corrections

Corrections

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So I’ve been deer hunting for a couple of weeks off and on, and in conjunction with a hectic work schedule (at a real job) I’ve been absent from this forum.

Well, I’m back.
I’d like to take this opportunity to make two corrections that loyal readers brought to my attention.
First, in my Gearhead article related to deer hunting, I had indicated that my first deer was a “yearling doe”.  A keen-eyed reader (okay…my cousin, Luke) made it abundantly clear as soon as I got to camp that I had in fact shot a doe fawn.  My use of the word ‘yearling’ was inappropriate as I believed I was using it in referring to something in its first year (which technically a doe fawn would be) but upon research, when the word ‘yearling’ is applied to an animal it usually refers an animal between one and two years old, which this particular doe was not when I shot it (I believe it weighed about 65lbs field dressed and I could have carried it out across my back.  And I was fifteen years old, so not a big deer at all).  No self-aggrandizement was meant on my part: simply a misuse of a word.
Secondly, and perhaps more ridiculously, I feel required to make a clarification about my post regarding my observations in Squamish, British Columbia.  Although I was simply trying to make a self-effacing fat joke along the lines that the air was thin in Squamish, but I wasn’t, one reader rather impolitely (I won’t quote their language or misspellings) pointed out to me that Squamish is only about 15 feet above sea level, which I thought was obvious because as I said earlier in the same post, Squamish sits on an inlet at the foot of Mount Garibaldi.  Anyways…to clarify, Squamish is not at elevation, but I am still kind of meaty.
I’ve been working for the past few days since my return from the wilderness on consolidating all the hilarious, exciting, and moving moments from deer season 2011 into one cogent post, which should appear sometime later this week.
But hopefully this piece keeps the blog-police satisfied for now.
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.
a few observations...

A Few Observations About Squamish

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As the alarm buzzed in my room at 4am last Tuesday morning, I had a brief flashback to turkey season.  That was, after all, the last time I’d been up at such an hour.  But this was not turkey season, and this was not hunting related.  I was preparing to catch a flight to Vancouver, and a few hours later I was chasing the dawn westward at 800 kilometers per hour and 11,000 meters in the sky.  Later I’d hop in a rental car and climb Highway 99 into the mountains as I made my way to the town of Squamish BC.

After the soul-crippling experience of driving through metropolitan Vancouver, I broke out of the concrete and glass jungle and began ascending the winding road to Squamish.  Here’s what I learned while I was there.

Squamish is Beautiful
Yep, no bones about it.  It’s a lovely little town.  Situated in just a very nice little spot on an inlet and surrounded by peaks on three sides (including the looming Mount Garibaldi) and the ocean on the other Squamish is as picturesque as can be.  On my first day there it was beautiful, the second it rained, the third it was beautiful, and on the last it rained.  Apparently that’s how Squamish works.
Squamish is Full of Nice People
I did not meet a single negative or unpleasant person in my whole tenure there.  The server at the Timberwolf Restaurant where I ate most meals, Vicki I believe, was as ebullient a person as I’ve ever met, but without a hint of insincerity.  The staff of the office that I was working out of had nothing but positive energy and advice for me: where I ought to eat, where I ought to go running, and where I should buy a home when I inevitably decided that I was going to move to Squamish.
People in Squamish Didn’t Seem to Care for Hunting
Squamish is billed as the “outdoor recreation capital of Canada” however in that definition I believe they are speaking of skiing, mountain biking, hiking, and fly-fishing.  I got some clucked tongues and that “you’re so misguided” look of disapproval from the locals when I had the temerity to group myself (as a hunter) in with the rest of the outdoor recreationalists.  No arguments or debates, just a benignly assured stance (at least from those I spoke with, which I understand is far from the majority) that hiking was fine, hiking with a gun, not so fine.  Fair enough, because it is still a very pretty town and I don’t mind that people don’t always like hunting.
I Really Shouldn’t be Driving in Squamish (or anywhere else in BC for that matter)
As I said, it was raining on my last day there. A day coincidentally that I was required (if I was to catch my flight) to drive down the sea-side lane of the winding Sea to Sky highway (or in this case Sky to Sea?) in a west-coast downpour accompanied by gale force winds.  The speed limit down the mountainside was in the areas of 80 km/h but really only locals should be doing that; I’m far too incompetent and fearful of careening off the side of a mountain.   My apologies to the line of traffic that this reluctant (but legitimately impressed) tourist was responsible for.
While writing this on the return flight to Toronto (chasing nightfall this time) I realized that there were other observations I had made about Squamish…for example, while on a leisurely jog I noted that even though I was at elevation and the air was thinner, I was unfortunately not.  Or that the bear track I saw on the trail was connected to a bear paw somewhere that was much different than the deliciously addictive treat that I give on occasion to my two-year old son.  And so on with labored and not very funny observations.  I also noticed that the man next to me was my exact double, just fifteen years older.  Weird things sometimes happen on flights and I’m pretty sure he noticed it too.
As for Squamish, well…the client may even have me back, so if they do I promise that I’ll be right back on this laptop during the flight home noting all the other ways this charming little town surrounded by wilderness has beguiled me.  And if I win a lottery between now and then, I may even make it my permanent home (if Squamish would have me, that is.)
hunting, hunting safety

