One and Done

January 17, 2016 Shawn West Leave a comment

A thunderstorm almost made me miss out on the bird that day, but before we get there, so much more can be said in the lead up to my encounter with a gobbler I nicknamed “One and Done”.

Years ago, a fifteen-year old version of me began my deer hunting career on the property. It had a modest farmhouse on it and was a working cattle operation for most of the year. By the time I started chasing gobblers we no longer hunted deer out of the farmhouse, but I made a point of asking the landowner if I could poke around the property one or two times in the upcoming spring turkey season. There were small copses of cedar trees interspersed here and there through the pasture, a marsh bookended one piece of the property while a bush road marked the other end. Hardwoods stands circled the perimeter and the large fields were cordoned off by a modern electric fence overlaid in front of an older fence of split cedar rails. A Google Earth view of the property showed more than one spot that just felt like they had to have a turkey in it; narrow fingers of pasture surrounded by hardwoods tucked back far from the prying eyes and binoculars of ‘road hunters’. In one spot the distance across the field was less than fifty paces.

I was early in my turkey hunting life and as I recall it was just my second full spring season. Success had eluded me in my rookie year but close encounters with gobblers had whet my appetite so much that in my mind I was picturing myself triumphantly killing a wary old gobbler in that exact, narrow, secluded spot. I told no one about the spot, so sure was I of my success there.

The fact that I had not actually scouted the location did not enter my young, excitable mind as an impediment at all. Such is the joyfully ignorant exuberance of youth and inexperience.

That morning my alarm buzzed in the predawn of an early May morning. I heard rain on the rooftop. Hard rain. No matter, I told myself as I pulled on a camo rain suit. I was outfitted with the newest, most modern line of waterproof box call and could run a mouth call more than competently. All my readings had indicated that turkeys stampeded to open fields during rainstorms, and with the zeal of a converted fanatic, I went out the door.

Driving in the dark down an empty two lane highway at 4:30 in the morning gives a man pause for thought. I shifted a mouth call from cheek to cheek and thought about how that morning was going to play out, while the rain picked up and my wipers slapped against the windshield. I ran a few practice yelps from behind the steering wheel and turned off onto the county road; as I did so lightning sparked in the east. A drizzle I can handle. Thunderstorms, not so much.

At that point my 870 would have been less of a weapon and more of a lightning rod.

I pulled off the county road at the eastern edge of the property and then drove down a narrow dirt road to a point that gave enough berth for me turn around and pull over so as not to block the track. Thunder rumbled again and wind-driven rain sheeted down, so I decided to give the storm a half hour to pass me by. It was 4:55am. I set a cellphone alarm and reclined the car seat, dozing and listening to the spring showers falling outside of my glass and steel cocoon.

My phone alarm buzzed and I jolted awake. The earliest hints of powdery grey dawn was breaking and while the thunderstorm seemed to have passed, a fine mist with aspirations of becoming drizzle persisted. I unloaded my decoy, my gun, and then slipped my vest over my raincoat. With the cedars and hardwoods forming a protective bower over the road I stalked quietly down the trail to that secluded finger of pasture where I was sure that I had a date with a tom turkey. I stopped and owl called half way to the field but received no response. Further on a crow called and again met only the stony silence of rain-soaked branches and budding spring leaves.

I entered the field and dropped a hen decoy twenty steps away before stepping over the electric wire fence and nestling comfortably into a corner of the moss-covered cedar rail fence. The cedar rails propped up my shoulders and supported my back so perfectly it was as though that spot was designed just for me to hunt out of it. I slipped shells into my gun and waited a few minutes in the dawn light, absorbing the sounds of an awakening woods.

Eventually I started calling softly, mimicking the soft yelps and clucks of a hen turkey on a limb. I escalated the volume into a fly-down cackle and ran a string of assembly yelps together with my mouth call. The natural amphitheater of the narrow field surrounded on three sides by forest provided an acoustically perfect atmosphere.

To my “second-spring-of-turkey-hunting-ear” I sounded damn near perfect.

As is usually the case nothing answered me immediately, and given my total lack of scouting in this area in the pre-season, that result was less than surprising. In time, I ratcheted up the volume and urgency, before throwing in some hard cutts and cackles. The second time I ran some aggressive calling, he answered.

It was a gobble that was quite close, and it was a long, raspy, mean-spirited old gargle that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And he did it only once. Although the gobble had come from a spot directly across from me, I was not 100% certain of where I should be pointing my left shoulder.

