Fair Game

Two days before the big game-hunting season opened in Colorado, a couple of overeager gunners from Oklahoma, Merrel Metts and Lloyd Luna, shot five deer. Nabbed by sharp-eyed game wardens, the two poachers were taken before a justice of the peace who socked them with fines of $2,725 apiece, the largest poaching fines in Colorado history, and sentenced them to 30 days in jail.

Last week, as the season reached its peak in the Rocky Mountain area west of Denver and some 135,000 legal, licensed hunters were hot on the trail, the two poachers were serving out their time. Most Coloradans thought they had got just what they deserved. But even the legal hunters were cutting some unlovely capers as they went after deer, elk or bear.

Any target, dead or alive, seemed to be fair game. One rancher near Glenwood Springs, hoping to protect a pet doe and her twin fawns, watched helplessly as a carload of hunters, guns blazing, killed the fawns and wounded the doe. Two days later he found the doe dead. The indignant rancher braced his dead pet up near the roadside, then sat back and waited to see what would happen. He did not have to wait long.

Moments later, four hunters drove up, jumped out and opened fire from the road. The fusillade ripped through the already dead deer. But just to make sure, the hunters rushed over and cut its throat. They ran when the rancher approached. Again the rancher propped up the carcass. Two more hunters approached, shot the dead deer and made off with the riddled remains before the rancher could get close enough to stop them.*

Happy Hunting Grounds. Despite incidents and accidents, Colorado mainly welcomed the hunting invasion, which gives the state a $75 million yearly business. In Colorado's happy hunting grounds, deer hunters get their game 75% of the time, elk hunters 30%. Lured by the promise of profitable shooting, hunters from 44 states, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, and even South Africa, roamed the mountains last year. This year they ranged from completely outfitted safaris from Texas (one man towed a jeep-load of equipment behind his Cadillac) to local residents, who, for the price of a license ($7.50) and ammunition, could salt away a winter's supply of venison by just strolling out in their own back acres.

Elsewhere in the U.S., even bigger armies of hunters were getting ready to move out this week. Because of forest fires. New York's fields and woodlands were closed to hunters. But in Michigan, where the largest deer herds in the country roam (estimates put the deer population at 1,000,000), some 500,000 resident hunters are oiling up their guns for a mass attack, augmented by 8,000 out-of-staters, in one of the best hunting grounds in the U.S. Despite the traditional red hunting caps and other precautions, the hunting will not be altogether happy: in Michigan, the death toll for hunters will be about one a day; in the U.S. this season, when all the shooting is over, an estimated 500 hunters will be dead.

*The incident reminded many of a 1949 experiment by Marine Major George Gilliland of Long Beach. Calif., who set up a stuffed buck at the roadside in hunting country and saw it shot some 400 times in two days.

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