By GLYNN HARRIS
Outdoors Writer

It had been years since I last saw my cousin, Billy Hood. I wondered if I'd recognize him when I went to see him on a Sunday afternoon in early November. I'd have recognized him easily. He was still the tall, slender, wirey-haired guy I remembered, only older.

As I stood over his casket at Edmonds Funeral Home in Jonesboro, a wave of sadness swept over me, as I listened to his brother, Bobby, explain what had happened Saturday, November 10, to snuff out Billy's life.

Billy and Bobby had gone squirrel hunting Saturday morning on the Kisatchie National Forest between Readhimer and Dodson. They'd done it hundreds of times before, just the two of them, enjoying something they'd come to share like brothers often do. Neither cared for deer hunting; they liked to hunt squirrels. It was this disinterest with deer hunting that, in a tragic way played a part in Billy's untimely death in the woods that Saturday. He didn't realize that deer season was open, and was not wearing hunter orange.

As the two brothers walked together through the woods, a shot rang out. Billy slumped to the ground, mortally wounded. The young man who shot him thought he was shooting a deer. With a squeeze of the trigger, two lives were shattered. Billy is dead, and the deer hunter will carry for the rest of his life the consequences of his grave misjudgment.

Ironically, twelve hours before Billy's death, I had participated in a hunter safety seminar on Jackson-Bienville Wildlife Management Area, less than 20 miles from where Billy died. Some 200 deer hunters, camped out for the deer season opening the next day, attended and heard several speakers emphasize safety.

The words of one speaker continues to haunt me even as I write this. Billy Sanford, right-of-way agent for Entergy Corporation, one of the sponsors of the seminar, gave an impassioned plea to those gathered to be careful and to hunt safely. He gave each hunter a hand-out with a simple message: "If Only . . . "

"It would be tragic for anyone of you here to have to leave the hunt with these words. . . `If only' ringing in your ears. If Only, I'd been wearing my hunter orange. If Only, I had been absolutely sure of my target. If Only, I had been more careful in the way I handled my gun," Sanford said.

If only Billy and the young deer hunter who shot him would have been at that meeting.

Billy Hood would be alive today, "if only" he had realized the importance of wearing hunter orange, especially when hunting on public land, even if he wasn't deer hunting.

A young deer hunter would not have to spend the rest of his life thinking "if only" he had taken the time to see if the movement in the brush was a deer and not another human being.

A man and a deer are two completely different creatures; one walks on hour legs, the other on two. However, a hunter's mind can play tricks on him when he is intent on bagging a deer. A moving branch becomes an antler. A patch of white tee shirt become the white throat of a deer. In his mind, he sees a buck. He aims and fires.

Bobby told me at the funeral home how he came across the young deer hunter who, in tears, confessed to the shooting. "I told him he was forgiven. I can only imagine what that young man will have to carry with him for the rest of his life, and even though he had shot my brother, I couldn't help but feel compassion for him."

Two grave errors. Two lives shattered.
If only . . .

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