Spent the weekend 20 feet off the ground in a tree stand, watching for Bambi and his family. There’s really nothing like sitting in the woods and watching the process of the dawn of a new day. Watching as darkness turns to grey, shadows appear as the horizon begins to illuminate a bit, starting with dark purple and then deep magof usenta and orange.
As the dawn continued in its progression you could hear the sound of geese starting fly from their night time roosts to the fields where they feed during the day. As the shadows continued to take on more definition and shape the familiar images of trees and bushes, and about 100 yards into the woods I could just make out the some unnatural movement. Squinting I could see three does picking their way along the edge of the field ahead of me. I was in a tree, back in the woods watching and waiting.
Shooting starts in Minnesota 1/2 hour before sunrise. Surely, with that many eligible gals in the woods, some dude would be coming around soon to, you know.. looking for Mr Goodbar thing. Well, in case you didn’t know exactly when shooting hours started, at exactly 6:35, or 1/2 hour before sunrise, on queue, it was like the opening barrage from the last day of Gettysburg, the entire countryside exploded into a din of gunshots. The deer I saw immediately ran off to safer ground as the sound of riles came from all directions. Highpowered rifles make a racket that can carry a long way away. Most of these guns were a mile to the north or south of us.
About 8:00, suffering from a sore ass and not paying that close attention, I happened to look up and learned a great lesson about deer hunting. It’s a lot like fishing. The game, in this case a very large buck, with a not so large rack, tend to appear when you’re not paying attention. The harder the you concentrate the less chance you’ll have of seeing an animal. However, should you be texting and listening to your iPod and otherwise screwing around, there is an excellent chance that you’ll be rewarded with a deer, or a fish or what ever you’re in pursuit of. And, so it went for deer.
At the end of our two days in the woods we took 5 deer, three bucks and two does. The area we were hunting, a friends property, is in an “intensive harvest” area, meaning kill a lot of deer. 5 per hunter are allowed. He’s got a 350 acre lot of land and the deer are everywhere. However, winter feed in that area is very poor and the are many more than the land can sustain and winter starvation is a big issue. Hence the liberal limits.
As expected however, the real thrill of the hunt is the time in camp, eating and drinking and hanging out.
1 Comment
November 9, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Congrats on the deer hunt, from all of us in Castro Valley, CA, who have returned from Yosemite with marvels of nature in our heads.