Most of us have finally gotten over the Thanksgiving feast and are now resting our appetite for the next holiday, Christmas, unless we can come up with one before the 25th.

I am ready for the feast now that it is going to be a while before I have to go back to the doctor. Now I can gain weight for the holidays and lose it before the next appointment.

Deer meat and sucker sides will help put on weight with the holiday foods.

Several deer were taken over the holidays and into the first of this month.

I saw several good bucks and with that several hunters have filled out their buck tags and have only doe tags left.

Putting meat in the freezer is what they will be doing for the rest of the season and eating good for the rest of the winter.

But another hunter, a young man, got a doe and was prouder of his doe than all the other folks were of their bucks. It was his first deer. Even better than that his dad and granddad have not scored this year. He was crowing loudly when I talked with him at one of the local eateries.

I asked him how far did she run when he shot. He gave me a strange look and said she didn’t, fell on the spot. A good shot is one that drops the deer on the spot, no running. He has learned that at a young age.

I remember the first deer I shot with a rifle. I shot it in the shoulder with a 35-caliber Marlin lever action.

The entire front of the deer was blooded and we ended up throwing that part away. That was the first and last deer that I shot in the shoulder. From then on it was a neck shot. I was lucky on that first deer as it dropped right there.

All the neck shots since then have dropped in their tracks. When you are shooting at a small place like a neck there is a chance that you will clean miss a shot. If you miss there is always another day and another deer.

When you get so you don’t ever miss a shot, you probably have quit shooting. You can get good enough that you seldom miss. And then you get old and can’t hold the rifle still and your eyesight goes so it really doesn’t matter that you can’t hold the rifle still.

Hopefully by then you have children and grandchildren and have trained them to be better shots than you ever were and they can take over the hunting, leaving the dreaming and living in the past to you.

We had a little rain before Thanksgiving and then last week we had a lot of rain and then sent in to our north to see it again as water flowing down the rivers.

We certainly got enough at my house and from the looks of things, most everywhere else.

I went over the bridge in Chattahoochee and saw six gates up last week. We were still full up here and below the dam was over full, though not as much as the week before. The water was high there, but not quite as high as it had been.

Now they will be under flood conditions again. We can only hold so much water up here so we have to let it go on downstream. It puts the folks downstream in a bad way sometimes, but what if we had no dam. We couldn’t control it as much as we do or at least the Corps of Engineers couldn’t.

It will take a while for fishing to get back to normal. but hunting should be OK right now.  Remember the key to getting a deer is putting hours in the stand.  The average is about 14 hours per deer killed. That includes all those beginners and other folks from Atlanta and other large cities. It probably won’t take near that many hours for the seasoned hunters we have in southwest Georgia.

Good luck and wear your orange.