Less Firing, More Range

Thanksgiving season is here, that magical time of year when the leaves are falling, the air is crisp and clear, warm pumpkin pies cool on windowsills and dudes go into the woods to kill stuff.

When I was a teenager in Virginia in the 1970s, that meant waking up early on Saturday, throwing on a heavy coat and a blaze-orange vest, and walking out the back door with a .410 shotgun to go lean against a stump for a few hours. Maybe you'd eat a Snickers bar, think about why that pretty girl ignores you in high school, and stare at a few squirrels without blinking for as long as you could until your eyes watered and they morphed into little furry tree monsters. If you got too bored or cold and didn't see any deer, you'd switch the shells in your gun from slugs to shot and blast those squirrels and eat them for dinner, which also had the side benefit of allowing you to get home in time to watch Wahoo McDaniel and Ric Flair on "Mid Atlantic Championship Wrestling" at noon. It was a typical childhood, really.

Well, those wholesome and simple ways of killing are long gone. Now shooting animals for sport seems less a bucolic escape from Blackberries and work and iPhones and traffic, and more like an extension of the Bluetooth world we're supposedly evading. Today's hunters use GPS devices so they don't get lost, and their bear-hunting dogs wear fancy remote-control tracking collars so they don't do the same. We map out deer trails in advance with motion-sensor cameras, and use night-vision goggles to spot treed raccoons instead of just shining a two-dollar flashlight up there like my granddaddy did when he'd take us coon hunting.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are roughly 100,000 fewer people hunting every year in the U.S. in the five-year span from 2001 to 2006—down from 13 million hunters to 12.5 million—yet we still spent $22.9 billion dollars on the sport in the last year of the survey. Today, there are thousands of offbeat products looking for a piece of that pie, so instead of walking into the woods chomping on watermelon-flavored Dubble Bubble like I did as a boy, sporting goods advertisers now tell you you'd better worry about the deer smelling your breath. Which brings us to "Gum-o-Flage," a specialty gum that "creates a natural scent that won't spook game." It comes in Alfalfa Honey, Pine, and Apple. Because you know if there's one thing a deer will not tolerate when it's being shot, it's garlicky halitosis.

If killing geese and pretending you're a bovine is more the way you swing, why not slip into your very own cow decoy, which is basically a life-sized fake cow that you can hide inside of. After all, as the Web site for the giant hunting retailer Cabela's asks about the version it sells—the Webfoot Confidence Cow— "What could be more harmless than a cow grazing in a field?" Well, a lot of things could be more harmless if there's a bull in the same field, so be careful. And if you're wondering how you're going to see those geese, don't: "Two viewing ports allow you to keep an eye on the flock and a rubber grip handle makes carrying the decoy easy." Side benefit: both of those features could come in handy when you're running away from love-struck Ferdinand.

Let's say your breath isn't too smelly; whatever animal you're disguised as today has fooled your prey; and you've just shot that big buck you called-in with your electronic deer call, using the button marked "lost fawn." Who wants to wait until they get back to town to see exactly how big the rack is? Not me! Now you don't have to, because you can use the "Rackulator," proudly billed by the manufacturer as "The World's Only Electronic Calculating Big Game Scoring Tool!" It's sort of a high-tech tape measure that you trace over the antlers and it tells you your rack score instantly—in seven different scoring categories! And it can be yours for only $119.95 (I planned to make way more fun of this, but now after reading about it, I really want one).