THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 25, 1995 TAG: 9511250272
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE ALLEN, THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: SURRY LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
Hounds yelped across the fields of a plantation Friday. Burly men, eager boys and at least one woman gobbled grits, hash browns and sausage in the barn before heading out to hunt. Kerosene lanterns threw shadows on six cured hams dangling from the rafters. Hay bales flanked the burlap-covered tables.
Although the setting was meant to conjure up the atmosphere of the 19th century, the hay bales hid a propane heater. Decaffeinated coffee was on hand and a local restaurant had stocked the breakfast bar. And the hunters were not gentlemen farmers; they were participants in an agrarian fantasy catered by the state.
For $250, the Southern Heritage Deer Hunt promised to whisk suburbanites back to the years before the Civil War, when Virginia gentry emulated European aristocrats by gathering to feast, brag and shoot wild game. ``Hunt 1,000 acres of a 1619 Virginia plantation, not hunted in over 30 years,'' the brochure read.
The expedition on the plantation, which is now a state park, was the most elaborate of the increasing efforts by Virginia and other states to entice citizens to hunt the deer that are over-running many areas.
Jim Lunsford, a retired music teacher from Haymarket, who was here on his wedding anniversary, said he had told his daughter about the hunt package's three hearty meals, which were billed as chances to ``regale each other with stories from the field.''
``She said: `Do you have decent enough hunting clothes to wear to something like that? You can't wear the same thing in the morning and the afternoon.' '' Lunsford recalled.
Like the others, he settled for the camouflage and blaze orange that made the 27 shotgun-toting hunters look like soldiers in a wilderness war, waiting for horse-drawn wagons to take them to the forest.
The group traversed Chippokes Plantation, across the James River from Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World. The plantation, which before the Civil War had 22 slaves and produced cotton, wheat and corn, was donated to the state in 1967. The brick plantation house is open for tours, and the state leases 500 acres for farming.
Hunting has been banned on the plantation since the state took it over. The deer have grown hungry and rambunctious, pawing today's crops of peanuts and soybeans until the farmer who leases the land demanded a rent reduction.
Both the trust of the deer and their abundance on the plantation made for a hunter's heaven. ``They'll be educated by dark, if you know what I mean,'' said Mack Walls, a state wildlife biologist on the hunt.
Fifteen deer - nine does, and about half of those pregnant - were dead by noon, when the hunters trooped back for pork barbecue, baked beans and corn pudding.
With the temperature in the 30s and 40s all day and with a drizzle all afternoon, some hunters wore coats so thick they looked like firefighters. The group included a postmaster, an oral surgeon and a scuba shop owner. Among the hunters was one woman, Carla Nichols, 33, a commercial real-estate researcher from Alexandria, who was hunting for the first time. A 10-year-old and a 14-year-old, boys shooting with their fathers, each downed his first deer.
The hunt began at 5 a.m. First the master of the hunt, H. Kirby Burch, the director of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, told the group, ``If there's anything I can do to make your stay more pleasant, short of shooting the deer for you, I'll be glad to.''
Then the Rev. Thomas W. Bauer, an Episcopal minister, offered the traditional Anglican blessing of the hounds, which he said went back 1,300 years.
Hunt organizers had planned for him to wear a 19th-century sackcloth robe, borrowed from a local historical re-enactment group, but the costume did not arrive in time. So the minister settled for his standard white linen vestment.
``As you hounds are faithful to your masters, may your masters be as faithful to God,'' Bauer prayed. A hunt club released three dozen squealing dogs to flush deer into the open.
Some hunters consider the use of hounds to be cheating. Michael A. Francis, a program director at The Wilderness Society, a conservation group, said in an interview, ``In Vermont, where I grew up, if you took a dog to hunt deer, somebody would probably shoot the dog.''
At 77, the master of the hounds, Dick Pittman, has lived many of the customs that Friday's customers were mimicking. He recalled the hunting traditions that prevailed while he was growing up near the plantation.
``Of a Saturday morning, one farmer would blow his hunting horn, and then the next fellow further down would blow his, and so on,'' he said. ``The hounds would follow a horse's trail to the piece of woods you wanted to hunt.''
Pittman paused and looked at the pack of hounds. ``Today,'' he said, ``we haul 'em around in pickup trucks.'' ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS color photo
Twenty-seven hunters boarded wagons Friday for the first Southern
Heritage Deer Hunt.
Photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II, The Virginian-Pilot
Hunters participating Friday in a Colonial-style hunt on Chippokes
Plantation board mule-drawn covered wagons, ready to do their part
toward thinning out the whitetail deer population.
KEYWORDS: DEER HUNTING by CNB