In New Jersey: Venison and Bloody Fenders

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Fred Carlson is a stocky, sandy-haired man whose yellow rain suit gives him the appearance of a fire hydrant. He is standing in the doorway of the deer-checking station at Clinton, N.J., watching a cold rain that has fallen intermittently throughout the day. As a pickup truck driven by a man in a bright orange cap and jacket pulls up to the station, he puts down his soft-drink can, slips on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and steps out into the wet to watch while the team of state employees swing into action. The routine, already practiced a hundred times since sunup, is simple, though a trifle ghastly. Two burly men lift the dead whitetail deer out of the back of the truck and drop it on the bloody plywood platform of a large scale. Carlson's blond son Craig, 9, steps in, weighs the deer, calling out its weight in a clear, childish voice to three women sitting like the three Fates at a table behind the scale. As the hunter approaches the table to fill out a 15-item deer killer's form, an assistant clips a metal tag to one of the deer's hind legs while Carlson picks up a metal bar, wrenches the animal's jaw open to examine its teeth and then, grasping a small caliper, proceeds to measure the base of one of its antlers.

"Nice buck, about a year and a half old," he comments, straightening up to watch his helpers heave the carcass back into the pickup. "And well nourished too," he adds with a gesture toward the deer's six-pointed rack of antlers. "Antlers don't tell you anything about a deer's age. But they'll tell you how well he eats. A deer doesn't grow a rack like that unless he's getting plenty of food."

Carlson is assistant chief of New Jersey's wildlife management bureau. Because 130,000 licensed hunters may be loose in the New Jersey woods, he and his crew are not the only fish and game officials working. The state, which estimates the New Jersey deer population at an astonishing 100,000, runs 76 such check-out stations. But the Carlson & Co. post, located in rural Hunterdon County, is one of the busiest. By the time Carlson peels off his gloves and heads for home and supper at 8 p.m., the kill figure will have reached 209.

Ten years ago, even in a crowded state like New Jersey, Deer hunting was still the province of rugged individuals who bought their licenses, blasted their deer out of the woods and lugged them home on car fenders without too much supervision. For many of them, the deer season was the only chance each year of really getting free of feminine domestication to hunt, drink and rough it, a combination of Boy Scoutery and male blood rite. In New Jersey, for a brief period, deer hunting also became a form of semi-legalized mayhem as unqualified hunters, often as loaded as the weapons they carried, took to the woods with buckshot, and, along with their deer, managed to kill a fair number of cows—and fellow sportsmen.