All posts by Shawn West

I've been tagging along hunting with my family and friends since I was eight years old. Over twenty years later I still hunt waterfowl, wild turkeys, deer, and small game whenever I get a chance. "Get Out & Go Hunting" combines my two passions, hunting and writing about hunting. Hope you enjoy it, and if you like what you read, please subscribe to have posts delivered to you via e-mail or feed reader.
2017 turkey odyssey, hunting, turkey and turkey hunting

Stir Crazy

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It won’t be too long now, and I for one am very happy for that.  You see it has been a long time since I felt a May morning’s dawn on my face, and too much time has lapsed since I last had twenty pounds of feathers and turkey meat slung over my right shoulder.  In the intervening months, I’ve dealt with all the same stressors and failings that you may have had to put up with.  Long hours at a job, family commitments of varying importance and enjoyability, the interminable puttering around with gear, and the long pining for the always-too-lengthy season of this Canadian winter to pass. I did get out and enjoy an unforgettable few months of waterfowl hunting, and as I often do, I passed another personally fruitless deer season trying to use telekinesis to convince a tall-tined buck that he’d much rather reside in my freezer than spend another winter in his wilderness home. But warmer weather is inching ever so slowly closer, and my inner monologue screams out to re-mortgage the home and head abroad to pursue wild turkeys.  Meanwhile, my imagination wanders to sun-dappled woods, the smell of trilliums blossoming, and the distant rattle of a dominant tom’s lovesick holler in response to my sweet calls floating on the spring breeze.

Spring greenery and Ontario trilliums are calling me.
Spring greenery and Ontario trilliums are calling me.

To paraphrase Tennyson “in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of hard-gobbling longbeards”. Butchering legendary poetry in the anticipation of turkey hunting.  That’s about where I am right now.

Some of you, if you are reading this from the southern United States, are already deep in the throes of turkey season, and for that I envy and secretly hate you. Not a day goes by when my social media feeds on Twitter and Instagram aren’t chock-a-block full of pictures of men, women, and children of the south grinning their proud, beaming grins from behind the fanned out tailfeathers of a recently deceased gobbler, or of hunters leaned pensively against a broad tree trunk patiently waiting for a wily turkey to make a fatal misstep.  Meanwhile here I sit north of the border with my head in my hands, angst-ridden and impatiently waiting.  Sometimes I slither down to my basement and delicately put hands on my favourite box call, before I lay it down and reverentially glide the purple-heart tip of a striker across roughly conditioned crystal.  When I do that, the raw nerve is soothed…albeit temporarily. I drive my car to work every day, erstwhile yelping and purring and whistling on assorted mouth diaphragms, picturing the approach of a thoroughly seduced gobbler in my mind’s eye.

Somedays the old fella plays hard to get, tiptoeing stealthily in, walking almost sideways to the setup the way that old, cagey turkeys with scimitar-long spurs sometimes do.  Other mornings I picture him as a frenzied two-year-old, horny, triple-gobbling and almost stomping on his beard as he stampedes down my gun barrel.  I’ve been fortunate enough to see turkeys do both scenarios above and almost everything in between…and one hefty longbeard that did both the slow approach and the death sprint in short succession of one another.  But most of the allure is in knowing that no matter the vividness of my imagination, pretty much every spring Tom Turkey finds some other way to surprise and teach me in a fashion that pales in comparison to everything I’d imagined.

My batting average is not hall of fame worthy, but my list of stories might be.  Wild turkeys can be maddening to chase, and almost once a season I’m ready to quit on the whole goddamn thing. Operator error often plays a factor, and I’ve worn them all.  Poor shooting, bad decision-making, impatience, having too much patience, over-confidence, lack of confidence, incredulously blind faith, and stubborn cynicism have all cost me turkeys in the mere decade that I’ve gone from rank amateur notorious for over-calling and educating turkeys, to only-slightly-less-rank novice turkey hunter who still overcalls and educates turkeys, but now does so with misplaced confidence in my occasionally shabby set of skills.  Every time one of those gaudily-plumed professors whips me, which is often, I file the experience neatly away in the memory banks, hoping that being humbled that particular day will make me slightly less gullible the next time I spar with a bird.  In the decades to come I marvel at the things I might learn about myself, all the while not really knowing what those things are.

