The Doe of Contempt and Pity

As we settle into the holiday madness, which is immediately followed by a prolonged lull in my hunting seasons (with really no action, outside of occasional coyote hunting, until spring turkey season), I like to take the time to reflect back on the deer season which recently ended.

Like most every deer season I’ve partaken in, I didn’t shoot a deer.  Which is perfectly fine, given that some hunters go their whole lives without shooting a deer.  I was long ago given to the opinion that for the most part hunting was going to be about a whole lot of sitting time and not a lot of action.  This is particularly true of deer hunting.  I’ve heard lots of stories and read loads of articles about “aggressive tactics” for most every type of game, and have to agree that from one time or another I’ve had them work.  But never so as I chased deer.

There are what I would call “competitive deer hunters” in my life.  Men I know that take a personal hit when the hanging pole is empty on a Thursday, and guys that get downright desperate if there’s nothing dead by Saturday at lunch.  Some of these are men that can and regularly do walk up on deer.  Men that are stealthy and quiet and downright spooky in the woods.  That is never going to be me.  I hunt with men who have a surplus of hours to devote to trail cameras, scouting, legal baiting, and tree-stand hanging.  That is also never going to be me.  These men are emotionally invested in deer hunting in a way that I currently am not, and while it is hard for me to feel bad for them, I do feel a twinge of remorse for their situation.  Because for me, in a relatively quiet fashion I’ll get into a spot where there are known to be the occasional deer.  I’ll get warm and comfortable, and then I’ll sit, wait, and watch.  I’ll throw out a grunt on a tube call or turn over a doe bleat now and then, but in reality I deer hunt the way the vast majority of fishermen fish.  I’m just out there.  Despite the sympathy of those that hunt with me, I’m not certain that they don’t think something is gravely wrong with me.

I never really gave it much personal weight until this past year when I started hearing the same phrase over and over, it became the obligatory suffix to any conversations about seeing and shooting deer, and my nerves became taut and let’s face it, a little raw, with each repetition.

As a camp, we had a good year shooting deer this season.  In the first week the camp on the North Bruce Peninsula scored on a pair of bucks, which is about average for us in that area in that time of year, while in the second week three more bucks became venison.  In that same second week, our camp was seeing antlerless deer with regularity.  My brother had seen six of them by mid-week, which is rare for where we hunt deer.  Some seasons, we’ll consider ourselves lucky to see one deer period for the whole two week hunt.  The land of surplus deer this is not.

But like I said, maybe it was the timing of the season this year, or perhaps 2013 was a year of propitious conditions for deer survival, or maybe we were having just plain old good luck; whatever the reason, deer were bounding about our hunting area near Parry Sound.  I arrived on Wednesday afternoon looking to get a solid three days of hunting in, and the weather outlook was grand.  So there it was good weather, good hunting, and a willing population of deer.  One straggler made it camp Thursday and he was already tagged out on two bucks from the previous week; while in camp he mostly just did dishes and during the daylight hours he sat in a familiar treestand holding out for a trophy buck.  It was looking to be a slam dunk of a week.

But there was to be no good karma for me.  Our group was being begrudgingly selective, recognizing the success that they’d had and many does that normally would find their way into our bellies were being left to walk on and fend for themselves in the coming winter.  That was until I got there, presumably.

“Well.  Shawn can shoot a doe, but all you other guys have shot lots of deer in your lives, so don’t go shooting anything that doesn’t have horns…”  I heard this often for the duration of my hunting in the second week.

So it had come to this.  My paltry three kills had put me at the kiddy table in this particular camp.  A camp filled with what I thought were friends and loved ones; but A-HA!  their true colours had come out.

It all started off so promising.  Success as a fifteen-year-old in only my second hour on stand as a deer hunter…I must have looked like a shooting star of the deer hunting future.  But here I was almost twenty seasons later and that promise had come to naught.  A deer hunting hiatus caused by a hectic university schedule, punctuated by brief success with a button buck and a small basket racked seven pointer, and then the subsequent devotion of more holiday time to turkeys and waterfowl then to the hallowed family tradition of deer hunting had made me what I was that week.

I was the pity case.

As the hours and days went on and I invariably failed to take down the doe that was reserved for me, I sensed tension beginning to grow in the 600 square feet of space that we eight grown men were occupying.  Questions were raised, casually at first, about what the repercussions would be if someone else other than I was to go ahead and shoot an antlerless deer.  These often escalated into full blown arguments about the merits of selective deer hunting in general.  My brother said flatly that next year he would not be passing up does early in the week, as since my arrival he had not seen even a flicker of a deer, this despite him having smacked a fat spike buck at the very start of the week.