I cutt hard again on the call, hoping he would betray his spot and give me a glimpse. He remained silent. My eyes scanned the undergrowth across the field, trying to key in on the blue and red of his head, or the white bars of his wings, or for him to move slightly and let me track him with my eye, since he seemed reluctant to give me anymore help with his voice. At one point I was peering so hard through the trees that my eyes started to blur. I blinked hard and still could not make out his form, but I was certain he was there. My heart was hammering and I was barely managing to keep my breathing steady.

For fifteen minutes this went on. Me sitting there silent and still with my gun at the ready, and him standing somewhere across from me in the gloomy forest under grey skies, curiously wondering where the hen sounds had been coming from or perhaps even cautiously eyeing my decoy. I was afraid to move or even call. For a while I was afraid to even blink. The brain of a turkey hunter can play some awfully mean tricks in that still, quiet fifteen minutes, and I was mentally scrolling through my (at that time very limited) turkey hunting playbook trying to come up with a strategy. Finally unable to take it any longer I clucked, once, on my mouth call. Nothing.

Emboldened, I purred and yelped softly. All remained quiet across the pasture.

Taking this personally, and still absolutely sure that the bird was standing inside the far tree line, I yelped and cutt on my call, pleading for him to gobble again. The silence, or was it indifference, that I was receiving was borderline insulting.

Slowly I reached into my vest and retrieved my box call. It was damp, but waterproof and I sawed some sweet yelps on it. Once again, nothing happened.

I exhaled slowly and my heart rate returned to normal. I was fairly certain that the bird had seen or heard something he didn’t like and had just moved off, although I had never heard a putt or seen any movement at all. I was crestfallen, and in an instant all my hard-won confidence and self-aggrandizing delusions of expertise went out the window.

And that’s the point of the story I guess. A bird like One and Done didn’t care what the magazines said or how much proprietary modern technology I had in my hands, how promising a hunt looks, or how good I thought I was. If a bird like him wants to go silent and wander off, that’s just what he is going to do. Short of the very unlikely prospect of running him down and tackling him, he was not going to be killed that wispy grey morning, at least not by a hunter of my then-novice pedigree.

I never did kill him, or any other turkey that day, and when I went back the next day the woods were vacant of turkeys. I wandered and prospected but it was as though he was never there at all. I shot over the head of a bird later that season, bumped a couple of others, and it was not until the last weekend of that season that my comedy of errors ceased and I was finally able to put my boot heel on my first longbeard’s neck. The lesson in humility that the One and Done turkey taught me was not forgotten though, and to this day one or two birds teach me something new every season. Once in a while I get a predictable bird that does what I planned he would, but more often than not some ornery gobbler or his harem of girlfriends flips the script and I have to improvise.

I don’t mind though, because that’s the fun of it.

deer hunting, hunting, reflections, whitetail deer

Slowing the Game Down

Image November 27, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

There is an expression in baseball circles that a key to success is being able to ‘slow down the game’. I won’t belabor the theory but it essentially points to techniques that bring a level of calm to a sometimes frantic sport.

In that respect, I see parallels between baseball and deer hunting, and since I am abjectly terrible at actually killing deer I had a lot of time to think about this over the past few weeks.

For the uneducated spectator, baseball can seem to be the height of tedium. My lovely wife cannot stomach more than an inning on television and past attempts to get her to live baseball games have proven a mistake. She is not alone, and a four-hour-plus day at the ballpark does not hold much appeal to all but the most fanatical of baseball fans. So it goes with some types of hunting, but I find it most crystallized in a deer hunt, particularly when ‘on stand’. I have had many people over the course of my still young lifetime ask me one pointed question over and over again.

“What do you do out there? You mean you just sit? That sounds boring.” And to make a not-so-popular admission, it sometimes is cripplingly monotonous.

Of course, being on stand does not necessarily define deer hunting, or the men and women that do it. In some regions a drive or push hunt is the norm, occasionally accompanied by the sweet music of hounds working a scent trail. In other places, spot and stalk is the modus operandi. Rattling, calling, and decoying play an increasing part as well. Still, I would argue that if an informal survey were conducted, nothing defines or still serves as the default approach to deer hunting more than being 25 feet up a tree, or crouched in a ground blind, or leaned up against a stump or rock waiting for a deer to pass by.

