Make it hunter safety season, too

Saturday marks the opening of modern firearms deer season in Tennessee, and so a few words of advice to the thousands who will fill the state’s woods on this day and in the weeks to come: Be safe. Be smart. Know your limitations. But don’t just take our word for it. Listen to Memphian Bob Thurman, who shared his own cautionary tale this week from a hospital bed at The Med. He was there, with a broken left femur, after a 14-foot fall that occurred while he was alone, trying to attach a ladder stand to a tree.

If that sounds, even to a non-outdoorsman, like a two-man job, if only for safety’s sake, well, it is.

“When you’re hanging a ladder stand, you always need two people — one up in the stand and one on the ground making sure it doesn’t fall,” Thurman said. “I didn’t follow that rule, and it almost killed me.”

Thurman survived the fall, but in some ways the worst wasn’t over. He’d left his cellphone in his truck, so he had to crawl — for four hours — back to his allterrain vehicle. In his injured state, it took Thurman another two hours to climb onto the ATV and ride it to his truck, where he called for help.

A potentially fatal fall, followed by six hours of agonizing pain while trying to seek help — but easily preventable, by employing those old standbys, common sense and good judgment.

This, though, is not a tale of one hunter who made a mistake, compounded that mistake, and then — fortunately — lived to tell. This is one of those things that happen in the outdoors. This is one of the very real dangers of hunting. Tree-stand falls are the leading cause of hunting-related accidents in Tennessee. There were eight during the 2011-12 hunting season, including a fatality.

But there are any number of ways that hunters can get hurt, in likewise preventable ways. Commercial Appeal outdoors reporter Bryan Brasher, who wrote about Thurman’s ordeal, told a story on himself in a recent column. He told the story of opening day, five years ago, when he killed three does and then, without help, loaded them — with a combined weight of 340 pounds — into the back of his truck

“In the process, I ruined numerous discs in my thoracic spine and several more in the cervical region,” Brasher wrote. “I’ve lived with varying levels of pain every day since then ...”

And so on this opening day, we say: Careful out there.