Then on the Friday morning it very nearly happened.  As I sat on a high ridge overlooking a gully that had seen many a successful deer hunt take place I crunched leisurely on an apple.  Between bites, I thought I heard something thumping through the leaves behind me and to my left.  I turned and saw the flash of brown and white through coniferous undergrowth.  Holding the apple in my teeth I wheeled slowly to my left and shouldered my .308.  Bits and pieces of a deer trotted slowly but purposefully through the brush, and all the while I squinted through the scope looking for a spot to slide an ethical and lethal shot into the deer’s boiler room.  For what seemed like an eternity I looked, with my finger braced on the safety and with apple juice leaking slowly down from the corners of my mouth and dripping down my chin.  Realizing that things were getting bleak I made a desperate bleat with my voice (a sound which if made while holding a Granny Smith apple in your teeth sounds particularly un-deer-like) to stop the beast.  The hope was that I could get a safe window to drive home the 160-grain projectile.  The animal stopped and looked directly at me.  I could see that it was a doe, but that was all as only the deer’s nose, eyes, and ears were clearly visible.  Then as quickly as she stopped, she melted silently and wistfully back into the woods.  I never saw her again.

All was not lost of course.  After all this was the rut, and if the doe had come along, there was a chance that a buck may poke along behind her soon enough.  For two straight hours I sat stock-still and silent, staring at the departed animal’s back trail, all the while hoping for a suitor to come follow her path through the woods.  Nothing came of it.

Frustrated and ready to eat lunch I turned back to my right and noticed two ruffed grouse drinking from a barely trickling stream some 70 yards below me.  With a sharp report, one of the two grouse lay dead.  I went down and retrieved my tasty trophy, secretly proud of an instantly lethal neck shot on so small a target from such a distance.  By the time I got back to my deer stand, the other grouse had returned, perhaps looking for its departed companion.  Feeling confident I fired again, only this time to see the bird powering away for the next county.  I decided to call it a break even day for grouse, even if the whitetail deer had defeated me as they typically do.  Instantly, I got a text message from camp (cellular service is surprisingly good in spots up there).

The hunters were all back at camp and with bated breath they awaited my report on whether I had connected on a deer with my two shots.  I let them stew for a moment, letting them imagine my triumph as I hauled a 12-point monster buck from the depths of the gully, then I sent a picture of the prize-winning bull ruffed grouse back, an act that was met with indifference from my cohorts.  Later that same evening, my cousin shot a buck from the exact same stand I had occupied that morning.  The next day, my other cousin had a doe meander past him at twenty-five steps while he sat on bench overlooking a meadow, a bench that I had occupied a mere 24 hours before.  Exiting my sit on Saturday night I was pleased to find a deer track inside one of the boot tracks I made while I was walking into the stand four hours earlier.

These are the kinds of things that happen to me when I hunt deer.  I really do wish I was making all this up, but these tragic truths weave their way through the tapestry of my deer hunting career.  Would I have shot that solitary doe?  Absolutely.  I’m a meat hunter first, and there is little I like more than fresh venison.  But things conspired against me…had I not been munching that apple, I may have heard her earlier.  If I had set up facing that way, I may have seen her before I heard her.  There’s no way to plan and mandate all the ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ of deer hunting, and that’s the magic of it.

But I’m not discouraged.  Really I’m not, because for those unplanned hours and hours on stand I’m at peace.  There isn’t a thought in my mind other than the focus of deer hunting.  No bills, no politics, no responsibilities.  Just me, my rifle, an apple to eat, a tree to lean against, and the hope that a deer stumbles upon my happy little situation.

That’s why I do it, and that’s why I’ll keep doing it.  Failure be damned.

The Grumpy, Foul-Smelling Deer Hunter

Every year I create a checklist of the gear, clothing and goodies I need to pack for deer season, and just today I put the finishing touches on the 2013 edition of that document.  It is a seasonal task that I look forward to far more than I do to other fall tasks such as raking leaves, preparing the yard for winter, and putting ice-scrapers in my car.

You see, the list means deer season is imminent.  All the other jobs just mean winter is coming.

This year I left something off the list that has been on it for several previous years, and it is part experiment, part reactionary protest on my behalf that I’m leaving it off.  This year, I have sworn not to use any scents or scent control products at all.

And here’s why.

