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deer hunting

A Deer Season Digested

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So, through a crippling work schedule, a two-year old son that won’t go to bed in the evening and general laziness on my part I have had plenty of time to mull over the early November period known around these parts as “deer season” and have come to the following conclusion: I can’t catch a break when it comes to hunting deer.  But it is not all doom and gloom in the deer woods, and I thought I’d share with all of you some of the triumphs, comical failures, and general wackiness of what my deer season was in 2011.

Now I know I’ve used the word “digested” in the title so before anyone makes a poop joke and sends it to my inbox, I thought I’d just get it out of the way here.  I’m aware that excretion follows digestion.  So by definition this post may be considered crap.  No apologies.
For the second time in five years, I very nearly hit a deer with my car while driving home after my last afternoon of deer hunting in the Parry Sound district.  Apparently in my car I’m irresistible to deer in that area.  Meanwhile, when I’m in the field in the same geography the deer go full-on incognito.  Despite many, many hours of hunting up there 2011 marked the first time I’d ever even seen a deer in the woods there, much less raised my gun with deadly intent.  This particular deer was a very nice looking buck that just happened to be standing broadside on the trail at 5pm.  There was still just enough shooting light but the buck in question had two key factors playing his favour.  The first was that I could not (and thus, did not) see him until I turned a corner in the trail and our eyes momentarily met.  The second was that I had my gun in a cradle carry and by the time I brought the scope halfway to my eye he had made for another part of the province disguised as a flash of brownish-grey fur and impressive antlers.  His track was as big as my fist, and his first jump (from a stand-still no less) was about 11 feet long.  I never had a chance.
So instead I berated myself for not being ready, tipped my hat to the cagey old buck, and went back to camp so that I could eat some pork chops in mushroom sauce, have a beer, and listen to the camp elders sermonize to me about how to walk while holding a rifle so that if such an opportunity ever again presents itself I won’t be caught flat-footed again.  All things that, coincidentally, happened just as I predicted them.
On the Bruce Peninsula where I spend my first week of my deer hunting, for the first time ever in this tragic odyssey that has comprised my deer hunting career I managed to rattle up a deer.  I was sitting at the Four Ashes stand which is at the base (not surprisingly) of four ash trees that all grow out of the same stump…so I guess technically it is just one big mutant ash tree, but why mess with a cool name for a deer stand?  Anyhow, I had my gun leaning against a convenient but sturdy sapling and was doing a pretty aggressive grunting and rattling routine, because frankly I was bored and my hands were cold.  At the end of the sequence I took a drink of water from the Nalgene bottle I pack in, and was just reaching for my gun when I heard something coming at a dead run through the crisp leaves that blanketed the forest floor in a tapestry of orange, red, yellow, and brown.  I turned slowly towards the sound and saw the unmistakable shape of a deer running towards me through a maze of thick gads and small trees.  No shot presented itself but the deer was hard onto my setup, so I assumed the ready position instinctively.  I heard the deer splash through a small swampy spot in a cedar thicket and with rifle shouldered, heart pounding and fingers poised on the safety, I was swaying ever so slightly looking for an opening.  When I at last found the shape of the deer, I could very clearly see all of its hindquarters and none of its vitals.  This I saw for approximately one steamboat.  Did I mention that the sprinted approach of the deer brought it directly downwind of me at a distance inside of twenty-five yards?  Well it did.  The deer  disliked my odour (as most things do) and with a haughty snort crashed through the thicket, all the while giving me occasional glimpses of its tail flagging, but not presenting even a hint of an ethical or achievable shot.  I cursed that deer’s survival instinct as I listened to it bound away and then sat pensively under those four ashes for another few hours before the call of a hot bowl of soup and a stacked meat sandwich summoned me to abandon the stand.