Those are long hours, and depending on where you are in the world, they are sometimes frosty, wearying shifts. I have on more than one occasion done all-day sits that lasted from dawn to dusk, and guys in camp just shook their heads at me. Non-hunters consider it insanity and to put a fine point on it, I don’t really like it either. But I have to do it. I do not move quietly through the woods, I do not have a preternatural ‘eye’ for deer and deer sign, and I do not have countless hours at my disposal to scout and pattern deer.

A hope, a comfortable cushion, and a likely spot are all that I really have in my arsenal.

I’ve seen many enriching things, though, so all is not lost. I’ve seen late autumn sunrises and sunsets that provoke a deep visceral response and could move you to tears. I’ve walked out of a sit into the approaching nightfall while the big heavy flakes of a snowstorm fell fast on a driving wind, sparkling like stars in the beam of my headlamp. I’ve seen a small group of ruffed grouse parade past me at twenty steps, oblivious to the fact that on another day with another weapon in hand I may have turned a few of them into table fare. I had a pine marten climb the tree behind me and sit perched six feet over my head for a full ten minutes; he muttered and purred to himself the whole time while I slowly tried to get my camera out of my backpack for a snapshot. I’ve heard hundreds and hundreds of mallards chattering and trading over my head before settling into a shallow lake a short distance away, their wings whistling in a way that was harmony and cacophony all at once. Songbirds have mistaken my rifle barrel for a twig and perched there for a time. A chickadee landed on my forearm once and a vole climbed across my boot top another time. I once watched a tree sway in a fierce wind and topple with a crash so exhilarating and violent that I felt the ground move from a hundred feet away while my hands trembled from the shock of it. I’ve been privy to these moments and plenty more.

Infrequently, I see a deer.

A deer eventually crossed 400yds from me.

There has been research conducted that found that people would rather experience an electrical shock than be left for long hours with only their thoughts. I do not understand that rationale one bit.

On a deer stand I’ve considered whether proposing to my girlfriend was a good idea. I thought about if I wanted to have a family. I’ve considered what kind of dad I’d be and more recently what kind of dad I am. I have had epiphanies about world affairs that I’ve long since forgotten, I’ve solved complex problems at my job, and I’ve thought a lot about the place hunting has both historically and in the modern sense. I’ve written and rewritten dozens of posts for this site in my mind, and I’ve been inspired by the wilderness to write contributions to other sites. I’ve listened to voices in my head that echo the deer hunters that came before me, and I’ve remembered and forgotten more than clumsy clichés on a laptop can do justice. I’ve napped with an autumn sun on my face and I’ve shivered through sleety afternoons where a warm fire and a deep whiskey were vastly preferable alternatives.

Perhaps if I had paid more attention, I’d have shot more, but it did not seem pertinent then and I don’t really care at this point either. The game has always been slowed down for me when it comes to our deer hunts, so I guess, at least in the baseball definition, I’ve been successful to a degree.

Which is good because it feels like success to me.

deer hunting, hunting

Deer Camp Realizations

Image November 10, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

I had been driving for nearly three hours when I made the turn onto the gravel two-track road that leads to the deer camp. In the inky dark of an overcast, early November night I set to nimbly avoiding deep potholes, muddy ruts, low-hanging branches, and the crowns of large rocks embedded in the road.

I’d like to drive a truck, but my real-world sensibilities as a commuter have me in a fuel-efficient family sedan. Some years back Frank, an often missed and sadly departed member of our deer camp fraternity, took it upon himself to paint the largest rocks a bright blaze orange. Our memories of him have not faded over the intervening years, but the paint on those damn rocks has. Thinking of Frank, I switched off the radio and drove the last five minutes to camp in a somber, pensive silence.

THWANG!!

The loud metallic bang on the underside of my car, right below my passenger door told me that as I attempted to nimbly tiptoe around one of the stones on my left side, one of its brethren had found my runner board halfway back on the right. I swore foully at the rock and pressed on. Further on, a raccoon humped its way across the narrow road and climbed halfway up a spindly tree on the roadside. He glared at me comically as I rolled by and for a moment I forget that he was probably hanging around the camp so that he could try to raid our coolers. I made the turn off the two track road and saw the deer camp ahead; in the blackness of the woods surrounding it, the glowing windows resembled the dying embers of a smoldering, unattended campfire. I parked on a grassy spot adjacent the rest of the vehicles, and pulling my duffel out of the trunk, stopped and listened for a moment. The low hum of the gas-powered generator behind the camp and the murmur of animated conversation and country music on the radio inside competed with the breezy November night.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I take a deep breath before I stretch out my car-cramped legs and back. The November night fills my lungs and for a second all I can hear is the late autumn wind in my ears. I exhale slowly, savoring the taste of damp, cool air as if it were the smoke from a fine cigar. Smell is allegedly the human sense most tied to memories, and the night air bracing my cheeks is heavy with that fine chill that makes the deer, and the men that hunt them, remember the falls of the past and the winters that they inevitably bring.