Friends, or at least people who purport to be my friends, label my lamenting as grandiose.  They say “It’s just a dumb bird” or “I don’t see why you think they’re hard to kill. My buddy shot one within twenty minutes of his first hunt” or “Stop being a drama queen and focus”.

So maybe that is it.  Perhaps I am just of too fragile a disposition to make a legendary turkey hunter.  True, I can call well enough, and I can even do a reasonably good job of sitting still, but when that longbeard sounds off and heads my way, things get immediately and chaotically re-wired in my brain. I instantly get into a pitched battle between pride and hubris, and things I’ve long rehearsed and believed all my life somehow fall by the wayside.  Safety first and foremost always, but planning, rational decision-making, and even my proudest skills of being articulate fade from view under the heart-pounding, single-minded haze that making a gobbler bury his own head in the dirt breeds in my psyche.

I’ve got it bad, that gobbler fever.  Even when I think I’m alright, it can all slip-slide away in seconds when I hear him drumming on the other side of the ridge.  I think I’m so hot, with my high-test shotgun shells, sweet-sounding game calls, and photo-realistic decoys made of space age materials.  They aren’t worth their weight in manure when a bird that I didn’t even know was there rattles my bones with a gobble from inside ten yards and proceeds to turn my insides into just so much quivering pudding.

Writing this all down was supposed to be an act of therapy, some shameless display of catharsis in the public sphere.  An admission of my own faults and addictions that while purely self-indulgent, was also meant to entertain and perhaps even serve as a cautionary tale to those in the same lamentable predicament.  But all I’ve really done here, so far as I can tell, is wind myself up even tighter. The drum is stretched taut now, and as the hands glide around the clock face in my office, every tick-tock just reminds me that I’m still weeks and weeks away from a happy place at the foot of a tree.

Picture Sylvester the Cat in that Looney Tunes episode where he thinks he’s finally managed to kill Tweety Bird.  That’s me lately…pacing back and forth in my mind and about to wear a groove through the floor of my once steely resolve.

Pratfall comedy and children’s cartoon references aside, the masochist in me openly loves the emotional duress and occasional physical suffering.  The sleep deprivation.  The bewildered looks from my spouse. Silent mornings of serenity, punctuated with raucous turkey noises and booming shotgun blasts. The sense of community in being with other turkey hunters, and the sense of exclusivity in having a one-on-one battle of wits and skills with a supremely adapted and wary (not to mention delicious) adversary. The outdoors experience is full of emotional complexity like this; I’ve always felt a sad sense closure to a successful turkey hunt, mingled with a degree of whooping excitement as I smooth down any feathers I may have ruffled in harvesting the bird.  When the season comes to a close, there is relief couple with a lingering sense of greater things still unexperienced, and I suppose these are true of any kind of hunting if a person is passionate enough about it.

I’m fairly far gone from being philosophical anymore, and this rambling is best served to end now, so I’ll close with wishing all the other members of the Tenth Legion out there the best of luck and I hope you have fine weather and willing gobblers wherever it is that you hunt them.

deer hunting, goose hunting, hunting, reflections, turkey and turkey hunting, writing

When You F@%! Things Up

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We’ve all done it.  We’ve made mistakes, and I’m not talking about the minor, piffling mistakes of a day-to-day life.  I mean big mistakes; errors that cost you a deer, screw-ups that sent that whole flock of turkeys sprinting into the next county, or boneheaded blunders that flare ducks and geese at the last minute.

There are, in my mind, fundamentally two types of ways that hunters screw up.  They either forget to do things that would lead to success, or they do things that prevent their success.  In both psychology and philosophy there is a whole genre of debate about the same thing, called ‘errors of omission’ and ‘errors of commission’.  I am neither psychologist nor philosopher, so I’ll leave the dialectics aside here and just fess up to things I’ve done on both sides of that particular ledger.

This always cathartic.

The constant hope is that you are alone when you commit these boners, so that you can just quietly berate and loathe yourself in solitude.  Not always the case, though.

