The Southern Highland Reader

BRYSON CITY–The Smoky Mountain Times’s Jim Casada takes a break from recent reviews of outdoor literature to share some Thanksgiving memories of eating and hunting in the Smokies.

An excerpt:

From that point on throughout my boyhood and beyond, rabbit hunting loomed large in Thanksgiving weekends. Hunts on Thanksgiving Day were normally abbreviated, because we had a grand feast and family gathering commencing sometime in early afternoon and culminating with a feast featuring fare like Grandma’s cathead biscuits and gravy, Aunt Emma’s ambrosia, Mom’s applesauce cake, and of course, turkey.

The trimmings included things which aren’t standard everywhere, as Grandma Minnie provided delicacies such as watermelon and peach pickles, leather britches beans, and a brown-sugar topped casserole using cushaws – an old-time winter squash.

Read Casada’s piece here.

REGIONAL–David Tell at the Macon County News reports on the opening of deer season this Monday.

The season, which is expected to be an active one, runs until December 12.

Tell’s lead:

Deer hunting season opens Monday, and it’s expected to be a good one.

Whitetails are numerous, active, mobile — and hungry, according to wildlife officials, and hunter interest and presence are seen as strong.

Read the whole piece here.

CHARLOTTE–The Charlotte Observer reports that two Cullowhee area men were sentenced to federal prison Monday for “… attempting to transport, buy or sell an American black bear”.

Bobby Allen Gibson, 24, and Steven Louis Broom, 31, were charged in July of last year.

Both will spend ten months in prison, a year on federal parole and perform 100 hours of community service. Their punishment also includes banishment from federal lands, revocation of hunting and fishing privileges, and, in Broom’s case the revocation of the right to own a dog of any kind.

The Observer story is here.

Asheville Citizen-Times story here.

REGIONAL–Knoxville News Sentinel outdoor writer Bob Hodge writes about ghostly happenings on a solo hunting trip.

BALSAM-This community near the Jackson/Haywood County line at Balsam Gap has a long history, steeped in, among many other things, bear hunting.

The tradition of hunting bears with hounds is as old as the first arrival here of the Scots-Irish, and Balsam, located near the confluence of the Plott Balsam mountains and the Richland Balsams, is adjacent some of the broadest, most rugged expanses of forestland in the region.

It is traditional bear hunting territory.

The hunting of black bear is carefully regulated, though, and as bear populations revive, and as private development concerns continue to encroach on areas that hunters have long considered “theirs”, some hunters have begun to test those regulations.

The NC Wildlife Resources Commission is searching for those responsible for bear poaching recently in the Balsam area, where a bear carcass, minus its head and paws, was recently found dumped alongside a road.

It wasn’t the first such incident.

“To just come and make a trophy out of it leave the rest to rot that’s … wrong isn’t even the word to describe it,” Balsam resident Sonny Bryson told Asheville’s WLOS television.