The dawn is still, a faint brightening just above the dried husks of a Purcellville cornfield, the moon still bright. Jay McKeever freezes and slowly inches down into a squat. A white-tailed buck emerges from a thicket of bare trees, the "big boy" he has tracked all morning.
The buck, colorblind to the blaze orange baseball cap McKeever wears, comes to a halt. It would be a perfect shot -- and a rack of antlers worth mounting. McKeever curses quietly, his Browning .270-caliber deer hunting rifle, with scope, untouched on the frozen ground next to him. The buck startles and bounds back into the woods.
Development has forced Jay McKeever to find new hunting grounds. He scouts the land before he hunts but knows that not all hunters do.
(Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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"I could have shot, but I don't know where the bullet will go," he whispers. "It could hit a bone and deflect."
These days in Loudoun County, a ricochet could be deadly. The plastic-tipped rifle bullet McKeever uses can keep going after it passes through a deer and travel up to a mile if he misses. And though they are invisible beyond a rise at the edge of the field, a Christmas tree farm and a new development of $700,000-plus homes sit in his line of fire. Some of the yards have brightly colored slides and jungle gyms.
Hunting in the shadow of mansions, McKeever says, is "like a head-on collision. There's just no place to let a rifle bullet loose around here that's not going to wind up getting in trouble."
McKeever lives in the fastest-growing town in the fastest-growing county in the nation. The number of residents has grown 31 percent in three years. He is also smack in the heart of deer country. Not only does Loudoun have more deer per square mile than any other county in the state, but hunters also routinely kill more deer in Loudoun than almost anywhere else in Virginia, nearly 8,000 in 2003 -- and they're hoping for more this year.
Lately, the talk among hunters at the 7-Eleven coffeepots has been about the explosive story out of Wisconsin, where a Hmong hunter who had been on someone else's deer stand on someone else's land shot and killed six hunters. They say the man was a criminal, not a hunter. They fear that the story will give hunters a black eye and embolden hunting opponents to push for more restrictions. But they acknowledge that some of the same pressure that drove Chai Vang to trespass on private property -- the loss of hunting ground to development -- is being felt in Loudoun in spades.
Some longtime Loudoun hunters have simply given it up or gone farther south and west. Others who have seen their hunting grounds turned into townhouses or mansions find other landowners and offer to mend fences, chop wood or pay thousands of dollars for the right to hunt. McKeever has had to seek permission to hunt new land eight times in recent years because developers have put up what he calls "Zactlies" -- homes that all look exactly alike -- on his hunting spots.
Perhaps more disturbingly, hunters and landowners report that the squeeze on hunting land has led to more poaching, trespassing and "spotlighting" -- hunting deer from the road with lights -- all of which are not only illegal, but also potentially deadly.
The trespassing has led to some harsh words between hunters. "But we haven't come to fisticuffs that I know of yet," McKeever said.
Still, what really worries McKeever, who spends months scouting the land between mansions and knows every inch of it and what houses lie beyond it, are the hunters who don't and shoot anyway. The margin for error simply doesn't exist anymore.
"All it takes is one accident," said Mark Duda, a consultant who tracks public attitudes toward hunting with Responsive Management in southwestern Virginia.
Ken Fleming, a former law enforcement officer, owns or manages several thousand acres for hunting in Loudoun, where he allows only 12 carefully vetted people to hunt. But this year, for the first time, his phone is ringing off the hook with people asking if they can hunt. And he is hearing shots and finding carcasses that he knows are not his hunters'.
"There's always been somebody that'll break the law, always will be. But we're seeing more of it because even they're being pushed into a tighter area," Fleming said. "Unfortunately, the loss of land has brought in some very unethical persons and situations. It's gotten really out of control."