Two years ago, with my then six-year old son in the ditch next to me and four or five good friends in close proximity watching, I missed three layups on geese inside 15 yards.  We had been having just a stunner of a morning.  We had found a fresh-cut field and piles of willing geese; birds pitched in on almost every pass and we were beginning to make some solid stacks.  A group of three spun hard at our calling and flagging, and as they bee-lined for the fakes, they slid ever so slightly to my left.  It was obvious that those birds were going to all die together at the business end of my shotgun.  I have always fantasized of making a true triple on a trio of decoying geese, and I like to think that my anticipation was the reason I balked hard on the birds.  When I rose to shoot the birds still hadn’t made me and I whizzed my first volley over the head of the leading bird…a bird that should have been flaring and climbing.  In panic I threw a wasted string of steel somewhere near the same bird, which was now obliging me by flaring hard and climbing rapidly, accompanied by the derisive laughter of my compatriots.  The third blast was a true parting shot as the birds were making hasty exits and I ushered them along with a wayward hail of steel BBs.  The lads down the ditch were roasting me loudly and thoroughly and I muttered a not so silent curse at myself.  My son innocently asked why I missed and I tried to explain myself with a rueful grin on my face.  Not my finest moment in the blind, although that evening and the next morning brought some redemption at least.

Sometimes you are alone, but people just have too many questions.

While walking into a tree stand a few years back in deer season I was obviously daydreaming or something and as I approached my ladder I was paying no real attention to my surroundings at all.  I crested a small rise and heard a deer snort.  Closely.  Think inside thirty steps.  I snapped my head up and saw a small buck standing broadside against a line of cedars.  As I fumbled to throw my rifle to my shoulder he coiled and bounded for the safety of the thicket, while I blasted two cartridges at what I was certain was his front shoulder.  After thirty minutes of searching, I found no blood, no hair, no dead deer.  The radios we use when out party hunting were crackling with questions, and I passed it off as shots at a wayward coyote.  Which way did the coyote come from, they asked.  Which way did he go, they asked? Was he a big coyote?  A dark one? Was he running fast or just loping along?  Was it more than one coyote?  How far were your shots? My tapestry of lies became untenable over time and I secretly confided in my cousin.  He promptly told everyone, to my chagrin.  Now it would seem that I cannot be trusted.

Sometimes you just screw up and just have to own it.

In two consecutive years I’ve missed two spring gobblers, and both times operator error lead to my hubris.  I killed an absolute trophy piece of limestone ridge one year, instead of the handsome strutter giving me a full periscope of his head and neck behind it.  Last year I blazed a pair of shots at a bird that I was convinced was a mere thirty steps away. On closer inspection he was much nearer to forty-five steps than thirty and I had cocked up an absolutely picture perfect opportunity for my cousin Luke and I to double up on a pair of Bruce Peninsula longbeards.  I took that one out on myself particularly hard, almost renouncing my membership in the Tenth Legion on the spot…except we all know that would be an error as well.

I, of course, am not the only hunter who experiences flailing ineptitude.  One of my favourite nights in deer camp, once the guns are away and the wine and whiskey flows freely, is hearing the camp elders, truly my heroes of deer hunting and men with countless deer under the belts, regale us all with the tales of their own hilarious failings, of their incomprehensible misses and gaffes, and for a while I don’t feel so crushingly inadequate…although that may have more to do with rye than with my reality.

Nevertheless, to err is truly human, and to miss is the mark of an experienced hunter, or so I’m told by people who really want to spare my fragile ego.

If you’ve got a favourite ‘missing’ story, especially if it doesn’t involve me, add it below in the comments, tweet it to @getoutandgohunt or post it here on our Facebook page.

deer hunting, hunting, reflections, whitetail deer, wild game

Old Gun, New Gun.

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I’ve expressed my fondness for various styles of guns in this forum on more than one occasion, and I’m usually for older, more proven models than new, fancy, cutting-edge models, but that’s not what this is about.