Safety First…

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While driving into my real job yesterday, I was listening to the radio (as I am wont to do) and a filler section devoted to listener e-mails came on.  Now normally I tune this out and go about my merry task of driving, but yesterday an e-mail from a hunter was read on air, and it both caught my attention and prompted me to write this post.

The particular e-mailing listener was, as I said, a hunter and they just wanted the station to air a public service announcement from them (or PSA as those slick radio-types call it), presumably on behalf of hunters everywhere.  The gist of the message was that hikers, dog walkers, equestrian enthusiasts, cyclists, and all other members of the non-hunting public should exercise caution this autumn while enjoying recreational activities in the public and privately owned forests of Ontario, since it is hunting season for wild turkeys and deer respectively across a number of WMUs in this province.  It also bemoaned the fact that although deer hunters (specifically those with firearms) are required to wear the aptly named hunter (or, blaze) orange clothing, members of the public (whose safety, based on the message delivered jointly by this e-mail and the radio DJ, is somehow compromised by a hunting season) were not required to wear blaze orange.
Now this is not an attack post, and I am not trolling on the individual (whose name I can’t even recall) or the radio station (whose name I won’t mention).  But I do take issue with the way this was presented, and yes, I am aware that a full tutorial on hunting safety would not hope to fit within the tight, 90 second timeline of this piece of metaphorical radio flotsam (or the confines of this blog post), and yes I do agree in spirit with the aim of the hunter in question…after all public knowledge is better than public ignorance.  However, a rude consequence of this very simplistic, diluted, line of thought as it was presented is this: it basically served to notify a non-hunting public in Ontario (and I use that term with some accuracy since the majority of the population does not hunt) that some hunter believes that there is a very real chance that hunters may potentially shoot recreational users of forests if the public does not take precautions, which is a patently absurd conclusion.
Again since I agree with the spirit of the dialogue, but disagree with the scope of the presentation of it,  I’d like to add the following logical addendum and anecdotes to hopefully clarify some myths about hunter safety for anyone in the public who may stumble across happy little piece of cyberspace.  I know in the Mission Statement I alluded to the point that I wouldn’t be preachy and didactic in this blog, but I do feel (almost obsessively) fierce about safe hunting and gun safety collectively so my apologies in advance if I get to a bit of sermonizing.   It is in my upbringing as a hunter to be radically safe; my father as well as my uncles, all who served as my mentors in hunting were also safety fanatics.  For years my brother, my cousins, and myself were all rebuffed for getting too excited as tag-along youngsters and straying too close for comfort to the man with the gun.  It seems almost as if I spent my first half-decade of hunting with my dad trailing five feet behind him, as he would not tolerate horsing around or running ahead when a gun was involved.  I vividly remember, and have no shame in relating to you dear reader, one such episode when my brother and I followed along with my Dad on a varmint-control mission shooting groundhogs (or more accurately woodchucks) on some land that an adjacent farmer had.  Groundhogs, as you know, can wreak havoc on farmland, pockmarking it with their burrows and inflicting damage on machinery and livestock alike.  After shooting each groundhog, we would march out to ensure that it was in fact dead, and if it was we’d turn it over on its back so that the vultures would come and do the cleanup.  The farmers were grateful for the help in controlling nature’s little miner, and more often than not Dad connected with the high velocity shells fired from his Remington .222.  I recall marching up to one deceased groundhog that had been head shot; it happens and it’s not pretty, but it is one of the organic realities of hunting.  I may have been ten or eleven years old, and all Dad said was (and I’m roughly quoting) “That’s what happens when something gets shot and that’s why you want to be careful around guns and never point one at anything that you don’t intend to kill.”  I was not traumatized or mentally damaged by this; likewise I didn’t have nightmares or think it was cool to see an living thing’s head exploded.  But it did teach a valuable lesson that (obviously) holds true to this day, and that was that a gun is designed to kill, and it does that very well.  So respect them, be extremely careful with them, and don’t play around with them.  We also learned that guns are not for making you feel tough or important, they weren’t toys, and they were for hunting or target use only.