During the entirety of the season we eat like overstuffed sixteenth-century French kings, but it is one night in particular during that languid week of hunting that holds a special place in my venatorial and culinary heart of hearts: Wednesday night on the Bruce Peninsula hunt.  We get a pile of fresh Georgian Bay whitefish, some Nova Scotia sea scallops, some slaw, some potato salad, some crusty rolls and then deep fry all the fish, butter up the rolls, and chow down.  Literally dozens of other hunters show up as well and bring with them more seafood and drink for the general gluttony.  We tell stories, eat, laugh, play shuffleboard, laugh some more, eat again, and go to sleep happy and full of good food and good cheer.  This year my cousin Lukas and I manned the fryer, which is a first in camp and a sign that the stranglehold of paternal control in our camp is slackening.  I did the breading, Lukas did the turning.  Not surprisingly he got all the kudos and credit…I ended up with raw fish and sticky batter on my hands.  But I’m not complaining because we did all the quality control before anyone else got a dig at the food, which is the sad duty of any camp chef.
But it wasn’t all eating and failure this deer season.  My cousin Lukas shot two deer a little over 24 hours apart, the first a nice basket-racked yearling buck and the second a brute of a nine-pointer that my Dad repeatedly referred to as a “bragging buck” that night.  It was a dandy looking deer, in full rut as evidenced by the grossly swollen neck and the reek of buck urine that wafted from the carcass for the remainder of the week even after the tarsal glands had been removed and disposed of during field-dressing.  His brother Dane shot one early on opening morning as well, just twenty minutes before Lukas shot his first buck.  In fact, with the rest of the camp attending a funeral on the Monday morning, as a group we were (for a brief while anyhow) completely tagged out by noon on Monday morning.  Nothing for those two brothers to do but have a cigar and feel all self-important for a couple of hours; neither really hunted that hard the rest of the week and frankly I can’t blame them.  My dad shot a decent eight-pointer to boot in the snow on the Friday morning of the Spence Township hunt, which was about par for the course; he seems to shoot a nice buck every other year or so, some of which have been real bruisers.  This one was an average 8-pointer which showed up not five minutes into the morning hunt, kicked up towards Dad by my uncle Kim.  I was not far away overlooking a meadow that everyone affectionately refers to as “the swale” and had been sitting for less than fifteen minutes when Dad’s .280 started barking.  In a bizarre twist of deer hunting luck, Dad shot a nice buck at the swale a few years back while I was sitting at the same spot where he shot his buck this year.  Bucks just seem to follow Dad around, at their peril it would seem.  Far away, in the wilds of southeastern British Columbia, my good friend Chris shot his first white-tail, a healthy spike buck, anointing him into the ranks of successful deer hunters.  He shot it on my birthday no less, which is of course an absolute coincidence…or so it would seem.  When we talked the following week I was pretty excited to hear the story; a first deer (or any other game animal, for that matter) is a memory to be cherished but also to be shared, and I was downright happy for Chris.  He’s got me very nearly convinced to book a hunt out West in the foreseeable future as well; he’s just that good of a storyteller.
For my own part I did get some shooting in.  During the Saturday morning stand up on the Bruce Peninsula, I missed two running shots at a coyote, and on the Friday morning up in Spence Township I managed to take a handsome ruffed grouse, which is always a treat because they are so darn delicious.  But for another year the wily deer of Ontario eluded me.  Not a huge problem for me though, because some of my buddies put in a lot more shifts during bow season, rifle season, and blackpowder and they didn’t get one either, which I’m sure is the lot of many other Ontario deer hunters.  But my rifle, all the blaze orange, and the long underwear have been put away for now.  I suppose next year holds more opportunities to scratch down a white-tail, and of course I’ll be looking forward to it.  But for now I’ll turn my attention to working on some landowners for turkey season, maybe one last late season waterfowl hunt, and getting out after a few coyotes through the winter months.
Coincidentally if any landowners between London and Milton need some coyote control done, feel free to drop me an email, I’d be more than happy to help out.
deer hunting, hunting, hunting gear

A November Gearhead-Gear to Take on a Deer

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So just shy of one week out from the start of the open gun season here in many areas of Ontario, and my inbox is loaded (okay five messages…) with requests from across North America for a Gearhead post.  So here it is.  Same standard Gearhead disclaimer applies, but even more vigorously in this sense, since of all the types of hunter I profess to be, ‘deer hunter’ is the area in which I have had the least (statistical) success.  That is, I guess, if you are one of those people who measures success in body count.