This is about a foible of human nature.  This is about an affinity for ‘things’ and the very human practice of ascribing them emotional value that sometimes exceeds their worthiness. About infusing metal and wood and polymers and glass with memories, hopes, and aspirations.  For some people the object is a talisman or a token, some bauble that becomes a representation of deeper meaning in their lives.  Photos, trinkets, keepsakes, and antiques, they all fall under this umbrella.

For me this is perfectly distilled in two deer guns.  One with a pedigree forged in years and primacy of place in a young boy’s hunting initiation, the other with no outwardly special graces but still imbued with deeply personal significance.

My father bought the old gun from a work acquaintance, back when those kinds of transactions between hunters were less meticulously controlled.  I do not know (mostly because I never asked) if it was Dad’s intention that this gun was intended to be for one of his sons, but I can suspect that he had it at least in the back of his mind.  It is a beautifully-crafted Remington Model 14, and it is at least 80 years old by now, and possibly even closer to a century has passed since it left Ilion, New York.  Chambered in .30 Remington (a shell that isn’t even manufactured anymore) it is smooth to the shoulder, extremely ‘pointable’, and about as nice a brush gun as you could hope to have.  I remember being put through my paces with it one Thanksgiving at the farm, just weeks before I would take up arms in my first deer hunt.  I was taken through the proper loading, unloading, safety and aiming rituals of the gun. Convinced I was safe, Dad then took me into the hardwoods and had me shoot at a knot on a split piece of hardwood at fifty paces; I missed the knot, but I was in the neighbourhood and Dad said it was close enough to kill a deer if I was lucky enough to have the bead on a deer’s front shoulder.  I just recall that the bullet split the wood as smoothly as any maul would have.

Next we stood perpendicular to the big hill behind the farm and dad affixed a cardboard target inside an old tire.  He kicked the tire down the hill and I tried to hit the bouncing, wobbling target.  This time I was more steady and poured a couple of shots into the kill zone.  With that I was deemed ‘ready’.  A few weeks later I swung the bead onto the form of a running deer and through the rear peep sight I calmly squeezed the trigger, knocking down a fawn.  I don’t even recall feeling the gun’s recoil in that moment, but the sounds and smells and feelings of that morning are seared into my mind.

A couple of other deer have fallen to that gun in the intervening years, and I’ve done some missing with it too, but every time I took it to the range it told me that operator error, and not some malfunction in the weapon, was the real culprit in my poor shooting.  It was always the first thing I reached for in November and the action has become so well worn that it almost falls open when released.  The recoil does a large part of the work in pumping the gun after it is shot and the patina it has from my hands is unmistakable.  It glows after a dose of oil and the stock and fore-end have a warm chestnut brown sheen that reminds me of bread toasted over a mid-day bonfire and a chill November breeze across my face.

That gun and I…we have history together.

But there’s another gun, and it lacks the heritage and character of the Model 14.  It is non-descript and in many ways indistinguishable from the thousands of other cookie-cutter rifles on the market.  It’s existence in my gun cabinet comes from a casual observation I made in 2012.  My younger brother and I were discussing rifles, and platforms, and calibers when I mentioned that I was thinking about buying a .308WIN in a bolt action with a drop-out clip.  It was not a burning desire, not an immediate need, and certainly nothing more than a passing thought at the time.  I owned (in fact had won) a perfectly serviceable .243WIN in a raffle, but it had two strikes against it.  First I was considering starting to moose hunt, and I thought .243 would be a bit light in caliber, and secondly, it was a top-load, top-eject model and it was fairly annoying to load and unload.  So like I said, I mused about buying a .308.

The local gun shop was offering good prices on the Savage Axis in that caliber with a standard scope package and I was tempted on several occasions to splurge on it, but we had just bought a new home and there just wasn’t room in the budget for a rifle/scope combo.  So in my mind it was just an idle daydream.

At the same time, my mother was dying.  She had cancer that everyone was certain was going to be terminal at some time in the not-so-distant future, and we had all more or less made peace with that sobering and not particularly pleasant fact.

