mayBe IT’S TIME TO CLEAN HOUSE?

I stood there listening to my neighbor’s full throttled rant, absolutely dumbfounded by the surreal nature of the entire situation. I’d known him for about five years, and he had always impressed me as a pretty darn calm, fair minded and rational person. I was now seriously questioning those conclusions.

The issue was that the neighbors to his west, a halfmile off my property line, had legally shot and tagged two 1½-year-old bucks, and it was only three days deep into rifle season. His concern, and I quote, was that, “If they keep this up, we won’t have anything to hunt next year! Can you believe they can be so short sighted and selfish? They are (messing) both of us over!”

I knew right then, this would be the end of our loose collection of neighbors allowing unquestioned access to retrieve deer, or any other truly legit reason any of us might have to cross each other’s property lines. Up to that point, none of us even expected to be called first, because we trusted each other for having good reasons, and that had been working well.

This was years ago, but even the younger version of me was smart enough to know that all would change, now that we were turning on each other. The cherry