Firearms & Ammunition
On the Thanksgiving weekend when I was fifteen my Dad took me back up to a hollow behind the farm in Lion’s Head.  In the early fall woods we walked to the forest’s edge with a piece of split firewood about twelve inches long and six inches wide; we sat the would-be target on its narrow end up against the base of a tree.  Then we walked sixty yards or so up the shallow grade of a hill and I sat down on an old tire.  With my legs crooked up and my elbows on my knees  I used my gangly , teenaged arms to line up the peepsight on Dad’s Model 14 .30 Remington pump-action rifle with a knot just right of center on the target.  Dad had put one shell in the gun; I clicked the safety off and tightened my finger around the trigger.  With a POW! the round-nosed bullet split the still fall afternoon and I watched the piece of wood all at once jump, shudder, and slowly fall forward.  With silky smoothness the recoil had already worked the pump action a quarter of the way back and I completed the motion, savouring the smell of burnt powder and the metallic “sna-chink!” of the gun’s action.  We went up and looked at the wood (which was almost split in two) and Dad remarked something pleasant like “If you can hit that from where you were, you ought to be able to hit a deer in the front shoulder.”  Then I got off the tire and Dad put a broken down cardboard box inside it.  He told me to go halfway down the hill, which I did, while Dad carried the tire to the top of the hill.  He arrived at a spot perpendicular to me and well out of my line of fire, at which point he called down for me to put three shells in the gun and that he was going to roll the tire down the hill.  I was to shoot for the piece of cardboard and keep shooting until the gun was empty.  Dad started it rolling with his hands and gave it a kick as it got away from him and at about thirty or forty yards I opened up, working the action smoothly and evenly…but again that action is so worked in that I think it leverages a lot of the recoil to do the lion’s share of the pumping for me.  I think I hit the tire once and the cardboard twice as the target hopped and bounded along unevenly down the hill.  With that Dad and I were satisfied that I could handle the power and kick of the gun.  A few weeks later, on the second hour of my first ever deer hunt, the .30 Remington swatted down a yearling doe and I was officially a deer hunter.
That Model 14 is all mine now, and it has come with me on every deer hunt I’ve made over the last seventeen years.  I have an unhealthy affection for that gun.  Its early 20th century vintage, smooth, glowing lines, and ease of maneuverability in the heavy brush I sometimes find myself in have never failed me.  I may be tempting fate to boast that it has always shot straight (even when I haven’t) and that it has never jammed or acted up on me.  Simply put, I love that gun, and the fact that ammunition for it has been off the market for many a year only means that the hand-loaded, 180-grain rounds I sift through it once in a while are all the more meaningful.  It is a brush-gun and it wields that title proudly and performs-as-billed with some aplomb.
I also have a synthetic camo-stocked, scoped, bolt action Stevens in .243WIN that I won at the Barrie District Anglers & Hunters annual wild game dinner and fundraiser in 2009, and this gun (alongside the .30REM) makes its way up to my second week of hunting in the Spence Township area, where there are a few more open hardwoods and moose meadows to hunt and the luxury of a scope is a welcome advantage.  95-grain Hornady SST Superformance fly out of the muzzle on this lean little number at some pretty high velocity (and it is a nice little crossover varmint rifle) but to date I’ve never had the safety off during deer season, let alone let slide with a shot bearing any kind of deadly intent at a white-tailed deer.  But maybe this year is the year I break that run.
Clothes and Outerwear
My outer layer is a Remington 4-in-1 coat (actually the same type of coat that I take waterfowling, just in the requisite blaze orange) that I picked up in 2008.  It does the trick nicely as it is plenty warm (even when only wearing the outer shell) and has plenty of deep, easy to access pockets.  For the last three deer seasons it has been reasonably dry and surprisingly burr-resistant (which where our group hunts is a nice luxury).
Under that I’ll usually have a hooded sweatshirt or long sleeve shirt, slung over a synthetic sports shirt (either from Under Armour, or a recycled soccer jersey) that wicks moisture nicely.  Unless it is unseasonably mild (as it was in 2008) I’ll also have on some long underwear; I prefer Stanfield’s two piece top & bottom ensemble, although my sister got me one of those thermal unitards (in fire engine red, no less!) with a rear flap for ‘evacuation’ for Christmas in 2008 and I used them the following year after my Stanfields got a bit damp in a rain…I was literally soaked the nuts!…but I digress.  I think she got that unitard for me as a ‘joke gift’…I’m okay with that because they were nicely comfortable, and I liked them so much I’ve continued to include them in the annual packing list.