But enough sermonizing (see, I’m sorry) and back to the point of all this.
The first thing that the e-mail and the radio station DJ failed to acknowledge is perhaps the most important point of all.  While it is imminently true that the public should be aware when there are men and women with guns, crossbows, and arrows in the forest, it is the sole and final responsibility of the operator of that firearm to not shoot at anything that they are not 100% sure (literally) is the game animal they wish to harvest.  To paraphrase a current hunting companion, you can’t reel in a bullet…or to put it another way, if you pull the trigger what happens next is all on you.  There should be no logical reason at all for any debate whatsoever on this point.  I contend that without question no hikers, cyclists, etc would ever be shot by any hunter who abides fully by this ethos.  The “adrenalin sometimes gets the best of us” argument is totally invalid, as is the overall premise of mistaken identity.  I suppose if you wanted to reduce this statement to its most absurd common denominator one could argue that a non-hunter clothed entirely like a deer or bear or turkey or whatever else could be hunted may stand a chance of getting shot and the hunter may in this respect be blameless, but only in that ridiculous and highly unlikely case would I be apt to agree with you.  And this is not a case of pride going before a fall, because even hilariously unskilled hunters such as I ought to be able to tell the difference between a deer and a jogger.  Be aware of the target, what’s beyond it, and make sure that you don’t squeeze the trigger if there’s one iota of doubt about what you are shooting at.  Period, full stop.
Secondly, and in the same vein of the above point, I fear some hunters do not truly respect the capabilities of their firearms.  Sure, I’m pretty certain that we all know that guns can kill, after all that’s kind of the point of using one while hunting.  But I think a lot of hunters fall into both relying on their mechanical safety too much and not practicing good muzzle control.  Now this is where I hear all sorts of excuses that I patiently nod in agreement with, but really there’s no excuse.  I turkey hunted a couple of years ago with a guy who, while handing me his weapon over a fence line that we were crossing, actually pointed the business end of his shotgun squarely at my chest from point blank range; when I said something along the lines of “point your barrel to the side or straight up” he snorted and simply replied “It’s not loaded”.  These, by the way, are rumoured to be Terry Kath’s last words.  Coincidentally, I no longer turkey hunt with that individual.  I guess if they read this they’ll know why.  The old refrain of my two most important gun safety commandments, ‘treat every gun as though it were loaded’ and ‘only point a gun at what you intend to shoot’ seem to get constantly trampled under people rushing, being over confident, forgetful, overly excitable, or downright arrogant in the belief that certain guidelines of safety and common sense do not apply to them.  I’ve heard other stories of (and been present for one) terrifying near-misses that while somewhat benign in an “all’s well that ends well” or “no harm, no foul” kind of sense could easily have bypassed that step and taken the fast lane straight to tragic if not for the grace of a few inches.  The point I’m making here is that the concept of a “hunting accident” is at best a palliative euphemism for an injury or death caused by ignorance of rules and the absence of basic common sense.  At worst it is an outright myth.
There are reams of reference material outlining the core values of gun and hunter safety, as well as too many cautionary tales outlining the ways that people meet their untimely end while hunting, but overall hunting is a safe pastime (maybe too safe…if someone died every weekend while hunting, people might take hunting and firearm safety a bit more seriously…but now I’m just being ridiculously cynical).  Complacency, a belief that the individual knows better than the rules, and sometimes just plain old boneheadedness (not a word, I know…but apt) sometimes win the day and these become the stereotypes that we as a group, the overwhelmingly vast majority of whom are safe handlers of weapons, have to battle.
So as we head towards the peak of hunting activity here in Ontario (and by logical extension, the rest of North America) let us all as hunters be safe.  If you’re already a safety fanatic, try to educate those around you about it.  Set a good example and lead by it so that the public learns and sees that hunting is a safe thing to do for every person who could be involved.  Remember, no animal is worth your life or the life of another person, civilian or hunter.  If you’re safe there will always be other days to get out afield.  If you aren’t safe, well, then you can’t be too sure, can you?

Hunting. Not Hype.