On opening morning, beams of light poked through the night ahead, pickups kicking up dust in their rush to line up at the gate to the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina. Until the rangers opened the barriers, there was time to shoot the bull with neighbors. When catching on to my accent, they reacted with a surprised look, because another German was rumored to have hunted here the season before. Even odder, he had celebrated his success by sounding a bugle. With a mischievous smile I assured them that I know this guy and showed them the very hunting horn which had echoed through the Uwharrie on November 23, 1970.
On the morning of that day, I had also stood in line, eager for my first chance ever to hunt a whitetail buck. As I had been warned that hunting openers in the USA tended to reverberate with salvos akin to wartime battles, and human casualties were not uncommon, I was somewhat apprehensive. This would need some getting used to, as at home deer hunting seasons stretched for half a year, involved less than 1% of the population and hunting accidents were virtually unheard of.
Once the
