"Me and my dad were out cutting some firewood," recalled Earl Pitts. "Near as I can recollect it was along about 1937 or '38. We were just over that ridge there from where we are right now." He pointed off to the west.

"At one point, we got pretty far from the wagon, so I walked back to bring it up. As I swung up onto the seat, there was something standing there in the road we had come in on, maybe 50 yards behind me.

"I didn't know what it was at first, but then I realized it was a doe. That was the first deer I ever saw!"

That little story was told back in the late 1960s as the old-timers I was hunting with and I sat around our noonday campfire, eating bologna sandwiches and drinking scalding hot coffee from an old coffeepot that had seen better days. Most of the men at that fire were only in their 40s at the time, but ancient to my youthful way of thinking, and they had lived through the true hard times of Arkansas deer hunting. Consider that back in the 1930s, estimates put our total deer herd at somewhere around 500 animals, and even in the 1960s, we considered just seeing a half-dozen whitetails in a season a good year.

So for the Natural State deer hunter, these truly are the good old days!

Today's published estimates put our overall deer herd in the range of 1 million animals.

According to Arkansas Game & Fish Commission figures, our checked harvest for last season was 184,991 animals, up from 169,853 in 2007-08. Since most reports put Natural State hunter numbers at somewhere around 275,000, that means our success ratio is in the 67 to 68 percent range. That is an all-time high if you disregard the few seasons at the end of the past century when we wore out the does. Some 108,000 of those deer were bucks; leaving 76,721 does, a slightly skewed ratio that could indicate a problem somewhere down the line.

I have joked many times that all you have to do to find a good place to hunt in Arkansas is take a dart and toss it at a map of the state. Anywhere it lands will be a good spot unless you land in the middle of the Arkansas River, because virtually every single county in our state has good deer numbers.

Naturally, some hunting spots are better than others, and this article is designed to look at what numbers and experience tell us should be the best of the best for the coming season. But before we begin, some terminology guidelines need to be established.

There are three types of land in Arkansas: public land, managed public land and private land.