As I open the screen door and look through the window, I catch eyes with one or two of my comrades as they sit around the long wooden table that is the centerpiece of the camp. Everything of import goes on around that table. Meals and stories. Lies and jokes. Arguments and nonsense. Every year I try to think of some novel way to make an entrance, but every year it becomes an afterthought. Walking in I just say something perfunctory like “Hello fellas” or “Gentlemen”.

Right away someone says to sit down. My Dad asks if I ate and before I can answer he tells me that there’s still some roast wild turkey and stuffing in the kitchen. My cousin Dane says to get a beer for myself and one for him while I’m at it.

And that is about the time that I realized why I show up there every year. The odds are slim that I’ll see a deer, and slimmer still that I’ll shoot one. The weather may be so sodden and rainy that we’ll spend hours in camp reading magazines, playing cards, or napping. Close quarters will fray a nerve or two and someone will get lippy with someone else and then immediately forget about it. People will argue about politics, economics, dishwashing, sweeping and all sorts of other things because we are all exceptionally strong and belligerent personalities when we’re in the same space together for five or six days. Odors of varying levels of pleasantness will waft through the cabin and we will laugh a whole hell of a lot. In between all that we will spend several hours of every day in the forest waiting on a deer.

It is an adventure and a trial, a vacation and chore, and the most fun you can have while being an occasional asshole to your family and friends. The hours in stand whip by, and the time spent in the woods melts into my memories.

And then as soon as it started, it ends. Driving out at the end of the week is a mixture of relief and regret. Regret at the passing of another deer season, but relief that it all went to plan, even if no deer strayed into the crosshairs. I’m not far up the road before I’m thinking about the next year, or in this case, the next week. Another deer camp calls my name, and this one is even more cramped, argumentative, and hilarious.

I can’t wait.

goose calling, goose hunting, hunting, waterfowl hunting

Deferred Gratification, or, A Two-Truck Kind of Morning

Image September 30, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

The concept of deferred gratification, in a psychological sense, is that if an individual’s mind can be trained to delay a small reward in the short term for greater rewards in the longer term then research seems to indicate that those individuals who can defer rewards to a later period are typically more successful later in life.

Now, I can only trust the research at hand, but last weekend’s hunting in Bruce County seemed to bear out that hypothesis.

Having a real job, instead of my fantasy job of one day being a kept man who just goes hunting all autumn long, I was forced to miss the opening day and, by extension, the opening weekend of the 2015 early goose season due to work commitments in Western Canada. It isn’t the first time that’s happened and it probably won’t be the last time.

As I sat in the Calgary departures lounge I was ruing a missed opportunity. Historically, that early opener weekend has been a good few days of hunting with good weather, good friends, and willing birds that had not yet developed a hyper-sensitive wariness to decoys, goose calls, and ground blinds. Family and several friends had plans to be out in the fields with their shotguns, and the social media world was counting down to the opener with heavy anticipation.

As that opening weekend progressed I puttered around the house aimlessly, not really interested in cutting the grass, or getting groceries, or any of the other mundane things that needed doing. My mind was in the goose blinds with my friends and I lamented all the action, laughter, and fun they were no doubt having.

My Twitter feed was full of men and women who were out hunting their respective early goose (and in some realms, teal) seasons and I was getting more and more antsy. Finally, late on Sunday evening I texted one of the guys in our group for an update.

He informed me that they had shot two birds all weekend. I was slightly shocked.

I had plans to hunt the weekend of September 119th and 20th, which is the last weekend in our area before the goose season takes a five-day government-mandated hiatus, and I was worried by his report of slack shooting and limited suitable fields for hunting. I texted my cousin and he echoed the sentiment, but he did say that several fields were scheduled to be harvested in the week ahead and that when I arrived there would be greater opportunities to get after the geese.

Then the weather took a turn for the worse.

I arrived to the farm the Friday before the hunt, and there was a 100% chance of rain forecast for Saturday morning. Early in the season, our group has some shockingly fair-weather hunters in our midst. Nevertheless I set an alarm and woke to the sound of rain hitting the farmhouse rooftop. I still dressed and geared up, before texting my compatriots to see if they were down for getting a bit soaked in search of good shooting. One of them never even replied (no doubt fast asleep to the soothing patter of late summer rain at his window) while the other fellow said he was staying in bed.