I am a historian by training, and even if I wasn’t I am a firm believer in the empirical value of history.  That is to say that history is as good as an indicator of future results than anything else I have observed.  And history tells me that scent control products don’t have a significant effect on success.  All the scent control peddlers will of course tell you otherwise, but another trait of mine is a healthy skepticism of any institution or individual looking to ‘sell’ you something.  After all, they have a vested interest in having you purchase their product and may take to wild assumptions and promises to sway you to their financial benefit.

But enough of the proselytizing on my part; here’s the (strictly personal and empirical) evidence as I can present it.

Every son probably has some degree of hero worship for his father, but I am not exaggerating to state that my dear old dad has been a veritable deer assassin in his life.  Scores of deer have met their demise at the end of his rifle, and a good many of them sported nice headgear.  Several of those could be described as “mature” bucks…you know, the kind that, according to our friends in the scent control industry, are so hard to kill that some sort of “nasal confusion device “ or other olfactory trick would be required to give us mere mortals an upper hand.  That Dad kills deer is a fact (and one that is not without jealous derision in our deer camp), and here is another fact.  My Dad utilizes exactly zero scent control outside of hunting the wind correctly, and even that is sometimes impossible given the wind’s fickle nature.  Likewise I can honestly say that I haven’t seen him use a deer scent lure in the nearly two decades that I’ve been deer hunting with him.  Dad’s coat regularly hangs next to the camp cookstove, or from a beam adjacent to the dining room table.  It isn‘t just my Dad either.  Both of my uncles are accomplished deer slayers, and my one uncle shot a 150-160 class buck wearing a coat that regularly hung to dry above the same cookstove where we cooked bacon daily.  Not an ounce of scent dispersion technology in that jacket, and yet here we are.  I’ve hunted with men who smelled like distilleries when they woke up, and they shot deer.  I know others who smoke cigars on stand, and they shoot deer as well.  Ditto the guys with wretched coffee breath and the men who sit in trucks that smell like wet dogs and cheese on the drive to their deer stand.

My only logical conclusion to these observed facts is that deer like (or at the very least aren’t offended by) the smell of people-food, retrievers, whiskey, and fine Cuban cigars.  All of which seems perfectly natural in my opinion.

Another interesting fact that I uncovered in researching this post was that for decades (maybe even centuries!) deer hunters managed to kill deer without dousing themselves in synthetic attractants, carbon-based odour elimination sprays, or impregnating their undergarments with charcoal.  Shocking, I know, but not nearly as shocking as the willful ignorance of this fact by scads of deer hunters globally.

I’m put in mind of a scene that would be patently absurd if what was a joke, but is all the more ridiculous in that the participants were so gravely serious.  Just recently I watched an interesting hunting episode on television (I won’t name the show, since I find their production model and hunting practices generally offensive) where a group of ‘hunters’ to use the term loosely essentially drove around an enormous ranch in a truck, where upon sighting a suitable buck would shoot said deer from the modified platform on top of the vehicle, typically from distances of 500 yards or more.  Every one of these mighty hunters wore their scent-control impregnated jackets proudly, and a prominent company that specializes in those garments was a key sponsor to the show.  And having related that, I’d now like to pose the following questions.

First, how in the world could a deer smell a hunter at such extended distances?  How bad do you have to smell that a deer can smell you from nearly half-a-mile away?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, did the scent-control technology also mask the exhaust smell from the noticeably idling truck that the hunters were sitting upon?

Now let me admit openly that I’m not a very good deer hunter.  I have difficulty sitting still, I don’t stalk through the woods in a particularly quiet manner, and I’m not that proficient with a rifle (I prefer the embedded forgiveness that shotgunning waterfowl affords me), so I can assure you that this is not some means for me to make myself feel better about my own failings; I claim full ownership of those.  But even a deer hunter as inept as I am somehow has managed to kill a handful of deer, all without the aid of any scent control sprays or products.

Now I’m not lambasting scent control at large.  I’m sure for the close quarters of bow hunting that a lack of scent control becomes a serious impediment to success.  I have no doubts at all about the power of a deer’s sense of smell either, and I have no doubts that lures and attractants can be effective tools.  What I’m objecting to in this little tirade is the lockstep and unquestioned belief that a soaking in sprays, additives, and specially formulated laundry detergents is a prerequisite to successful deer hunting (and I’m not even mentioning those special sort of deer hunters that keep their equipment in sanitized bags full of moss, dirt, and doe urine or mock scrape juice…those are pathological signs of mental illness if you ask me).

