The Hunt

I spent last weekend, Friday evening the 7th-Sunday evening the 9th at deer camp not too far from Preston MN. It was a fairly blustery and chilly weekend with lows in the 20's and highs in the 30's. The pictures in the blog are from last year, this year it wasn't quite as green and I kept my camera in my backpack too long and the cold sapped the batteries. I also managed to leverage the flex time from work to shoot down for an evening hunt on Wed the 12th plus Thursday AM. The bottom line this year for me ... no shots at deer.

Opening weekend however I did get to see 5-10 deer each day and was a little too selective. I had deer in range that I certainly would have shot at had they come by Wed-Thur. We would like to get bigger does and at least "decent" bucks on my friends deer land, so we need to be selective -- no "shoot and release" in the deer hunting game!

The fun of deer camp and the hunt is undiminished for me by not shooting however -- I can punch holes in paper all I want, and while having been raised on a farm with a detailed understanding of "where meat comes from" (including my "pet" calf "Jingles" when I was like 9), there isn't a lot in the killing part that I particularly crave. I'd like to get a big buck someday, and I'd sooner get deer than not get deer, but getting "skunked" on deer is way more palatable than getting skunked on walleye!

A lot of the fun is enjoying the hunt from "The Stump" stand that makes the cold wind not much of a problem. I do think though that post season this year I need to sneak over to Gander and pick myself up some sort of a "2nd stand", harness, etc. The Stump is maybe a bit TOO "genteel" for days other than the really nasty ones. Nice to have the option of being a little closer to the deer. However, I DID get to be very close to watch "the chase" of a year old buck after a year old doe.

About 4 in the PM on Saturday they showed up coming up the draw below me toward the pond that is right below the stand (right to left in the picture that shows the stand and the pond). For the next 20-30 min she led that buck on a merry chase that included SIX extended swims in that freezing cold pond! I don't mean splashes either -- the pond is mostly 10'+ deep and she swam round and round like 3-4 "center laps" on most of the dips. Mr Buck never lost interest and stayed pretty close. Most of the time she would get out of the pond right below the stand, so like '15 yards", shake like a dog, then take off on land -- they were both very tired, but instinct isn't a very forgiving master. Round and round they went and eventually they headed off. It was nice that other hunters in the party were able to see the show from a greater distance and hear the splashes as they went in, so I didn't have to defend my sanity or accusations of falling asleep in the stand and dreaming.

Another good year of hunting, hopefully there will be many more. While the general outlook for '09 politically and economically from our deer camp could be summarized as "dismal", things like deer hunting are comforting along with religion, family and friends to "cling to bitterly" in these times. Now, I don't really see myself as being "bitter" about those things at all, but the nation has spoken, I must be. It is time for me to get my head right, BO just can't be wrong!

Deer Stand Envy

Man, Just imagine the spending a hard day on the hunt in that beauty! There are more pictures out here ... I think the hot tub is a bit much myself. Lots to keep up, very heavy, and I really don't think the visibility out of that scope is going to work out with all that steam. I'm also not a fan of beer and guns ... but, one can't be too judgmental.

I Got My Buck

It only took until age 51 to finally get a deer. Fourteen years of hunting prior to getting married, a 21 year "break", and then the last couple of years with my youngest son. I always enjoyed "the hunt", especially now that I've had the chance to spend some time in the stand with my son. There are a number of pictures out here.

The first 14 hunts I was younger and generally hunting with older hunters in NW Wisconsin farm country. I tended to be pretty impatient and unable to stay on a stand for a long while, so was usually "driving" (walking to move the deer to others). I covered a lot of brush country in those days, and did a fair bit of "road hunting"; driving around to find deer and then shoot from the road (illegally, but it was sparsely populated and not a lot of enforcement). Through a combination of poor skills, badly suited personality traits and no doubt a little bad luck, I just never quite downed a deer even though I had a number of what seemed like "golden opportunities" over the years.

One thing that likely contributed was my tendency to enjoy technology may have hurt me in deer hunting. I purchased a 30-06 semi-automatic rifle while I was in college with a 3-9X scope that I really couldn't afford. I never spent enough time shooting it to be comfortable since the ammo was also very expensive. Worse, I was usually trying to shoot at a deer 200 yards away with the scope cranked up to 9x in order to be sure of seeing antlers. A really bad combination for accuracy.