In early 2013, Mom’s health continued to decline to lower ebbs and repeated treatments were really only staving off what was clearly an inevitability.  It was a stressful and truly shitty situation, most of all for Mom who had lost a lot of her energy and vibrancy in putting up the good fight for many years against the disease. She still made all the appearances and efforts she could, and one evening in early March, I arrived home to find Mom, Dad, and my younger brother over visiting my wife and (then) very young sons…the youngest wasn’t even a year old yet.

After some pleasantries, my brother disappeared out the front door for few minutes and came back in carrying a large box that on sight, I knew held a gun.  He had been on a bit of a gun-buying spree at the time so I presumed that he was showing me his latest purchase, which was a Savage Axis with a scope in .308WIN.  I was about to jibe him for buying ‘my gun’ when I was left speechless and a bit stunned when Mom just smiled at me and said two words.

“It’s yours.”

I probably stood there with a goofy grin, and with nothing to say for a few seconds before I started laughing and saying “thank you” a dozen times. There weren’t any tears that I could recall, and it all unfolded that my brother had mentioned that I was thinking of a new gun, and that she had leapt at the opportunity to get it for me.  I also distinctly remember mom saying something about probably not having many more opportunities to get me something to hunt with.  It stung me to hear her open admission of her own mortality, but it also was just like her.

She adored that ‘her boys’ (by which she always meant my Dad, my brother, and I) hunted together and shared a passion for the outdoors, and whenever she could she tried to stress the importance of having us get together and go out into the fields and woods. That gift was just one more of those gestures. I thanked her and my brother and my dad some more and then we eventually just settled in for a nice visit.

She was gone from cancer not even 90 days after that gun took up residence in my house, and she never had the chance to see a picture of me standing next to a deer, cradling her gift. In fact, to date no one has because I haven’t harvested a deer in the three deer seasons since she gifted me that rifle.  But now, in a way to honour her gift, and also as a way to get off the ‘zero’ that the .308WIN is carrying, I reach for it first on almost every hunt.  It is light, with a synthetic stock of Mossy Oak camo. The Bushnell scope, and the new caps I put on it last year are primed and ready. The clip slides smoothly and snugly into place, and the trigger is crisp.  It is nice-looking, nice shooting unit, and some day it is going to do its job and put venison in the freezer.

So even though it is the ‘new gun’ it’s just as saturated with emotion and expectation as the Model 14, which is the crafty, aged veteran of the deer woods, not only in my hands but from whatever hunts and experiences the previous owner(s) had taken it on.

It’s so hard to pick a favourite in this circumstance, so I guess I’ll do what I do every year.

I’m packing up both.

Two Guns

goose calling, goose hunting, hunting, waterfowl hunting

Being in the Moment

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I always want to write these things down while they’re happening, but I’m usually too busy being ‘in the moment’.  Still, as I find myself in moments like the one I’m in now, bouncing along in turbulence somewhere over Lake Ontario, I think back to that good time had in the camp, and the memories replay like a slideshow across my mind replete with all the sepia-toned embellishments inherent in fond recollections.

There’s a mid-afternoon sun and a cool breeze from the northwest when we pull up to gate the day before the opener, and I don a hoodie before cracking a can of the cold stuff. It tightens my throat and I shiver but not from the early fall air, but from the adrenalin and anticipation.

Trucks begin to roll into what pass for parking spots, haphazardly crooked to the untrained eye, but for the baptized there is a sense of spacing and order.

We lean against railings and tailgates, busting each other’s chops, eating cured meat and crackers, punctuating insults and hunting stories with reckless cackles of laughter.  Evening creeps in and still more trucks filter in, until before long twenty grown men are milling around, shaking hands, toasting the gathering, and shouting to be heard.

The next door neighbor, who is also the father-in-law to one of our comrades stops over and we tell him not to expect much in the way of peace and quiet tonight.  He mutters a chuckled, unrepeatable curse word and an hour later meanders back home.

Cousin Luke has brought a couple of deep fryers and before long chicken wings are breaded and hit the oil.  A liter of Louisiana hot sauce meets a half pound of butter and they become one entity of molten beauty before being poured onto drummies and flatties that glisten crispy and golden after a swim at 350 degrees. In an act of mad-scientist impulse, sweet sticky rib sauce coats another batch of wings, while French fries roll in a turbulent froth of scalding oil.

