My first hunting weekend of 2016 came and went. The freezer is still empty. The memory bank is full. Some highlights:
**There was no rush out the door Saturday morning; a late Friday night arrival to the north country after a long week combined to keep my butt stuck to the mattress for an extra couple of hours past dawn. When I finally did venture out I was surprised at the grey landscape, made more so by the heavy clouds that didn't hold rain but did hold back the sunshine. Central Minnesota was rich with fall colors through the end of last week; but for the golden tamaracks and some stubborn aspen still clutching their golden leaves Northern Minnesota's colors had faded. It was beautiful. Peaceful. The air dripping with the tangy sweet scent of leaves on the ground, the silence broken by the call of a goose looking for the flock, robins attacking the last crab apples, my dad grumbling at the cat.
**After weeks of listening to my parents bemoan the lack of ruffed grouse in the woods I was pleasantly surprised to flush one barely twenty yards down the first trail I hunted. "Pleasantly surprised" is the grouse hunter's term for "shocked enough to wet myself a little." The take-off of a grouse is explosive - a flurry of beating wings and rustling leaves and angry chirps followed closely by the blast of a shotgun that sends lead pellets sailing several feet behind the tail feathers of the disappearing bird. Bird #2 escaped without even drawing a shot, while bird #3 felt safe enough to stand on the ground so I could squeeze off a shot that killed a clump of hazel brush but didn't even knick the neck of the bird. Grouse four through eleven also lived to see another day, as did the three birds I flushed on Sunday. I'm thoroughly disgusted to end the weekend without a meal of grouse (they're delicious...I'd choose them over chicken any day) but encouraged by the number of birds I saw.
**I have five trail cameras set up around the property. My dad checks two of them weekly but the other three were off limits for the last month so as to not disturb the big bucks that like to run back and forth getting their picture taken. Those three cameras held several hundred pictures and about 75 videos...and exactly one buck that looked more like an antelope than a whitetail. 96% of the pics and videos were of the same doe and fawn who I now recognize more easily than two of my daughters. The other 4% of footage was of two senior citizens who seem to have a lot of spare time with which to ride four wheelers past my cameras. Sigh. Needless to say all three cameras have been moved, two of them far off the beaten path. If that doe and fawn find them this week.....
**Spent some time caging young oak trees before Saturday lunch. This time of year if you don't get a cage around those oaks they're liable to leave your property entirely. Especially the young ones - not sure if it's something akin to the whitetail rut, but when the weather turns cooler the smallest oaks get livelier. It took us a few years to figure out why the heck we had fewer oak trees each spring, but since we've started caging them in the fall our numbers have stabilized. Anyone have any advice on how to contain those wily white pine?
**Daughter Two and I hunted grouse Saturday evening. You already know the results of the hunt. What you can't ever know is the half-hour of intense beauty that surrounded us at dusk. As the sun fell below the western skyline in a blaze of yellow and orange a full supermoon silently crept over the treetops to the east. An afternoon that was far too breezy instantly became an evening that was not far from perfect. I've spent two days trying to figure out a way to properly describe the show Nature gave us to end our Saturday. It can't be done.
**The intent of the weekend was to spend some time bowhunting for deer. I half-heartedly pretended to take up archery when I was a senior in high school - this fall I've been preparing in earnest for an opportunity to poke an arrow into a whitetail for the first time ever. Saturday morning's opportunity was slept away; Saturday evening's disappeared when Daughter Two asked if I'd take her grouse hunting and Sunday evening would have no opportunity because of a long drive south. So Sunday morning I crawled out of bed at 5:15, left the house at 6:00, and was in a stand by 6:30. That same beautiful moon threw enough light to keep my headlamp off. A heavy frost coated everything. The silence was deafening so any sound carried for miles. The dance of orbs in the sky was repeated from the evening prior, but in reverse order - the moon faded from sight in the west as the sun arrived in the east. I stayed in the stand until about 8:00, the only activity on the ground being two raccoons that bumbled by at about 7:00. The temps were supposed to reach over 60 degrees, so shooting a deer would have been a bad decision....which is the deer hunter's way of masking disappointment with logic. No, there wasn't any disappointment on such a beautiful morning - although it would have been nice to knock off one or both of those raccoons. Nasty creatures. Don't get me started.
Arriving late on Friday and leaving mid afternoon on Sunday makes a short weekend feel even shorter....seems like we spend more time packing, unpacking, and repacking than anything else...but I rarely regret a drive to the north woods, especially when my girls can come with. I pointed out to my eldest daughter that she has only a handful of these trips left in her life, which sounds horrible when I read it. She's a couple of years from college and her grandparents aren't going to be around forever - combine those two realities and I figure she's got maybe ten of these wild weekends left. So grouse or no grouse, several deer hunts or one, a weekend with my girls at grandpa and grandma's house is always memorable, always worthwhile, and always too short.
And yes, we did put tree cages around some young oaks....for protection from nibbling deer. The rest of the paragraph was complete nonsense.
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