Some tendencies hold in life, especially if they at least seem to be beneficial, so I bought a 3-9x scope to put on my smooth bore 12ga for hunting this year, but the fates spared me. After 2 attempts to get sighted in I was unable to hit the target at all and was starting to panic that I'd have no gun on opening day of hunting in my new stand. I decided to purchase a cheap 20ga rifled barrel single shot open sights as a "backup" as I launched on my last ditch attempt to sight in the 12ga.

The second shot with the single was the best target shot I've ever made-completely center, and moving out to 50yards, I was able to shoot a 3in group. As things usually work, the 12ga also sighted in with ease on that outing BUT, I came to the conclusion that "simple was better" in this case. I didn't get a shot Saturday with that gun, and if I had, yet another piece of "bad luck" would have played out. Although the gun shot perfectly so I never touched the sights, apparently they weren't tightened at the factory and the perfection was random. Saturday PM I noted that the rear sight was ready to fall off the gun.

My son however decided to head for home Saturday night, so I was able to hunt with his 20ga pump open sights on Sunday AM and for a change I had a standing shot out the window of my stand, braced, through open sights, and hit the deer in the heart. Surprisingly (to me) he ran about 25 yards directly at the stand before simply falling over.

So ends my deer curse. Hopefully I will be like Boston and be able to show a new trend pretty rapidly in future years, but no matter, I will still enjoy the hunt. It is very much about the activity rather than the result, just like fishing. It is also another of those "great equalizers". The stands may be a bit nicer than my youth, the "shack" much nicer, but cool stands, guns, clothes, or camp technology won't really bring the deer in. Being able to afford expensive sabot ammo for targets is nice, but the deer have to show up AND, the accuracy has to be reproduced with a live creature out there.

Rather, senior corporate management and technical people are pretty much identical to farmers, construction workers, college kids and mechanics in deer camp. Difficulty rolling out of bed in the AM, the cold, the need for naps at noon, the appetites in high gear due to the time out of doors, stories of "the one that got away" or the "big one", just glimpsed through the brush or more imagined than real. All those memories and more translate over the 21 year gap with perfect continuity. Most of the things that the masses believe make a difference really don't, but many that they assume don't count, really do.

The hunt is one of those experiences that ties one rather closely with reality. The planning and calculations to arrange for deer and projectile to come to the same point at the same time and of course the facts of "life and death". The steak or burger on the plate is quite abstract, the connection to the living thing it came from tenuous at best. The still-warm gut sack that one can't help but realize is very much like the "power pack" that gives us our motive power is much more connected with reality. Our species is significantly better equipped for a small group to venture out in search of game than it is to conceive, design and build computer systems. True, we are ABLE to do the latter, but our natural adaptation is much more to the former. To those willing to relate to reality, hunting is almost certainly "familiar" at some basic human level.

There are of course very few "liberal hunters". The concept is very close to an oxymoron. To interact with reality in real vs imagined and ideal nature, using guns, a potent symbol of "individual rights and power" is something that isn't going to sit well with many on the left. The idea that people are allowed to have guns for any purpose is only given lip service in the interest of political calculation. Guns are one of the hated "dividing issues" as in "God, Guns and Gays", the "false issues" that the evil right uses to divide the country according the the MSM. The existence of hunting is part of the "barbarism" of the right, the left has "evolved beyond that".

Calling hunting "barbaric" in one breath, holding up human kind to be worshiped, and then explaining natural selection as taking "millions of years" in the space of a few paragraphs of thought would make perfect sense to most liberals. However, it seems pretty undeniable that we were fully adapted to hunting and it was our main manner of survival up to 10K years ago when we began the farming task. Not much in the way of natural selection happens in 10K years, so we have exactly the same human nature that we had at that point. If hunting was "barbaric" then , we are still very much "barbarians" and there is nothing the left can do to change that.

I've succeeded in the hunt. Long live the barbarians.

Deer Stand Construction

The past couple of weekends a number of hours have been spent in construction of a deer stand that will be occupied by me the weekend of Nov 3. The "indoor part" is an alleged "3 man" fully enclosed unit called "The Stump", manufactured in Cannon Falls MN. Of course, one doesn't want to be hoping for bad weather, so we decided that a 6x6 deck and a nice stairway would make the stand a bit more comfy. Here are some pictures of construction so far for those interested.