I usually wear the same camo pants that I multi-purpose with all year long, although I also pack some ratty jeans that I don’t mind getting mud and blood on, and a pair of lined pants in case it gets extra-frosty some morning (and since 2011 boasts the absolute latest date that deer season can start in Ontario, it may actually happen when I’m hunting not far from Orrville on November 19th).
I double up on socks (since I don’t want my toes to freeze while I sit on stand…I do a lot of sitting) with a synthetic thermal sock underneath a wool sock.  I have two pairs of gloves, both in blaze orange; one pair is just light cotton for days when the temperature is nice, the other pair is Thinsulate lined for rain, snow or just a bitter November wind.  I likewise have a blaze orange baseball cap and a blaze orange Thinsulate toque, so that I can wear one or the other (or if the weather is changeable…both!)
The key to all these clothes is flexibility and layering.  But I’m sure your grandmother already told to dress in layers so I won’t belabor that point further.
Footwear
Rubber boots.  (If you’ve been following these ‘gearhead’ posts this should come as little surprise.).  What can I say?  They’re comfortable, cost-effective, insulated, lightweight and they don’t carry much in the way bells and whistles.  My cousins and my brother have adopted the modified hiking boot style of hunting footwear (what with scent control on a molecular level, cutting edge waterproofing, and similar upgrades) and they all rave about it, so one is just as good as the other in my eyes.  I just like spending around $50 on my boots, while some more ‘advanced’ footwear can run to four times that much.
Accessories
Just like it is for my wife when she goes shopping, deer hunting for me is all about accessories (again, no surprise to any loyal follower of this blog).
We party hunt in our camp so it is vital that we all keep in touch.  For that, we carry some short-wave handheld radios to keep in touch.  Mine are from Motorola, and although they came in a pair (I got them in 2001) one of them gave up the ghost last year and is completely non-functional.  Its mate is still going strong though!
I have a bag of sticks and plastic rods from Quaker Boy that I can use if I want to try to rattle up a buck, and I use a Knight and Hale doe bleat can.  This year I received the Quaker Boy Brawler buck grunt call in the mail for re-joining a conservation organization here in Ontario but before that I used the Knight & Hale E-Z Grunter Plus.  My cousin, and other hunting acquaintances have had success with calling deer.  Me, not so much.  But I keep trying though, maybe this will be year that an old bruiser buck comes galloping to the call.  I’m not brand loyal and accumulated these calls in a piecemeal fashion; I can’t pretend to be one of those highfalutin, corporate-sponsored types of writers…although I secretly long to be one.
I use the same combination of Buck 110 Folding lockback (with a clip point) and Gerber Magnum LST folding lockback (avec drop point) knives that I use year round.  Both are wicked sharp, but the classic look, feel, and weight of the Buck has made it my favourite go-to blade.  I almost cut the tip of my left thumb off with it a few seasons back, but that has more to do with operator stupidity than with any flaw in the knife.  The moral…don’t let me sharpen a knife unsupervised.
I have various and sundry other toys on my person during deer season including a compass, toilet paper, matches, a rope, a plastic bag to keep items dry (and to pack out a tasty deer heart if I’m so lucky), a little folding packet for my licenses and tags, another folding pack for extra rifle shells, a water bottle, a candy bar, a Heat-a-Seat, maybe and apple or two…
This year I bought a Rocky backpack for all this, as before I was always forgetting which pocket held certain items, and I tended to rattle a bit when I walked…which is never good for a deer hunter, whose primary aim should be a stealthy silence.
So there you have it…another Gearhead post in the books.  I recommend you try out any of these items that you feel like and if you want to adopt some of the same gear as me, go for it.  If not, that’s fine too.  As long as what you use is comfortable and leads to success (no matter how you define success in the deer woods) than that ought to be good enough.
deer hunting, hunting regulations, taboo of the day

