A Hunting We Did Go

It wasn’t long before my short Thanksgiving break that I was invited to go hunting with my brother in-law, Mike. The message was relayed from wife to wife and I accepted the invitation before my most gorgeous bride was able to complete her sentence. The answer was “yes” I was more than anxious to go into the forsaken wild and be a part of selective killing.

When it came down to it, there wasn’t much “selection” involved really. Opportunity was more a play than actual consideration when it came to Mike drawing his weapon. I must add that when he thought he saw something with coursing blood in its veins, that gun was slung into a “ready” position faster than an Amway Distributor on ‘fresh meat’.

Of the four deer total we saw, three that I personally witnessed (+2 if you count the repeats on the ridge 150 yards away) only two were recognizable as does. The other two were anyone’s guess – and it being later in the season, only bucks were fair game.

If we had been ten minutes earlier we could have nabbed the spot Mike wanted to hit. However I like my coffee just so, and I needed those precious minutes to fine tune my joe. As we tromped up and down those torturous slopes, we heard gunshots from our preferred location. Someone was getting very lucky, or so it sounded – and made us want to pull the trigger on the lady-deer all the more.

I’m certain my presence had nothing to do with our lack of success. Survivalist to the core, I was wearing my snow pants, or “bibs” as my wife calls them – and some Sorrel’s snow boots. I stayed nice and toasty the entire journey – which was of course one of my goals…

…it would have been a complete success on my part if another of my goals would have been to crack and break every twig in the woods under my massive waffle-stomping boots – and to fill the chilled winter air with my *swish swishing* snow pants. I serious sounded like a yeti with a Velcro problem in and around his crotch.

I tried to only move my lumbering mass when he moved too, to try and break the sinewy branches under foot at the same time as him. I’m not built for speed, but I do get some momentum going, so I wasn’t always as quick to stop as Mike was.

I think I began to notice a pattern that anytime I was abnormally loud and crackly, he’d use his lower resonating male deer call. This would surly fool any still-oblivious deer that it wasn’t a human of Babe the Blue Ox crashing through the forest, it was just a horny buck trying to find hot young doe to make babies with.

In the end we didn’t get a thing. But I had more fun than I have had in a very long time. Plus, I got to shoot a tree which was awesome, since I hadn’t shot a rifle since I was like fourteen – that and the tree really had it coming.