Photo by Charles R. Brower III

When I was in high school, I used to sneak out of school and spend opening day of the deer season down at Roger Rowland's Western Auto store here in Clarksville. There were other check stations scattered throughout Johnson County in those days, but as Roger usually had a big-buck contest -- the prize typically being a Winchester .30-30 -- just about all of the biggest bucks sooner or later ended up at his place.

I would sit there on the back dock, drinking a lime Nehi and listening in open-mouthed awe at the stories the lucky hunters would tell as they brought in their kills. For a 16-year-old, heaven could scarcely have been any sweeter.

My dad was a fisherman, and we spent many enjoyable days on the water together. But inside of me, apparently, was some primal longing that called out for something else. My first year out of high school, I ordered one of the sporterized Springfield 1903-A3 rifles that Herter's used to sell back then. Problem solved: I was ready to hunt deer.

The statewide deer harvest as recorded for 1970 was 26,017 animals. There were probably as many hunters back then as there are now (most estimates put the number of hunters at 275,000), so a lot of hunters went home empty-handed. But it should be pointed out that at the time, that harvest was considered a major accomplishment, coming as it did in a state where deer had been virtually nonexistent only three decades before.

Earl Pitts, one of the old-timers kind enough to let me tag along in those days, told this story as we sat once around a noonday campfire eating bologna sandwiches and drinking scalding coffee from a blackened pot. "Me and my dad were out cutting some firewood -- near as I can recollect, it was along about '37 or '38. As we chopped up the dead trees, just over the ridge there from where we are now" -- he pointed off to the west -- "we got pretty far from the wagon, so I walked back to bring it up.

"As I swung up to the seat, there was something standing there in the road we had come in on, maybe 50 yards away. I didn't know what it was at first, but then I realized it was a doe. And that was the first deer I ever saw!"

Sometimes as I now wander the same ridges that I visited as a boy, I wonder what those men with whom I hunted back then would think about the bounty we enjoy today. Last season 131,457 deer were taken here in the Natural State, up 23,001 from the 108,456 taken in 2003-04, or a percentage increase of just over 21. Some 13,094 were taken by archery tackle (crossbows included), 18,248 by muzzleloaders and 100,115 by modern guns. While that total's fallen off from the high-water marks achieved around the turn of the 21st century, most of that overall decline can be attributed to a reduction in doe harvest combined with reduced buck harvest in the mountain areas.

Where's the best place to go to kill a deer in Arkansas? Hands down, the vast region of timberland lying south of Little Rock within Deer Management Unit 4, the West Gulf Coastal Plain. This area is made up almost entirely of Deer Zone 12, where some 59,246 deer were taken last fall -- nearly half of the state total.

You'll notice that above I employed the new terminology now being used by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission in its deer management program. All these letters and numbers can admittedly be a little confusing at first, so refer to the map included with this article. You'll see that Arkansas now has a total of six DMUs, whereas in the past there were only four. This can only bode well for the future, since this system makes possible deer management schemes tailored for smaller areas with site-specific needs.