THIS IS the season for "camp-hopping," during which hunters and hangers-on visit other camps after dark or on just plain lousy days, when a warm camp and good company look a heck of a lot better than thrashing around the soaked countryside. This is in line with something I've long said, which is that the most effective wildlife conservation tools are miserable weather, a deck of cards, and a bottle of hooch.

When any more than two hunters occupy the same space, the stories are bound to fly. Tales are traded, perhaps with some embellishment -- who got lost and how, strange things found in the woods, a moose or deer passed up for want of a bigger animal.

I've already heard several stories about hunters who passed up younger or female moose or deer in hopes of getting something more in the trophy class, only to see the season end before they had another chance.

I'm in the whatever floats your boat category. I'm out there primarily for the meat, which is excellent and home grown, and numerous surveys have shown that around 80 percent of hunters value the meat far more than a trophy to hang on a wall. Eight or nine years ago my son Mike shot an eight-point buck in the 200-pound range. The rack is mounted but it's up in the barn attic for lack of wall space. Meanwhile the meat, consumed on fishing trips and other festive occasions, is long gone.

That buck, by the way, was one of the twins that we'd watched growing up for three or four years, having first seen them as newborn fawns, which I was glad had evaded my mower during haying. There was a certain poignancy to all this. My mother's ashes, and then Dad's, and then my brother Peter's, had been scattered on that hilltop field where the deer lived, just up from the house, which accordingly we call Ancestors' Field. The deer fed on the grass nurtured by the ashes. Mike narrowed the gap in this holistic cycle when he got his deer, and we completed the cycle (well, almost) via the cast-iron fry pan.

Mike was pretty happy that evening in the kitchen with family and friends, celebrating his deer, which he and his friend Johnny MacKillop had dragged out of the woods and I had hung up in the main barn.

In this past Wednesday's News and Sentinel in Colebrook there are two pictures of local kids who got their deer during Youth Hunting Weekend -- Tyler Barrows of Columbia (his deer was a 135-pound five-pointer), and Vincent Frizzell and daughter Rhiannan, 14, (a 730-pound button buck) and son Trevor, 7, (a 104-pound doe). All three animals were headed straight to the freezer, to be consumed in the coming months, with memories and stories for the seasoning.

John Harrigan's address: Box 39, Colebrook, N.H. 03576. E-mail: hooligan[at]ncia.net