Billy the Martian

deer hunting
Saturday, November 06, 2004
10:13 PM

We drove up together, leaving John’s house at 10:30 or so. John’s new truck made for a very pleasant drive up.

We got up to Bemidji on Friday at about 2:30 in the afternoon. We had time to get to the sporting goods store and get all our various errands done in time to make the cocktail hour and go out for a nice dinner. I drank too much.

Today, we got on the stands a wee bit late, but it was okay. Dad shot a big buck from the Swamp Stand (Stinky Buck stand) at about 8:30. Dragging it out was a lot of work. We got tired. We went back out for the afternoon hunt, and everyone saw some deer except me. John saw a buck that he said was the biggest he’s seen on the land.

The weather was quite warm — in the 50s, and the wind was mild.

I was on the Pine Tree stand. Scott was on the Two Buck stand, and John was on Dad’s Stand in the morning. I was on Dad’s Stand in the afternoon.

11/7/2004, 6:02 PM

I was in the Two Buck stand this morning, and saw little. Scott was in Dad’s Stand, and we both heard a doe snorting (a lot). Uncle John shot a nice little buck from the Chicken Gut stand, and dropped it right in the path. Dad shot the monster buck that John saw yesterday. He got it from the pine stand with a couple of long shots. We decided we didn’t want to drag it, so we went back to Bruce’s and arranged to borrow their four-wheeler. They’re fetching the deer now. Scott and I came back to the hotel.

Weather was cooler than yesterday, but still nice. The wind picked up this afternoon. My face is windburned, even though I didn’t stay in the Swamp Stand all afternoon. I got cold and came back to the cars at 3:30 or so. We saw some deer cross the roads, but I don’t think anyone saw any from stands during the later hunts.

On Monday, Uncle John and Scott left in the morning. We checked out of the motel, swung by the locker plant to drop off the biggest two deer, and made arrangements with a friend of Dad’s to get a used 4 wheeler sometime next year.

John and I gave Dad a lot of abuse about shooting all our deer. We think we might have overdone the guilt trip that we laid on him to get him to come back. Obviously, he’s back with a vengeance!

I’m not ready with the description of the hunt, yet, but I have the pictures online:

We’re on our way back now. Dropping off 2 deer at locker plant in
Bemidji now. Bringing one home. More details later.

John just put me on the spot by sending me this. Now I have to try to come up with the other half.
Damnit.

John:
This little excerpt is long over due. I apologize to our faithful readers for the delay.

Bill and I went to Bemidji to hunt for the 2003 deer season. The land was exactly the same as we had left it the previous year. The trip up was uneventful and we arrived in at the hotel around 6:00 PM. After a quick bit to eat we settled in to get our gear ready for the next morning. Like the previous years I was excited about the upcoming hunt and was looking forward to that first sunrise.

We were a little better organized this year than last and so the getting up and getting to the land went much smoother. Both of us were probably awake before the alarm, might have something to do with getting older and having to pee more often then when we were younger, or it might just be excitement for the hunt.

We dressed in our hunting finery and grabbed our gear and made our way to the car. I noticed while we were loading up the car that the air was pretty chilly, but didn’t really think much of it. This is where it pays to have someone get up early and watch the weather channel, but more about that later.

We drove to the land and unlike previous years the talk about what stand we were going to use first didn’t take up the majority of the trip. Bill looked at me and said, “Same as always?” and I replied “Yep.”. Bill took Dads stand and I took my usual spot at the Two Buck stand.

Walking out to the stands we both noticed that the snow was crunchy and powdery under our heavy boots, but again we didn’t think much of it. Man that was a mistake. Bill waved good bye to me as he has a little further to walk than I do. I tied my rifle to the cable and then climbed up into the Two Buck stand. I brushed a good deal of snow out of the stand and then settled in for the first morning hunt. I like always had worked up a pretty good sweat, but I seemed to be cooling off a little faster than normal.

By the time the sun was up full I had seen at least two different deer. It was soon after that I noticed just how cold it really was. I usually spend most of the time in the stand with my hat and gloves off and coverall unzipped. This day I was searching in my pack for my face mask and heavy mittens. The sun was just up and I was already cold. The sight of several more deer during the morning, (yes father they were all small and I had a poor to awful shot at the best of them I lasted until just before 10:00. That is earlier than normal, but I was sure glad when I saw Bill walking down the trail towards me. I was very cold by this time and from the frost in Bills hair it would seem I wasn’t the only one. We walked back to the car both of us deep in thought. I don’t know what Bill was thinking, but if his thoughts were similar to mine then it went something like this, “Damn it is F**king cold out here. What the hell am I doing out here on such F**king cold day.” Over and Over again. I was sure I would step wrong and break my toes off inside my boots.