The night carries on and we carry on with it.  30lbs of wings becomes a pile of cleanly-picked bones in a bowed out aluminum pan. Someone passes me a bottle of Jack Daniels Fire and the peer pressure mounts to have a smash of it, and never one to disappoint my friends in such a benign pastime I oblige them before passing the bottle to my right.  The whiskey hits the wings in my belly and I feel happy…in the moment.

Fast forward to sometime after midnight and the remaining men of the camp are all eyeballing the clock, wishing to go to bed but secretly afraid to be the first one to relent, lest his socks get a hole cut in them or he otherwise be deemed ‘soft’.  Everyone eventually tires and as if en masse we all find our bunks, while a few stragglers noisily fight the coming of the dawn.

An alarm blares and bleary-eyed goose hunters rue the moments just so shortly put to bed.  Teeth are brushed, coffee is slogged back, and gear is checked and double checked.  The time has come (too soon for some) to hit the fields and start the day’s work.

We split into two determined groups and make for our spots.  The group I take up with decides we have not been punished enough yet and we choose to hand carry a few dozen decoys, along with guns and blind bags the length of two fields.  We have permission to, and could just as easily driven out to the spot where we eventually plunk down our bags, but what’s the fun in that?  We assemble and place decoys in the dark, and as the first faint rays of sunlight begin to creep in from the east, we find our spots in a deep, grassy ditch to await the morning flight.

I sit pensively with my back against the gentle slope of the embankment, reflecting on the previous night’s decisions and the morning that I hope it will become.  Someone shouts down the line that we’re inside of legal light and the sounds of shotguns being loaded floats from station to station.  It is the modern era after all, and I confirm the time on my cell phone before texting a couple of guys in the other group.  It turns out they have competitors for their field, and are engaged in a debate with other hunters about setup and positioning.

I click the phone off and just listen to the dawn.

In time, and somewhere far off, I eventually hear the whispered calls of Canada geese.  I wave a black flag purposefully but with some degree of blind faith that if I can hear the birds, they can see me flagging to them.  The calls get closer, and someone hollers down the line.

“Geese in the northwest!” and my eyes and ears triangulate on them just as soon as my brain registers the announcement.  There’s a thin string, maybe ten birds in all, stretched out against the horizon and getting unmistakably closer. I put the call to my mouth with my right hand and flag a few more times with my left. The geese wing ever nearer and their chatter is no longer aimless but in response to my calling and the calls of my friends.  As they close to about a hundred yards they lock their wings and begin to drift in. They slide to my right and I break into some more excited chatter, trying to coax them back to centre stage.  They skirt our right flank, but one goose strays too close to our gun on that end and an expert shot folds the bird while the rest wing away braying and moaning.

The flight has started and we rush to make some daylight adjustments to the decoys, with the hopes that future birds will decoy more readily. With the fakes now in a more appealing semblance of order, we charm a few willing participants to play and as the guns bark, more birds tumble down into the grain stubble.

Geese trade about from all directions, some near and some hopelessly far off, and we shoot and we call and we ultimately decide once a dozen birds are in hand that it is time for breakfast.  We have a whole rest of the day to shoot and many of us are both famished and parched.  The masochists we are, we choose to hike all the gear out, and my shoulders really feel the added weight of birds in my hands.

Sometimes I don’t even know why those guys have trucks.

We monopolize four full tables in the local diner, and we eat massive breakfasts of bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, and toast, while pitchers of water and carafes of coffee make their way to our tables. We re-live the moments from less than two hours previous and we get an itinerary in order for the rest of the day.

Cleaning and butchering geese. Tidying up the camp. A long nap for some of us. And then back out again to another field for an afternoon shoot…but that last one is literally another story.

Back in the present, the flight has stopped jostling my hands and of course, all of the grievous spelling mistakes and typos will be cleansed before this gets to your screens, my friends.  Still, I can assure you that things were fairly bumpy here at 26,000 feet.

Not surprisingly, all it took to smooth out the turbulence was some time taken to myself reminiscing on a weekend that literally gets better and better every year.