Hunt Green

In the last year or so, a marketing term has been splashed everywhere we turn - Fill in the blank - Green. Live Green. Drive Green. Go Green. Shop Green. Hunt Green. Ok, fine - I may have just made that last one up. It seems to be the popular thing to do, though, so I decided to try and think of ways that hunters can hunt green - so here goes:

Hunting green. It’s very important to the environment that we hunt green. I’m proud to say, I’ve been hunting green my entire life. Just the other day, I was bear hunting with my brother, Todd, and we were noticing the green bear scat. Or, rather he was noticing - it looked like your normal, everyday scat to me - more on the why of that later. I took Todd’s word for the color, but we’re both knowledgeable enough to know that bear scat is normally not green, so it was with some confusion that we pondered this green scat. You see, when hunting, sometimes the animal activity is slow - and you ponder strange things. We pondered scat because there was nothing else to ponder at the moment. It donned on us, then, that the bears were obviously so concerned about the place they call home, that they had been chomping grass - pounds and pounds of grass - so that they could green up their home. They were living green, and I was happy for the lifestyle they had chosen. Todd and I started hunting green - hunting green scat, that is. When we found some, we knew there had recently been a bear in the area, and we stopped to take a closer look at our surroundings. We wanted to be careful - as we wouldn’t want to get too close to a bear, lest we become bear food, and cause them to quit their green lifestyle.

A few years ago, my dad, my grandpa, and I were hunting whitetail in northern Idaho. My dad shot a whitetail, and Grandpa and I went down to help him pack it out. Only, my grandpa and I are smart, perhaps too smart, and we tied neon green ribbon to the trees as we headed down to his buck because northern Idaho is heavily timbered, and we kind of liked the idea of finding our way back to the pickup. What we didn’t take into account is that Grandpa and I are both color blind, and neon green looks an awful lot like the yellowish lichen that hangs on those trees to color blind folk. Grandpa and I were so proud of ourselves for being so smart as to hang the ribbon on the trees, and we struck out in the lead to follow our green trail of ribbons. We started hunting green. But, we couldn’t find it. We took a few hesitant steps, then, “Ah ha! There’s one,” I would claim. We would go hike over to the tree, reach up to pull the green ribbon off, only to find that our green ribbon had turned into lichen! It does that sometimes. Then Grandpa would say, “Over there! There’s one of our ribbons!” Yes, now we were real proud of ourselves, we’d found a ribbon! But this one turned into lichen by the time we reached it, too. Dad finally figured out what was going on, and after he got up off the ground from laughing at us, he started to hunt green - and he had much better success than we did. At last, we found the pickup. It was not green, but we were happy to see it, anyways.

When I was young, I used to hunt green animals. This is another problem with being color blind - people don’t tell you what color the animal is that you’re trying to hunt. So, I hunted green animals. I found some now and again, but someone would always tell me they were brown, or tan, or cream, or gray, or reddish, or…I got so confused I gave up hunting green animals. I am sorry for the negative effect this has likely had on the environment. Maybe one day, we will all learn what it is to truly hunt green, and the world will be a better place because of it.