Bill managed to get a couple of pictures of us with enough frost on our faces to win the Frosty the Snowman look-a-like contest. It took nearly an hour and a half to get the car engine warm enough to blow out warm air. I think we were in the car until after noon. We finally decided that we could go out and hunt for a little while longer, but neither of us was interested in a full afternoon hunt. We headed back out to our two favorite stands and commenced the after noon hunt.

If the morning hunt was colder than any other I can remember the afternoon hunt wasn’t much warmer. It was however, more eventful in that I saw several more deer. I had two that bedded down for a little nap just south of the eastern trail. They were very young and I didn’t have a clear shot otherwise I taken a shot at them if for no other reason than to warm my blood.

It was probably around 2:00 when I had a nice sized doe step out on to the southern shooting lane. She was very polite and paused just long enough for me to take careful aim and squeeze a shot off. The shot was a good one and miss dead doe didn’t run very far off the trail. I did my usual guess at marking where the deer was when I shot and also like usual I was about ten yards off. The deer was about 10 yards further down the trail then where I thought it was. The nice deer only went about 20 yards into the trees after I shot it, but based on my experience last year, I was damned sure not going to lose my way dragging this one out and I marked the trailwith several pieces of blaze orange clothing.

Last year we really missed our little talked about partner. Even if I hadn’t decided to go site seeing while dragging my deer out of the woods I still would have missed Oscar. In Oscars memory I fashioned Oscar Junior before the 2003 hunt. Oscar Junior is a metal back-pack frame with some added rope and a clip to hook the deer onto. It makes pulling a deer out of the woods far easier than tying a rope to a log and dragging. Oscar Junior made it almost too easy to pull a deer out, I guess I will have toshoot a bigger deer next year and see if it really works.

That was pretty much the end of the first day for our hunt. I will letBill talk about the second day, because it is the day he got his deer.

Nuts. I wish I remembered more:

We slept in; with one deer in the bag, I wasn’t going to get out early into the cold to get a second. However, the day was much nicer, and I wasn’t muscle-sore like the year before. This was due to John’s brilliant backpack rig, which made deer extraction easy. With either the original Oscar, or John’s Oscar Junior, taking a second deer doesn’t make for a longer weekend.

I shot a little buck on the east lane from Dad’s Stand. It jumped a ways south, but wasn’t hard to find. If I remember right, I could see it from the stand, and I took pictures as I approached it. John showed up a while later, and we dressed it out, and I dragged it most of the way back. When I got winded, John took over, but I’d dragged it far enough to know that I could have gone the rest of the way by myself if I had needed to. We said goodbye to the land, and scooted over to the Wilson’s. They had a full crew there, with sons, daughters, daughters-in-law, and grandbabies. The boys were actually out hunting, but Bruce was pacing himself.

We interrupted the Vikings game long enough to say hi and coo at the babies a bit, and we said our goodbyes and headed home.

We generally felt that with the easy deer extraction, plus not getting lost or other boneheaded manuvers, we’d mastered the art well this year, and that certain folks would be proud. Really, the only thing we screwed up was not checking the weather before Saturday, and perhaps that worked to our advantage, since it was cold enough that we might have skipped the opening morning!

Wow, this sounds familiar. I used the same game plan as Mr. Rosenberg. If I don’t know who they are, I vote against the incumbent, and I never vote for someone who is uncontested.

And I like his novels, too.

Okay, Dave made me get my rifle sighted in on time. We went to the Oakdale Gun Club and joined the gang of folks getting ready for the season. The Oakdale club is a very nice outdoor range. There were a bunch of folks there who clearly only get to the range once each year, because they had zero experience in following the range master’s instructions, but the range folks clearly expected that sort of thing, and no one sprouted any unintended holes.

If you’d like to see pictures of Dave shooting, or even movies, they’re here.

(Dad, the paper target shot is mine. I should be good to go.)

P.S: Thanks, Dave. That was fun, and I needed to get that done before Friday, or else they’ll kick me out of the clan. Next time, let’s do it when everyone else isn’t there so you can finish getting your gun set, and we can make bang-bang noises with handguns.