The
'Myrkle Men'
of Assateague

Stalking Maryland's sika deer has a rather nasty side effect: It turns one into a hunter joyously possessed. by Lionel Atwill

Assateague Island, a slender finger of sand just south of Ocean City , Maryland , is best known for her 200-plus wild ponies, those sturdy little animals with barrel chests and flower child manes that resem­ble the My Little Pony ponies that graze the bedroom rugs of 7-year-old girls.
    They are cute, those horses, and they give Assateague a special flair, but cuddly horses are not enough to entice me there; cute ponies I can find on my 7-year-old's bedroom floor. What does lure me to Assateague, however, is the island's lesser-known resident: her sika deer.
    Sika ( Cervus nippon ), Asiatic cousins to our elk, are beguiling deer that once roamed China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Formosa, but are now found only in small pockets within their natural range. Sika are exotics, imported to Mary­land in the early part of this century, but unlike those weird animals with corkscrew horns and unpronounceable names that prowl Texas (where sika also roam), unlike those strange goats and sheep in California that wear Halloween costumes all year, sika have the natural charm of well-assimilated animals, like German brown trout or pheasants from the Orient.
    They are small scaled—a good stag, as the males are called, weighs less than 100 pounds—yet they pack the characteristics of more familiar game. Like male elk, the stags have shaggy necks, a piercing bugle and a proclivity to wallow. They also wear a mini elk-rack, of up to 10 points. Like whitetails, sika make scrapes. Like mule deer, they sproing when they trot, as if all four feet were pogo sticks. Like hogs, they travel on two-foot-high game trails through the brush. Like pronghorn, they have a patch of white hair on their rumps that they flair when scared or annoyed. Like . . . who knows? . . . they bark loud greetings and warnings, sounds that might come from the illegitimate offspring of a turkey and a crow.
    There are a couple of hundred sika, maybe more, on Assateague, enough to permit bowhunters to take two' sika or one whitetail on the island during the generous season. At least that appeared to be a generous offer—until I realized that hunt­ing sika has a side effect.
    Hunting sika on Assateague turns one into a Myrkle Man. And not everyone would happily accept that fate.
    Myrkle Man is a term I coined, a term the Myrkle Men of Assateague accepted with such glee that I now use it retroac­tively, as it were, as if they—the Myrkle Men—have always been Myrkle Men. Surely, they always will be.
    Myrkle is the Assateague vernacular for myrtle. Myrtle is what covers much of the island in thick, impregnable clumps. To know Assateague and her sika is to come to grips with myrkle. Hence Myrkle Men. It is not a derisive term; it is a badge of honor.