As a hunter, what are your thoughts about taking part in an organized deer drive?

Many years ago, as a young man, I participated in a number of deer drives. The strategy was quite simple. Five or six hunters would work together to try to move deer in a specific direction.

You had your “pushers” and your “standers.” A “pusher” was usually a guy who liked to move and work the brush. A “stander” invariably was the guy in the group who was known to be an experienced deer hunter, a marksman and not prone to buck fever. Although as I recall, deer drives were not illegal in those days. We learned that whitetail deer, even one that has been bumped out of its security bed, has an astonishing will to survive and many a driven, fleeing deer has eluded the best laid plans of deer drivers.

The subject of deer driving has made the outdoor news lately. Northwoods Sporting Journal columnist and hunting guide Stu Bristol recently recounted a deer-driving controversy that took place last fall in Waterboro. It seems that a Waterboro landowner, who insists that he was hunting his property alone from a treestand, got swept up in a game warden “sting” operation that resulted in a number of summons being issued on this man’s property for illegal driving of deer. The sting involved quite a production, which included the use of an airplane and multiple wardens and vehicles.

In the Waterboro incident, Bristol, a former Vermont Game Warden, questions how in the world the arresting wardens will ever prove intent on the part of the alleged deer driver. Because deer driving is notoriously difficult to prove in court, according to former SAM director George Smith, most hunters who fight the charges in Superior Court get off the hook.

According to Bristol, the Maine deer driving statute was changed in 2003. Deer driving is a Class E crime, punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and even possible jail time.

Bristol asks, “Are wardens issuing citations for violations that lack sufficient proof to prosecute?” He’s convinced, in fact, that the current deer driving statute doesn’t cut it, that it “is not adequately spelled out to help officers in their duties.”

This is a difficult issue. Three or fewer hunters can, technically, drive deer with impunity. But if four or more coordinate their efforts to move a deer in a specific direction they are in violation.

Nearly 10 years ago, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine argued that deer drives are a fact of life and that deer driving should be legalized. SAM asserted that the hypocrisy only bred contempt for more useful fish and game laws and the Maine Warden Service.

The law aside, there is an ethical dimension, too. A sportsman who contends that driving deer is unsportsmanlike has a point. In the Dismal Swamp of coastal Virginia, I was once invited to sit in a treestand and shoot at deer being chased by a pack of half-starved hounds owned by a hunt club.

Not my cup of tea. I never went back. The fact is, though, that in the sloggy, vine-clogged tangle of the Dismal Swamp there is no other way to effectively hunt whitetail deer.

One method of Maine deer hunting that I do enjoy, however, is working a deer woods with a trusted fellow hunter, moving in one direction maybe 50 yards apart. Is this deer driving?

I’m not sure that there is any better way to write the deer-driving statute. In the final analysis, the law’s applicability and effectiveness really rests with the Game Wardens who enforce it.

As with so many laws and regulations, the laws are there to check excesses and and demand public accountability for gross and patently inappropriate behavior. The best Wardens will exercise discretion when it comes to enforcing Maine’s deer-driving law.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”