Taboo of the Day: Being a Jerk

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My thanks to the internet at large for giving me a seemingly endless well of bad behaviour and boorish opinions on which to base these Taboo of the Day posts.  Yes, I fully understand the irony of writing an internet blog and using it as an outlet to make light of the opinions expressed on the internet.  Moving on.

So I happen to have an account on a certain multi-billion dollar social network site, which is a trait that I have that in common with a few billion people.  On this site, there is a group which I have elected to become a member of, and this group’s purpose is to bring hunters together to talk about things, share photos and stories, and generally serve as a sounding board for hunters in Ontario.  As usual, cyberspace (if people even call it that anymore) seems to give some people the confidence to say basically anything they want.  Again…irony.

In Ontario, we have a recently enacted addition to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.  The link to it is here.  Basically, no deer parts or products containing any parts of a deer (including urine, gland oils, etc) can be used as a deer attractant.  Like it or not, its the law.  I for one don’t particularly care as I’ve never used attractants heavily (or really at all) and their use in my circle of hunting friends is limited at best.  I’m not a wildlife biologist, nor do I aspire to be one even on an amateur basis, so when “the law” says don’t do it, I don’t do it.

I won’t name the group or the individual in question (that would be bad form) but basically, another member was quite vocal in the fact that they intended to intentionally subvert the above law, primarily because they did not agree with the law’s intent or execution.  Which is where this Taboo of the Day comes in.

I said my piece in the forum, because that’s what it is for, but something about the exchange stuck in craw.  The person in question had a variety of excuses (which is precisely what they were) including absolute certainty that they would not get caught, a variety of disparaging things to say about the Ministry of Natural Resources and the enforcement practices of Ontario’s Conservation Officers, and a very real belief that their approach was in the best interest of hunters at large (since in their opinion all laws regulating hunting are the product of a weak governmental system and intrusion by the boogieman of ‘anti-hunting’ and therefore are to, via extrapolation, be opposed).  It is important to note that the individual in question had no support in the forum and every other post (as of today) was on the ‘legal’ side of the argument. 

But this raises a topic that I think needs discussion.

Does opposition philosophically or otherwise to a law, as they pertain to hunting, mean that one should be able to not comply with them.  If you’re a rational person, I think you’d probably say that the answer is “no”.  When it comes to hunting, the law is the law, like it or not.

Some examples?  Sure.

I think that the gun control law in Canada is misguided.  But I sure as hell registered every gun I have.

I think that waterfowl seasons are too short.  But once the calendar turns and the season closes, I’m not out there still gunning.

Even though I don’t moose hunt I can say after reviewing it that the moose tag system in Ontario is in need of some overhauling, but I think it best that if you don’t have a tag for a bull moose, you don’t shoot a bull moose.

I’m usually not this narrow in my thinking but like I said when it comes to the rules I feel that they have to be followed.  And here’s why.

I’ve already gotten a lot of emails (some that were quite personal) since starting this blog from those who feel it is perfectly fine to infringe on game laws provided that they aren’t caught, and they think that my efforts to promote lawful hunting is some sort of infringement on their natural rights.  I’d go so far as to call some of it hate mail.  That’s fine.

To flog a dead horse, I’ll reiterate something from a few Taboo of the Day posts, a statement that while obvious to me, has caused me no end of controversy in my inbox.  Modern hunting is no longer a right.  I’m sorry. 

