| By Bob Weaver
Hunters will be flocking to Sunny Cal this weekend, and supplies on grocery shelves will likely run low.
Although the influx from Ohio and other states has slowed in recent years.
Deer camps will be crowded with men, boys, girls, guns, food, and basic essentials, like beer.
Refined hunters will take to their tree stands or tree shacks, while others will hit the woods on their ATVs and UTVs.
Yes, deer season opens Monday.
It can be a pretty costly hobby for some, buying property in the county with cabin, to "come in" once a year. A few years ago a $60,000 truck went by my house with a long trailer and four ATVs.
Much of last century, Calhoun men would load up in a car and drive through deep snow or blizzard conditions to the higher mountains of West Virginia to hunt deer.
Few deer existed in Sunny Cal.
That certainly has changed.
Year 'round, worse in rutting season, drivers practice the art of dodging the critters, while WV has the highest incidence of collisions.
Some of my relatives, maybe yours too, had an old flat-bed International or Ford truck on which they built wooden shacks, some resembling extended outhouses with stove pipes sticking from the roof.
Poor man's campers, back then.
The distribution of deer into the smaller mountains commenced in force in the 1950's, and more and more hunters stayed back to kill the local buck.
During the early 1950s you could hunt from daylight to dark, all week, without spotting a single deer.
Sighting tracks before the season was a preoccupation.
When you did sight a track, it was almost as gratifying as killing the animal, giving you bragging rights 'til next season.
By the early 1960s the deer kill rose to a hundred or so in the county. Now they're thick, except when the guns start banging.
Before season starts, they come in my yard, eating the grass, shrubs, flowers and herbs in the planters.
I knew it was over when our cat Callie would be spotted rubbing noses with the critters.
School is closed, the education system long giving up on maintaining attendance.
And if you need work done, repairs, services, etc., don't bother to call. They're in the woods.
Let the hunt begin. | 
