THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 17, 1996 TAG: 9601170021
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: Long : 160 lines
IMAGINE LOOKING out the back door of your farm house and spotting a big white deer in your soybean field. It's a good-sized buck, maybe an eight-point buck, the color of a bunny rabbit. It has pale hooves and pink eyes. And you want to kill it.
That's how it's been for Katherine Taylor these past several weeks. There's a white buck out there, and she knows it. She hasn't seen it yet, but she knows it's there. And just about every hunter in Smithfield and Isle of Wight County knows it, too. It's not exactly like having Moby Dick on your property, but it's close. Few kills could be sweeter than an albino buck.
Not that it hasn't been done. Back in November, ``Tom Thumb'' Jordan took a white buck in the Everetts area, just about 5 miles up Route 10 from Taylor's farm in Smithfield. Katherine's husband, Robbie, saw it. It was ``solid white,'' he says, maybe a six-pointer.
Matt Knox, deer project specialist for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, says an albino whitetail deer is ``extremely rare.'' Only two albinos were reported killed last year in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. So Jordan was halfway toward meeting last year's record.
The trouble is, there are white deer and then there are albino deer. A white deer has brown eyes (Katherine, who scores deer for the Virginia Peninsula Sportsman's Association, has even seen blue eyes), but an albino has pink eyes. And those pale white hooves.
Very rare.
Still, everybody's fairly certain the buck around the Taylor property is the genuine article.
Katherine says, ``I had one fellow say to me, `I'll guarantee you a good place to hunt in Surry if you get me the opportunity to hunt that buck.' ''
Another hunter, a customer at Ken's Barbeque, where Katherine is a waitress, told her he had seen the buck. Seems he turned on the light in his back yard about a week ago and saw it. That big white buck was right there, eating from a bag of dog food.
Stories like that just made Katherine more eager to take the buck before deer season closed last Saturday.
She wouldn't kill it just for the sake of killing it. Katherine Taylor is no bloodthirsty hunter, not at all. In her mind, there are hunters and there are killers. And she's a hunter. ``Killers are rednecks and booze drinkers,'' she says. ``They poach, they have no respect for the land, and no respect for the animal. I'd turn one in in a minute.''
A true hunter knows and respects the animal he's hunting, Katherine says. And as a responsible hunter, she believes an albino, as striking as it might be in the wild, needs to be culled from the herd. ``It's genetically inferior,'' she says, and so it's best if it's not left to breed.
Not to mention that an albino would be one heck of a trophy.
It was hard to squeeze in any hunting time between getting her three kids off to school and going to work at Ken's, but Katherine managed to pull on her camouflage clothing Thursday morning after the school bus had come. She was hopeful but realistic. ``Probably won't see anything,'' she said. ``Not that white buck. Finding that buck would be like finding a needle in a haystack.''
A light snow had fallen during the night, and the morning air was bitter cold. To give her energy, Katherine pulled her Jeep up to a nearby market and bought breakfast to go: a chocolate peanut butter bar and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. Then she was down one of the roads on her 300 acres, scanning the fields with her eyes.
She stopped on the edge of one wide, stubbly field where just hours earlier deer and turkey had roamed. Their tracks were everywhere: the deep, almond-shaped pairs of divots the deer had left and the three-toed marks of turkeys. Katherine pointed to one turkey track and guessed it came from a good-sized tom. She's so accustomed to the woods and fields that she can tell the difference between a hen's tracks and a tom's tracks.
As for the deer tracks, some of the tracks looked a whole lot like they belonged to a big buck.
She entered the woods, her boots crunching the snow and fallen leaves. It was hard to be quiet. Up ahead, the bark on a sapling cedar had been sheared away. ``A buck did that,'' she said. Farther in, there was another sure sign of a buck: a fresh scraping on the ground. So fresh that no new snow had fallen over it.
Katherine decides this is the place to sit and wait.
For nearly an hour, she sits as still as possible, her back against a small tree, her knees bent and her toes buried beneath the leaves. Her shotgun, a 12-gauge Remington 1187, Special Edition, rests on one thigh. Light flurries float among the trees, but the sky is deep blue. The woods are so quiet, only the leaves make noise.