The reasons are numerous and certainly fodder for another post, but the bottom line is that we as a group hunt as a privilege in this the 21st century.  Very, very few of us rely on wild game for subsistence, and while we as a group certainly do inject millions of dollars into conservation and habitat conservation (facts that we should all be exceedingly proud of) our image is the most important thing we have.  Pig-headedly acting outside the legislation is one of the worst things (outside of outright poaching) that we can do as a group.

To put it simply we cannot pick and choose the laws we want to obey.  Because even though we act individually, we are judged all together.  If you want to have a smooth go of it, play by the rules.  I have no sympathy (or time, or even a liking for) those who do it otherwise, because they cost us all.  They cost us opportunities to hunt, they cost us landowner permission, and they cost us all the hard work we put in trying to show the non-hunting public the positive side of the pastime we all love so much.  Maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist, but being a self-important, stubborn jerk in the face of any law or whatever else that you feel does not fit within your worldview of what hunting is or should be (like opinions such as these expressed here for example) only serves to damage what generations ahead of us worked to build, which is a sustainable, respected tradition.  There are plenty of those out there who would disparage hunting, we don’t need those within our own ranks to help them out.

But by saying all this, have I become the self-important, stubborn jerk that I so disdain?  Maybe.  I guess it depends on your perspective.  An interesting thing I’ve learned in my life is that you can almost never change a person’s mind; so if you’re nodding in agreement with my opinions, odds are you already felt the same way I do.  If you’re so enraged with me that you’re contemplating all sorts of verbal abuse and hate mail, I imagine that you started out this post with that mindset.  Which is okay, because I can take it.  What I can’t take is the acts of the few denying me and the many patriots of hunting the enjoyment of the thing we love.

So please, when you make that choice of what side of any hunting law you are going to live on, worry a little less about a fine, or getting caught, or coming up with justifications for why what you do is okay, and worry about the future of hunting at large.  Because it sounds cliche I know, but is a deer or one more goose or whatever it is you’re chasing, or your own righteous opinions about what is right and wrong in the woods worth hanging a bad name on all of us?

If stating things like that makes me the enemy of the hunting community, maybe I’ve got this whole thing ass-backwards.  I don’t make the rules, I just follow them.

