Home, Home on the Preserve

Frank Bergin, 26, of Pelham, N.Y., unloaded his rucksack and propped his .30/06 rifle against a tree. He had driven half the night, hiked five miles through the wilderness from the highway. Now for a snooze, and then on with the great bear hunt. A year before, in the same remote Adirondack clearing, he had come across black bear tracks, marked the spot carefully on a map. Came the dawn. Bergin yawned, stretched, looked around—to see twelve equally expectant faces peering curiously at him from behind the trees. Without a word, he rolled up his sleeping bag, hiked the five miles to the highway, drove half the day back to Pelham. "Where's the bear?" asked his wife. Bergin just growled. "What got into you?" she said.

The same thing that gets into most U.S. hunters. There is no shortage of game—just a superabundance of hunters (15 million this year) and a paucity of places to hunt. Wary farmers post NO TRESPASSING signs; creeping asphalt and urban sprawl gobble up more land each year. What open land remains is often overcrowded. Last week in northern Michigan's Ogemaw County, the deer hunter population was 100 per sq. mi. In the East, it is worth a man's life to venture into the woods. "I don't know which is safer," says one hunter. "Wearing a Day-Glo coat or hanging a pair of antlers on my head." So what does today's hunter do if he wants to bag his game and live to eat it? He heads for a private shooting preserve.

Boars on Horseback. Preserves are nothing new. New Hampshire's 25,000-acre Blue Mountain Forest Inc. was stocked in 1890 with deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and Himalayan mountain goats. Railroad Magnate Austin Corbin chased boars there on horse back with javelins. Today, there are nearly 2,000 preserves in the U.S.—most of them open to anybody with a box of shells and a handful of greenbacks. Some are nothing more than dusty, played-out farms, stocked with a few pheasants and partridges. Others cater to the whims of an affluent society.

At Michigan's Metamora Shoot (members: Henry Ford II, American Motors' Roy Chapin), the "in" uniform is a pair of torn khaki trousers patched with adhesive tape, and the "in" gun is a $1,000 Winchester 21 double shotgun. A few preserves even have their own aircraft landing strips ("Taxi Right Up to the Clubhouse," boasts California's Hidden Valley Club, favorite retreat of Lawrence Welk and Oilman Earl Gilmore). Wisconsin's Rainbow Springs stocks pheasant, quail, partridge and ducks, offers a 41-room clubhouse, skeet and trap ranges, a swimming pool, ice-skating, and an 18-hole golf course.