I’m also not some crank throwback advocating the removal of science and technology from deer hunting; I am just fine with reasonably powered optics, waterproof materials in my coats and boots, and precision shooting rifles.  Go ahead and use your scent control, but have no illusions about what is doing either.  I’ve worn it in the past and had deer wind me, and I’ve shot the few deer I have without having lathered any of it on my person.

So this year, I’m going with my own musky, natural odour in the woods. With maybe just a hint of bacon grease splashed on as well, for luck.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Perfect Moments of the Not-Too-Distant Past

As I write this, I’m sitting at Pearson Airport waiting for a flight to Montreal, but I’m really back at Saturday afternoon on the banks of a drizzly beaver pond, cold water dripping off the brim of my hat, straining my eyes for the slightest movement in the faded gray skies that frame the rust, gold, and brown leaves of the treetops.  Our group of six intrepid waterfowlers had kicked a few dozen mallards out of this hole on our way in, and we’d been waiting in vain for the last few hours for them to return as they usually do.  A misty drizzle became steady rain, and then became a misty drizzle again.  Once or twice it outright poured, and all the while a breeze hung around, becoming just strong enough to make the wings on the flapping decoy spin and to ensure that the parts of you that weren’t waterproof got clammy and cold.

Yep, it was a duck hunter’s kind of afternoon.  The ducks just hadn’t read the script.

At some point, almost through spontaneous regeneration, six hunters became eight and with nothing flying we just decided to stand around and trade stories and jokes.  Some of the boys had just got back from moose hunting, and there was ample entertainment from them.  Someone recited the clips from an offensive sound file they had received in an email, and we all laughed.  At one point something very funny was said, because I found myself in fits of hilarity while wiping away tears of laughter.  It is probably better that I can’t recall exactly what it was that made me break down that way, as I’ve found that airport boarding areas aren’t the wisest of places to begin giggling like a maniac.

Some ducks came in and a few fell, with Tack’s yellow Lab Levi making quick work of the retrieves.  Then we went back to standing around and telling stories and lies.  We milled around and carried on quiet personal conversations that were punctuated with group laughs.  We talked about hunting, baseball, women, new guns, new calls, and decoys.  We threw sticks in the pond and then did personal play-by-play as Levi negotiated the decoy lines and the submerged twigs as he fetched them.

Eventually the wind and rain frustrated us enough that we went and wrangled the dekes; with our guns slung over shoulders we headed for the trucks.

Here on Monday, they just called for priority boarding, but my mind barely acknowledges the announcement.  I’m in my memories from Sunday, when we went into a puddled grain field with high stubble and good cover in the ditch.  Misty fog wisped around, and once again prospects were good for some gunning.  Hunkered down in a line we scratched down a drake mallard that came screaming into one of the de facto ponds that were slowly but surely taking over the field; it almost didn’t matter that we missed the other six ducks that were with him.  To be fair we didn’t cover ourselves with glory on that performance, but we compensated on a low flying trio of geese that swung wide in the field before winging towards the gap we had left between the two dozen shell decoys.  Some clucks, moans, growls, and shotgun reports later, and none of them made their way out of the field.  A few more ducks worked the spread, but all high and wary.  Pleading comeback calls and raspy chuckles failed to persuade them and after countless circles they lit down in a deep, fast-moving ditch one field over.  Our man Hastings went on safari to jump them up, and as his reward he crumpled a brace of them for his game bag.  As flocks of dozens and dozens of ducks traded on an increasingly strong wind, the fog blew off but a rain was fixing to blow in.  With Hastings stalking the ditches a field over, and with Tack answering nature’s call well up the ditch, it was up to Rory, Dane, Lucas, and myself to work the calls on six big geese that broke away and once again made our fakes.  Just moments before we had failed to lure in a group of forty or fifty geese that showed interest, but just weren’t convinced.  This group though, were coming in on a wire.  Low finishing work on my Tim Grounds Super Mag combined with good calling from Dane on his GK Giant Killer and from Rory on his Doug Schuyler Voodoo Medicine Man sealed the deal and as the birds put their feet down at fifteen yards, we all began sawing away on our pump guns.  As two geese winged away we collected the ones that stayed behind and went back to the cover of the ditch.  As the rain began to fall we decided to call it a morning and after a picture or two we packed the decoys, weaponry, and our birds back to the trucks.  One large breakfast and one superb nap later, We cleaned up the farmhouse, packed up, and began the trek back home.  Hours of hunting, laughing, and being out in the wilderness all seemed to race by as we re-told the tales from the hunts, the details compressed in my mind by the fleeting enjoyment of it all.

