Is This Buck Legal?

How to survive if lost in the woods: Build a fire using your waterproof matches or a cotton ball smeared with Vaseline; fire your gun three times after hunting hours; and hope you left a hunting plan and a stamp of your bootsole on foil beneath your car's window wipers. Stay where you are; find or build a shelter for the night; know that you can live for 14 days without eating but only 3 days without water; and no Missouri stream is clean enough to drink straight up. How to hunt turkeys in season (April and November): Don't wear red, white, blue or black, turkey colors; keep your back against a thick tree or rock; don't make too loud of a turkey call; don't shoot roosting turkeys (it's not fair); aim at their heads; put the turkey that just bought the big casino into a hunter's-orange bag, tucking the wings in so no other turkey hunter imagines it's a live one. . .some of the many tips from Missouri's ten-hour hunter's education course. Free to all students 11 and older thanks to Missouri's one-eighth-of-one-cent sales tax that funds our marvelous state parks, conservation areas, shooting ranges and programs. A husband-and-wife team taught us how a muzzle loader works, how to track game, I.D. six kinds of firearm actions, and the six ways to carry long guns safely on the hunt. Much emphasis on safety. A million Missouri hunters have taken this course, reducing the average number of fatal hunting "incidents" from 20 per year to 4. I passed the 50-question written test, earned the coveted orange patch and now with this credential maybe with my squirty little .410 I can tag along with friends who hunt birds at Marais Temps Clair. I've never hunted. My father did, sometimes. He certainly wouldn't have taken a female along.

My coveted patch, earned 3/22/12

Our first speaker, though, was a young former hunter who accidentally killed his best friend's father--involuntary manslaughter normally avenged by eight years in the pen. He got five years' probation and cannot own a firearm or hunt. The best friend and his family withdrew their friendship, which he understands, he said. As the speaker left the front of the room, one man, with great simple American manly grace stood up, took the young man's hand, and said, "I'm sorry, brother."

Why'd I take this course, mandatory only for hunters born after 1966? Because this is the environment I live in and the people I meet.