Then somewhere behind her comes a knocking sound, as if a deer is pawing, or perhaps it is the buck stepping slowly toward his scraping. A buck always returns to his scraping to see if a doe has been by. Then, if he catches her scent there, he'll be off on his own hunt.
Katherine listens as closely as she can. But it's too quiet this morning, she says. And it's the end of the deer season. Everybody knows that by the end of the season, which opened all the way back in November, the deer have become more wary. Their sense of smell has been quickened and fine-tuned, and their sense of danger has grown keen.
Katherine decides the sounds she hears are just birds. Then the crows start in - three of them, cackling and carrying on. ``Stupid crows,'' she says. ``I hate crows.''
Back when she was a little girl in Pachuta, Miss., Katherine had a cousin who ate a crow. ``My grandfather had a rule: if you shoot it, you eat it,'' she says. ``So when my cousin shot a crow, he had to eat it.''
The first animal Katherine shot was a squirrel. She was about 6 years old, and she took it with a shotgun. And she ate it. When she turned 12, her father, Kenneth Harris, gave her a recurve bow and arrow for her birthday. She used the bow and arrow to shoot a bobcat out of a tree. She did not eat it.
By the time she was a teen-ager, Katherine had become something like a female Davy Crockett, a regular woods person, attuned to the wild and loving it. ``My woods were my serenity,'' she says. ``I'd have lizards and snakes and turtles and frogs. I watched so many animals. I learned how they behaved.''
Her sister and three brothers, all of whom live in Hampton Roads, are hunters, although Katherine's sister, Donna, ``hasn't killed anything but a couple doves,'' Katherine says. Their mother, who lives in Chuckatuck, hunted a few times, but she doesn't hunt now.
Katherine thinks it's no big deal to see a woman wearing blaze orange out in the woods with a shotgun. ``Not one person, other than my ex-boyfriend, has ever tried to browbeat me about hunting,'' she says.
Matt Knox, the deer expert, says that out of the about 240,000 deer hunters in Virginia, there is no way of telling how many are women. ``We could ask, but we never have,'' Knox says. ``It's not unusual at all for a woman to hunt.''
But it may be unusual for a woman to be a hunter, a practical nurse, a professional cake decorator, a mother, a teacher of hunting ethics and muzzle-loading techniques, and a wolf breeder at the same time. Katherine Taylor does them all.
But out on the trail of the notorious albino buck of Smithfield, she hasn't been successful. One hour still-hunting by the fresh scraping isn't enough, as it turns out. Back in her Jeep, she takes a swig of her Yoo-Hoo and shrugs. ``Maybe I'll get a chance to hunt one more time before the season ends,'' she says, ``but I doubt it.''
Back at home, in the 1857 farmhouse she shares with husband Robbie and their three children, there's plenty to do. It's a warm, welcome kind of home, with friends stopping in the kitchen and at least three kinds of chickens wandering out back. The wolves (``hybrid wolves,'' she is quick to say), pace in their pen. Eight beagles gambol in a pen next door. This is a farming place, an animal place.
Katherine and Robbie even had a pet buck once, a deer they found as a newborn out in one of the fields. They named it Bucky. They raised it to be a nice-sized buck that roamed inside the house and out. But once it started crossing the road, they took Bucky to the 4-H center in Wakefield and turned him loose, never to be hunted.
The Taylors love deer. Katherine says each one is different, each has a personality, like people. And the albino? ``I've always wanted to take one and get it out of the herd,'' Katherine says. ``It's different. Reminds me of myself.''
For now, that albino is on the loose, having eluded Katherine and the other hunters this season.
If poachers don't get it, Katherine will try to catch sight of it now and then.
Next season, it could be hers. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by VICKI CRONIS\The Virginian-Pilot
Katherine Taylor, right, is an experienced hunter. She recently went
into the woods, above, searching for an albino deer seen nearby.
Photo
Katherine Taylor sits quietly in the woods in Smithfield waiting for
the albino deer to appear.
by CNB