deer hunting, goose hunting, turkey and turkey hunting

The Bruce Peninsula

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I can’t wait for the next six weeks to crawl by so that I can ‘go north’.  And in my somewhat narrow perception of the term, I’m referring to a sojourn that will take me north up Highway #6 for a little over three hours to the village of Lion’s Head.  Lion’s Head is, to be brief, a pretty little hamlet found on the Georgian Bay (read, eastern) side of the Bruce Peninsula.  If you use Owen Sound as your southernmost reference point and Tobermory as your northernmost point, Lion’s Head is about halfway up…and not four feet from the lion’s tail for you jokesters out there.
As an aside, I know that those of you who are reading this in Subdury, Cochrane, South Porcupine, or Thunder Bay will snort and tell me that I have no clue about what north ‘really’ is, and you’re right.  In fact, I spend the second week of the November deer rifle hunt at slightly higher latitude, relative to Lion’s Head, just north of Seguin Falls.  Neither are the high Arctic, but certainly both have a different environment and yes, even climate, than the mix of pastoral plains and generally urban/suburban areas that I see down here in Southwestern Ontario.  In a tongue in cheek fashion I’d retort that residents of Thunder Bay, ON do not understand the hardships to be found further north in say Churchill, Manitoba (polar bears anyone?), but I digress as this is not a post about geographical perceptions of climate or hardship.
The village of Lion’s Head serves as the launching point for my “adventures in hunting” (which, by the way, was the alternate working title for this blog…I made my choice though and I’m happy with it).  The farm where my father and uncles grew up is the home base from which I can head to any number of sites to chase after, and usually find myself defeated by, wild game.  Someday I’ll evolve into a competent photographer and have some photos that illustrate the unique beauty of this area, but for now let me take you on a virtual tour through some hunting stories alone.
As a pre-emptive defense, a lot of the places I’m about to mention don’t have much value in the way of ‘tourist’ spots.  If you’re looking for me to gush about The Grotto or something like that, I’m sorry to disappoint you.  I’ve been there (The Grotto) and it is beautiful, but I can’t even swim so it holds no real allure to me.  Same goes for Tobermory; been there (both in the high tourist season of July when it is as crowded as a Hollywood nightclub, and in the off-season when a lot of the stores aren’t even open for business during the week) and done that.  It is another great Bruce Peninsula destination but not a place where I can go hunting, so I’ll leave the point at that.  Restaurant reviews and shopping destinations will be fairly thin on this post (although I will say that the Farmer’s Breakfast at Mom’s Restaurant in Ferndale is an absolute must).
My first exposure to hunting came in a village north of Lion’s Head known as Cape Chin South, so that’s where I’ll start.
On a cool Thanksgiving weekend when I was eight years old, I awoke in the darkness early on Saturday morning and went goose hunting with my Dad.  I remember being bundled up like Ralphie’s brother Randy from A Christmas Story as I was wearing, to mention just a few of the items, long underwear, sweatpants, lined work pants that were a couple of sizes too big, and a wool sweater.  I had my Wellington boots on and my feet were wrapped in toasty wool socks.  Wool mitts and a grey toque completed the ensemble.  There was no way that I was going to get cold and want to come home early.
But most of all I remember the much-too-large olive drab hunting coat that my Dad put on me.  I imagine that to an invisible observer there was one of those tender, paternal, very Rockwellian scenes as my Dad helped me into the coat and zipped it up to my chin.  While I lacked mobility and dexterity (and frankly, I still kind of do now over 20 years later), I recall the key benefit of this particular coat being that it was big enough for me bury my whole face into it if I got cold.
And despite all the preparations, I still got cold.  Did I mention that this hunt pre-dated the common use of padded foam seats, and ‘Heat-a-Seats”?  It did.  Dad jammed a black garbage bag into my pocket that would serve to keep my derriere dry, but it was lacklustre in keeping my little tush warm.
We got out of the car and walked into the field in the grey, beetling morning before I was sat down in the nooks and crannies of a rock pile that had a bunch of old cedar rails piled up around, and upon, it.  They did a very good job of breaking up the human outline, and with the addition of a half-dozen shell body decoys we were ready for the goose hunting to commence.  I can’t recall how many geese flew around that day, but it was by no means a huge flight.  In fact I can only recall one small bunch of three of four.  Dad pulled an old Olt goose call out of his pocket and began to cluck away on it a bit and the birds circled before coming in to land with our fakes.
So long as I’m able to remember, I’ll never forget those geese hanging in the air, as big as jetliners, with their feet down ready to land.  Dad took a double with his Remington 1100, although he missed a third with his last shot, and laid the geese in the rocks by my feet.  A short, gooseless while later Dad decided that two birds were enough and we headed back to the car.  Dad carried a goose, an old feedbag with the decoys in it, and his shotgun.  I got the honour of carrying out the other goose.  I bumped and dragged that poor goose’s head through the grass for some ways before Dad turned around and told me to pick the goose’s head off the ground and treat the game a little better.  My eight-year-old biceps got quite the work out; I think I held that bird’s head almost above my knees the rest of the way to the car.  Since then I’ve hunted waterfowl all around Lion’s Head; in the Ferndale Flats, at Spry, and in Dyer’s Bay to name a few spots in weather that ran from balmy early September hunts in t-shirts to chilly mid-November pursuits in driving snow.  Still, that young boy’s first hunt on a Thanksgiving Saturday in Cape Chin hooked me in.
