jungle of reed cane. Ten yards inside, running wide open, it came to the edge of a sharp-dropping creek bank. Not able to stop, it went crashing down the bank and hit a sharp boulder on the opposite bank,…