Outdoor pranks contribute to fun for all of us. One of my favorites was conceived and carried out by a deer hunter in Simpson County. The devious fellow took a trip to Colorado for some mule deer hunting. While there he found an antler shed from one of those giant muleys that no one ever sees except on the day after the deer season closes. Some of those old mountain bucks grow antlers as wide as a yardstick and taller than a bale of hay. And you can’t reach your hand around the beam even up at the first tine. That’s the kind of shed antler this fellow stumbled upon in the Rockies.

Now, he knew a member of his hunting club in Simpson County who always got excited when there was talk around the camp house about big bucks. This excitable chap hunted hard for the big one everyone had seen but no one could kill. Most deer clubs has that one buck around. When a hunter came in reporting another sighting, this hunter would be in that spot for days and weeks, waiting and watching, intent upon bagging the monster and laying claim to the title of Master Deerslayer.

Recalling his friend’s excitability, the mule deer hunter hit upon an idea. He took the giant shed antler to the Simpson County deer club woods and laid it in the leaves. The spot he picked was a little ways from an out-of-the-way tree stand that belonged to the susceptible hunter. The victim, true to his vigilance in the unrelenting pursuit of the “bull of the woods”, soon found the shed and rushed into camp showing it off to the troops, all of whom were in on the scheme. They listened wide-eyed as he told of his plan to bag that buck. As far as I know he is still hunting that big deer, perhaps sitting for days on end in the cold and the rain each deer season, watching and waiting expectantly for a buck that dropped the antler 2,000 miles away.

Then there was the time when some young rural chaps in East Texas decided there was a dearth of excitement thereabouts and concocted a plan to liven things up. They made a heavy duty set of tom walkers. Remember tom walkers? They were called stilts in dignified circles. To the bottom end of each stilt, they nailed realistically carved wooden replicas of bird feet. The carvings had the typical three long toes forward and one to the rear, all complete with protruding toenails. The huge feet were more than 30 inches long!

The mischievous crew waited for the first good rain and then proceeded to send one of their number, mounted on the tom walkers, out through one of the local farmer’s corn field. It was only a day or two before the giant bird tracks were discovered and things got interesting in East Texas. Meetings were held and posses were formed. Armed men, traveling in pairs or small groups, never alone, stalked about the countryside searching for the elephant-size fowl.

Speculation on what, or whom, the monster bird fed upon was among the more interesting of the topics around the community’s gathering places. Each time the furor began to fade, the conniving bunch would get out the tom walkers and make another pass across someone’s muddy field.

Both of these playful tricks show that it is amazing what the human imagination can create, both in the insidious minds of perpetrators as well as in the susceptible dreams of their victims. These pranks help keep alive the spirits of the big, mean creatures that are “out there” in the outdoors. May we, and all generations of the future, have our imaginations enriched by the Big Bad Wolf and Sasquatch and Bigfoot and bucks as big as horses and man-eating birds that tromp around the countryside at night.