And now, less than twenty-four hours later I find myself about to put away the laptop and wing my way east into la belle province.  The exigencies of career and parenthood will take precedent for a while longer.

But with any luck, it won’t be long until I’m back on a shore or aside a field, hands braced on my 870 Express, waiting for the birds to drop their flaps and put the landing gear down.  Like a golfer’s hole-in-one, those perfect moments of the past keep me chasing the next ones.

Shotgun Memories

It is always in the home stretch before a hunting season that I get all nostalgic about hunts gone by, and this year is no exception.  Some time ago, my father wrote a piece for the CK Times website (the link is here) about the things he had been privileged to see throughout a lifetime spent in the wilderness.  His lifetime is far from over (I hope) and he’s still making memories every year as he heads into his early sixties.  I’ve got a significantly longer time to go to even up with the years Dad has been hunting, and given the different paths our lives and careers are tracking on (Dad grew up in a rural village and spent 30 years working for Ducks Unlimited, where his work responsibilities often took him into the wild spaces he loves…I grew up in a mid-sized city and my job often takes me to airports, office high-rises, and business-level suburban hotels) it is unlikely that I’ll ever accumulate the literal decades of time that Dad has been in the woods, fields, and marshes.  Since I won’t equal his time afield, I thought I’d at least steal his premise for a post and talk about some of my fondest memories experienced while I was lugging a firearm through the wilderness.

First off, it may just be easier to tell you the fondest memories I have that don’t involve a hunting experience: my wedding, the birth of my two sons, and winning a couple of Regional soccer championships as a teenager.  Aside from those, pretty much everything else I hold dear to my mind involves guns, mud, blood, friends, fur, feathers, and the outdoors.  But here are some specifics to get you primed for the opening of whatever hunting season is coming up near you.

The very first morning I ever hunted turkeys, the dawn broke exactly how I figured it wouldn’t.  My idealistic mind pictured an early morning sunrise, with the glossy feathers of a hefty tom shimmering into view, and the big gobbler stopping in front of me and getting a headful of lead #6s.  After all, that’s how every turkey hunting video I had ever seen had run.  My experience was significantly different.  A low grey sky gave way to misty drizzle, and inside of ten minutes I was soaked in all the places that a hunter hates to be soaked.  The seat of my pants was dampened, but my hopes were not.  Then I heard it for the first time in the wild, the gobbling of tom turkeys.  They were the width of two fields away, and I never got a visual on them but they hammered away in ‘row-row-row your boat’ fashion for fully forty minutes.  I was hooked for life after that, and if you haven’t heard a couple of gobblers sound off like that through the fog and the mist, well, you haven’t lived.  That morning I even managed to call a tom in, but he obviously hadn’t seen all the hunting videos that I had…he stayed in the woods behind me and never came anywhere near where I could see him, let alone shoot.  I had other encounters in the other years since, but that first drizzly, misty, foggy, damp morning sitting on a vest-cushion with wet underpants as I listened to the gobblers do their thing was all I needed to know that I was doing something good with my time.

I had never seen geese side-slipping until my second or third season of hunting them, but the first time I saw it I think I actually shouted some term of wonderment out loud.  We were hunting a field in the days before layout blinds, and we were all safely stationed in the fenceline crouched under low shrubs or sitting in tall fringe grasses.  A gaggle (to use the term precisely) of geese were winging towards us, but I sensed from instinct that their flight path was taking them beyond us.  They were high and they were moving fast.  The one-by-one in a pattern that seemed both planned and utterly chaotic the birds began flipping over onto their backs, dropping speed and altitude with every barrel-roll.  My young eyes had never seen anything like it and I was in awe of this controlled plummeting.  As fast as they dropped in the birds set their wings and the contrast between their rapid descent and the near hovering that they did as they committed to the decoys had me completely bewildered.  Someone shouted to take them, and I managed to drop a single goose from the middle of the flock.  This was coincidentally one of the last, if not the final, time that lead shot for waterfowl was legal in Ontario so that hunt has some historical significance for me too.