So much for that, I thought.

I was just about to undress and get back in bed myself when my uncle arrived and we decided to forge out into the damp for a hunt.

We settled on a huge field that was frequently holding birds, but not surprisingly, they skirted our setup and landed a few hundred yards away. After a time, something got those birds off the ground (I still have no idea what it was that spooked them) and as their honks, clucks, and moans hit a crescendo, we flagged and called them our way. They slid past me on the furthest distance of my range, but they squared up nicely over my uncle and he scratched down a double. As he shot I swung at the trailing birds and sent them on their merry way with two shots that tore through the wind and drizzle but failed to connect with feather, flesh or bone.

One of the birds my uncle had shot was banded, and after a half hour of not seeing any more action we decided to dodge any more potential foul weather and headed home. I registered the band with my cell phone and found that the bird was two years old, was banded near Ypsilanti, Michigan, and was too small to even fly when it was banded in June of 2014. Bird band data is always interesting and puts the journey of these game birds into distinct perspective.

Two early-morning geese, one of which was sporting some jewellery.

The weather steadily improved and after an early afternoon nap, I outfitted my six-year-old son and with renewed hope we headed for a field that my friend Brian had said was flush with birds earlier that day.

This spot did not disappoint.

As we walked in from the road, birds were already trying to land in the cut grain field, and after getting safely situated and inserting my son’s ear plugs I loaded up and the shooting began. Handfuls of geese traded across the skies steadily for the greater part of three hours and many groups worked our spread and responded to our calling. Eventually we decided it was time to go, but not before 23 geese were piled in the back of Brian’s pickup truck. We cleaned geese by the glow of truck headlights and then we sat at the picnic table at the farm under the starlight, sipping some cold beers and reliving the hunt that had ended just a few short hours earlier.

My oldest son, and the geese from Saturday evening's hunt. — My oldest son, and the geese from Saturday evening’s hunt.

We planned a return to the same field the next morning, fully expecting to experience a fraction of what we had just been through. We were wrong in a very good way.

Geese whispered distantly in the dark as we put out decoys and found familiar hiding spots trampled down from the previous evening’s hunt. I checked my watch and settled in as legal light came and passed; it was not long before the shooting started in earnest.

A light breeze blew from the east while geese begin to wing their way around the Ferndale flats on the purples and burning oranges of a coming dawn sky. I flagged and called, trying to sound enticing and entirely non-threatening, and before long birds swung wide out over the cut grain field before dropping their feet into our spread. We opened up on them over and over again, and in more than one instance I was emptying my gun and immediately jamming more shells into it as line after line of birds seemed to make their way for our field.

Professionals call it “being on the ‘X’”. I just call it unreal goose hunting.

Geese fell, feathers floated in the sky, and Brian’s dog Levi worked retrieve after retrieve. All the while the pile of birds we were concealing in the long grass of the deep ditch that formed our blind grew and grew. Rough counts began to tell the story of the morning.

25…more birds.

29…a few more were fooled.

31…I shot badly that go around, punching holes in the air with my 870.

37…A great group and some excellent shooting; six came in and not a single bird left.

When we reached forty birds in the bag, we had a chat down the ditch. We decided on one more group and the birds promptly obliged by sending a good-sized flock over. The guns of seven hunters barked again in a carefully orchestrated cacophony, and five more geese found their way to hand before we set down our arms and traded laughs, smiles and high fives. We were done and Brian headed for the truck. My cousin Lukas joined him, because this was going to be a two-truck kind of morning.

Seven hunters. 45 birds. One great morning.

While we cleaned up, to a man we agreed that it had been one of the most memorable hunts we had been together for, and the weekend had seen a polar opposite of experiences from what had gone down just seven days earlier. In a way, it proved that waiting made things sweeter.

Still it was officially hunting season for me then, and the short week-long interval between that morning spent in the ditch and the morning that would kick off the opening of duck season on September 26th was going to drag by ever so slowly. Still, as I sat at the breakfast table that morning, a pile of decoys in Brian’s truck bed and lot of fresh goose meat waiting to be processed in the back of Lukas’, I was just basking in the afterglow of a fine morning spent afield.

Get Out & Go Hunting

One and Done

Slowing the Game Down

Deer Camp Realizations

Deferred Gratification, or, A Two-Truck Kind of Morning

Hunting. Not Hype.