We’ve established what the Tiger Woods, John “Wild Thing” Daly meme represents. Tiger stands in for the established traditions of hunting and fishing. Wild Things are the rule-breakers. Instead of tweed or Gore-Tex, when the weather turns foul, they wear an old coat held together with camo duct tape. My two previous columns on the topic provide more clarity if you haven’t yet read them.
Last week we graded anglers on the Tiger/Wild Thing spectrum. This week hunters take their turn on the therapist’s couch. Our spectrum includes five grades: Full Tiger, Leans Tiger, Stuck in the Middle with You, Leans Wild Thing and Full Wild Thing.
Double-barrel bird hunters — You only hunt upland birds, and you only hunt with a double-barrel shotgun. Grade: Leans Tiger. If your shotgun is a side-by-side 28-gauge, you’re Full Tiger.
Elk addicts — You spend all your free time after elk season ends researching and applying for the best special-permit bull elk hunts across the country for the upcoming fall. You’ve killed a bull elk every season for the last decade, and many years you’ve killed more than one. You’re archery-only now, and you’re hesitant to bother with anything that might score less than 400 points. Grade: Full Tiger.
Cow elk specialists — You killed your first elk when you were 17: a raghorn while hunting with your dad. You killed a 325-point elk when you were 24, and that European-style mount is your biggest ever and still hangs on the wall of your home office. Today, your perfect elk hunt goes like this: you get off work, and on the way home you swing by the ranch that encouraged you to take a cow off the south pasture using your depredation tag. You shoot it, field dress it, then back the truck up to the carcass to get it home. You break that elk down yourself and don’t bother with red meat at the grocery store for a year. Grade: Stuck in the Middle with You.
Part-time pheasant hunter — You only hunt pheasants once a year, the fall weekend your old high school gang gets back together in town (you’re the only one who hasn’t yet moved to the big city). Your only shotgun is a 12-gauge pump and your only dog is a black Lab. Birds are optional (that’s not what the black Lab thinks), but good times with your old crew are mandatory. Grade: Leans Wild Thing.
Ten-gauge types — You gave up goose hunting when lead was banned because steel doesn’t hit hard enough on big birds. You gave the hobby another try after you bought your first 10-gauge. Now you use all your vacation time in the light-geese season. You tell people you’re saving up your money for a pink-footed goose hunt in Scotland because it sounds exotic, but you’ll never go. Grade: Full Wild Thing.
Varmint shooters — You call every ground-dwelling squirrel-like rodent you come across a picket pin, and when you were younger you spent a fair share of your free time plinking them. You don’t shoot them much these days, but when you see too many picket pins digging dens in a pasture, you lament the way kids these days waste their time indoors playing “Resident Evil Requiem” when they could be out shooting picket pins. Grade: Full Wild Thing.
Trophy mule deer hunters — Shooting trophy whitetails is too pedestrian for your tastes, so you’ve become an elite mule deer hunter. People think you’re nuts when you tell them you’re headed to Kansas to hunt muleys, but you know the grain fields along the rivers in the western part of the state are where to spend your time if you want a 200-point buck. Grade: Full Tiger.
Pass up pheasants for quail — I confess. I used to hunt both birds near home on the Great Plains, but the last few years I’ve almost stopped carrying heavier pheasant loads. If my dog gets on roosters, we work them for the dog’s sake. I mostly let them fly these days, however. A couple quail are a good day for me now. I can pluck both in 20 minutes. If I shoot a brace of pheasants, I’ll be fussing with them until midnight. Grade: Full Tiger but getting on in years.