Every year about this time I write something celebrating hunters, because hunters are the folks who actually pay for wildlife in this country. License fees, excise taxes on guns and ammo, all of it flows back into habitat and herds. Then a story like this comes along and I remember why some people can't stand us.

Three men got arrested at a California national park after rangers found them covered in blood with headless deer stuffed into trash bags. You can read the whole ugly account over at the New York Post, and I'll warn you now, it's the kind of story that makes you want to go apologize to a game warden personally.

Headless deer. In trash bags. Sit with that a minute, because there's no version of lawful hunting that looks like it.

When I field dress a deer it's a careful job. You take what the law allows, you tag it, you respect the animal, and you use the meat. My dad taught me that before he ever let me carry a rifle in the woods: you don't waste it and you don't hide it. Cutting the heads off and stuffing carcasses in garbage bags is the opposite of all of that. That's not hunting, that's butchering something in the dark and hoping nobody asks questions.

And doing it inside a national park, where hunting is flat-out illegal in the first place, tells you these guys knew exactly what they were doing. You don't wander across a park boundary by accident with a truck full of trash bags. You plan that.

What burns me is they weren't just stealing from the deer herd. They were stealing from every licensed hunter who follows the rules, and from every non-hunter who watches a story like this and figures we're all the same. We're not. A lawful hunter in September is out there with a tag, a season, and a reason. These three were out there with Hefty bags.

The rangers and game wardens who caught them deserve credit too. That's thankless work, patrolling remote country at odd hours, mostly catching nothing but cold mornings. Then one night you walk up on three blood-covered men and a pile of trash bags, and you've got to sort it out right there. I've met enough conservation officers to know they'd rather write zero of these tickets a year. They'd rather everybody just followed the law.

I don't know how the court case shakes out, and I reckon the penalties in California for poaching can run steep, especially on federal land. Whatever comes of it, I hope it stings enough that word gets around. Because the odd truth about poaching is that it's rare, and it only takes a couple of jackrabbits like this to paint the whole crowd.

Opening weeks are here or close to it in a lot of states. If you're headed out this fall, do it right. Tag your animal, know your boundary lines, and if you can't say out loud what you're doing and why, you probably shouldn't be doing it. That was the rule when I was eight years old sitting next to my dad in the Ozarks, and it hasn't changed a bit since.