by DAVE PAYNE SR

Earlier this week, poachers killed five deer on Rector Road and left them to rot. 
Meanwhile, a Veto father and son hunting team  ignore Ohio wildlife officials' pleas for them to kill does to keep the exploding deer herd in check. It's a decision Arnie and 18-year-old son Casey Green made together, hoping to increase the size of a local herd thinned by Epizootic Hemoragic Disease.
This kind of responsibility comes naturally to the Green family. 
Talk to Arnie about hunting and you might think he has never killed a deer. He has, but the big racks run together in his mind like whisky over ice. There's no room remember your own success when your mind is filled with images of your son growing up as a fine outdoorsman.
 Arnie keeps the family firearms locked safely away unless he is present, even though the Green children have a healthy respect for them. How does Arnie know they do? He asks them and listens to what they say.
"You've got to know where your children are emotionally," Arnie said. 
Such proactive parenting is important in a day where gun-toting kids sometimes kill other kids. Casey knows fists are weapons and guns are tools for bringing fathers and sons closer together.
Arnie and his father first took an unarmed Casey hunting when he was four-years-old. It was a special time for Arnie, who measures hunting success not by deer killed, but by his son's happiness.
 "Here I am in this really productive stand, I look down and grandpa is lying on the ground snoring away and Casey's swinging back and forth on a grapevine like Tarzan," Arnie recalled.
When Casey was in fourth grade, he traded grapevines for firearms. That year, he killed a yearling doe. Three years later, he killed a buck and another buck the following year. As the 1998 season approached, 14-year-old Casey had grown to assume as commonplace what others call baffling luck. 
Arnie feared Casey's past success would set him up for major disappointment. "I tried to explain to him you don't kill a deer every year," Arnie said. 
At 9 a.m. on the opening day of that 1998 season, Casey missed a buck. It disappeared. What Casey did next snatched a trophy from failure- he ran after it and shot it.
After making sure the deer was dead, Casey started counting points, losing track three times. When pumped full of adrenaline, itás sometimes hard to count to 11. 
The buck had an 18 inch antler spread and scored 144 Boone and Crockett Points. Dad was proud. "I'm glad Casey got it and not me," Arnie said.
Such a cornfed monster belongs on a living room wall, but Casey's mother wasn't crazy about hosting a big, brown, dead deer there. However, one look at her husband and son's smiling faces melted her heart. 
That big buck still hangs on the wall and a bragging father and beaming son still sit and stare at it sometimes.
I was naturally happy for Casey as he joined the Ohio Big Buck Club four years ago. At the same time, I felt some sympathy for the boy. The rest of his hunting life, I feared, would be anticlimatic.
Well, I was wrong.
 Arnie called me Thursday and said he had killed a deer with a bow, though never offered a single detail about it. He was too busy talking about a coyote Casey saw in the woods Wednesday and how an opossum, sniffing out a package of Starburst candy came within a couple of feet of the motionless younger Green. 
I realized that you really can top an 11-point monster buck. The greatest trophies don't hang on walls, but in minds- images of grandfathers, fathers, sons, grapevines, coyotes and possums.
"Seeing coyotes and opossums three feet away is what it is all about," said Arnie, who wishes for nothing more than to  look down from a productive treestand someday and see his grandson dangling from a grapevine.