In the same area as Cape Chin South are Otter Lake and Cape Chin North, and this area is where the family deer hunting takes place during early November.  My Dad wrote a fine piece about Otter Lake for the Chatham-Kent Times, so I won’t pretend to best that.  Instead, I’ll just talk about deer hunting.
In 1995 at a rangy, awkward fifteen years old I found myself sitting on a blown down birch log at 6:30 in the morning with a Remington Model 14 pump action rifle across my lap.  I was in the wooded uplands just west of Otter Lake waiting for deer.  I didn’t have any calls or experience, but as a first-time deer hunter the camp elders had seen fit to place me in a reasonably good spot near some known deer runs.  At around 8am my great uncle Bower came around and checked on me; he said he’d return in about an hour.  At ten minutes to nine I heard some crunching in the leaves behind me and turned to see Bower.  Instead I saw that a doe and a fawn were loping down the ridge and towards me!  As a party we had two or three antlerless tags, including one that I had been fortunate to draw in my first year of deer hunting and I slid the safety off, raised the rifle and fired at the doe as she bounded quartering away from my right.  She never broke stride but the fawn crossed me broadside at fifteen yards.  The rifle barked again and the fawn went down after some stumbled leaps.  Then everything was silent.  I hadn’t had time to be nervous before, but I was in the moments immediately after the drama I was shaking, elated, sad, proud, and a little nauseous.  Yes, the first-time deer hunter speeds rapidly through a broad range of emotions after their first successful hunt.
I now hunt deer a bit in the Parry Sound district, and I have had offers for some hunts in the Elmira area not too far from home, but I always make sure that I get time in every November at the Otter Lake camp.  I’ve shot a couple other deer in those hardwood uplands since, including one in 2009 that I shot at nearly the same time of day while sitting in basically the spot.  That fallen birch has long since rotted away though.
I’ve turkey hunted all over the North Bruce in Dyers Bay, Lion’s Head, Barrow Bay, Ferndale, and Cape Chin (North and South) but I have not yet managed to connect on a Bruce Peninsula gobbler, despite some close calls.  That terrible record notwithstanding, these treks have taken me through some of the prettiest country I have ever walked in.  The verdure of the spring as it comes to life around you is something special to behold everywhere, but the ridges, fields, and hardwood bottoms of the Bruce seem to do it better than anywhere else I’ve been to date.  For me when I think of turkey hunting I picture sitting in the sun-dappled hardwoods of Cape Chin or watching the dew form on the balsams south of the farm in Lion’s Head with a soft Georgian Bay breeze blowing in around me.
Winter on the Bruce, in my experience, is like winter anywhere else and by that I mean that it is variable to a fault.
Some years it is bitterly cold, other years it is buried in deep snow, and one notable year it was so mild that we hunted rabbits in January with no snow on the ground at all.  The rabbits showed up neon white against the browns and grays of the woods, their fur coats having already changed colour with the photoperiod.  Despite this advantage for us we still had a tough time shooting these little escape artists and only managed to take a couple of them home to the larder.  By contrast, during a coyote hunt almost exactly a year later, it was so cold that the thermometer outside the farm bottomed out, while the outside temperature for the morning hunt (at least according to my cousin’s truck console) was -27 degree Celsius.  I’ve been out on snowy days on the Bruce where visibility was basically nil, while on other January days, although snow was on the ground, it was so warm that one could hunt without wearing a jacket, especially if you were exerting yourself.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective I guess, I haven’t hunted any public land in the Bruce Peninsula.  This is primarily because I am the beneficiary of a family tradition of hunting in the area (which I am trying to honour and maintain as the older generation might one day step aside), family held land in some locations, and a network of friends on the Bruce who put up with my nonsensical metaphors, interminable stories, and sometimes hilarious ineptitude.
Despite the occasionally misguided attempts of some to bring what they feel is urbanization and their skewed views of ‘civilization’ to the area, I have found that the hunting ethic, as part of the rural outdoors ethic at large, is still strong on the Bruce Peninsula where it is a tradition built on personal relationships, respect for the resource and the landowners, and a history where hunting played a vital role in survival for the ancestors of the longer-term residents of the area.  I think that those are the keys to any place where you love to hunt, or fish, or camp, or hike, or whatever it is that you do to get out and enjoy nature and the wilderness.
For this particular observer historical tradition, camaraderie and shared enjoyment in the outdoors all make up the fundamental appeal of hunting as a pastime.  In my mind, the Bruce has all of the above and more.