Staying with goose hunting, the first time I had ever heard really, truly proficient calling for any type of game was on a goose hunt.  We had set up in a deep ditch in the Ferndale Flats on the Bruce Peninsula (the ditch being the only decent cover) and had put out a dozen or so decoys.  After some time, a line of geese on the southern horizon became visible, and they were making for our setup, or at least that is what I thought.  At about 200 yards or so, there arose such a sound from the next field east of us that I was sure there was another flock coming.  The most true to life clucks, moans, and bawls I’d ever heard drew the attention of the flock from the south and they swung wide of us before setting their wings and dropping to the field on our east side.  Six shotgun reports and a few falling birds later it became immediately apparent that a very accomplished goose caller was working the ‘field next door’.  So it went for a couple flocks more, and though we managed to score a few birds as they fled the gunfire east of us, it wasn’t the hunt for us that it could have been.  But it didn’t matter, at least to me, because my eyes had been opened to a whole new dimension of goose hunting.  After the hunt we waited on the side road for the other group, and as it turned out we had been hunting next to a championship-calibre caller: Craig McDonald.  He was hunting in the area with his Dad (they had a cottage in the vicinity) and while I was expecting an arrogant ‘professional’ (don’t ask me why) he was exactly the opposite; he was nice and humble and offered a few tips, and he had the nicest truck I’d ever seen to that time.  The next week I went out and got my first short-reed goose call, an instructional CD, and started to practice in ways that drove my girlfriend (now my wife) insane.  I’ve done a contest or two myself, but I’m still not even close the level of calling that we were treated to that day.  Nonetheless, I can pinpoint that hunt as the start of my obsession with game calls.  Now my wife knows who she can blame for the soundtrack to her life.

I may have told this story before, but with the early goose season looming, it bears repeating again.  On an early goose hunt in 2006 we spent the better part of a very hot September morning rolling hay bales into a makeshift set of blinds on a field that geese had been loafing in during the early afternoons and returning to in the evenings.  As with all things in goose hunting, as soon as the bales were setup, we went to get some lunch.  Wouldn’t you know it?  As soon as we drove off, forty or fifty geese dropped into the field to hang out.  We devised a plan of attack and secretly began a broad circle that led to us stalking from hay bale to hay bale until we were within sixty yards of the birds.  On a prearranged signal our friend Tack began herding the birds our way.  When he was just under a hundred yards from the birds they got up and began to head out.  They came our way broadside and a mere twenty feet off the ground.  Inside of fifteen yards Rory, my cousin Dane, and I opened up the shotguns; we had to wait that long just for them to provide safe shooting options.  I crumpled a bird with my first shot and then missed in the most embarrassing of fashions on my second and third rounds.  Dane and Rory both emptied their guns, and Rory managed to re-load and pop two more rounds as the birds put altitude and distance between us and them.  Angry at myself such atrocious shooting, I trudged out to pick up my goose.  I was dumbfounded to find that I was the only one picking up a bird: my cousin-Dane has a well-deserved reputation for being lethal with a shotgun, and Rory is no slouch either.  Yet here we were: eleven rounds spent and one goose to show for it.  Dane muttered various curses, exclaiming that he could see the tongues and eyes of the birds, among other things.  Rory blamed the soreness in his cheeks from wisdom tooth extractions performed just days before.  For once (and probably the only time since) I was able to look smug and bask in some accolades.  And the laughs…man did we laugh about that.  A while later, just as we were about to call it a night, a big flock came rocking and swinging into our decoys and we all redeemed ourselves, scratching down another eight birds.  That day at the hay bales was certainly one for the memories.

One of my fondest deer hunting memories isn’t even of hunting deer.  After a long cold day in an early November downpour, we had a sumptuous steak dinner.  We ate whipped potatoes, Brussels sprouts slathered in butter, sautéed mushrooms, and perfectly seared T-bones that were big enough to force all the other fixings off your plate.  Long after many others had turned in my cousin Luke, my brother Donavon, myself and the camp’s oldest member Frank Sweet turned off the generator, lit up Frank’s old Coleman lantern, and sipped cold beer while we swapped stories.  We talked about women, and hunting, and government, and literature, and told entertaining jokes and stories from our lives (although Frank had a significantly larger well of jokes and stories to draw from) while the rain fell on the roof and tinkled against the chimney pipes.  I don’t even recall what time we all eventually turned into our bunks that night (and the rain persisted to keep us all in camp the next morning) but I do recall thinking that there was no greater relaxation than just sitting around with the guys telling benign lies to each other, remembering girls we’d loved, and figuring out all of the world’s problems in one go through.  I was secretly sorry for those who never had (or never would) experience moments like that, and it was bittersweet to know that it was one of those perfect moments that would pass, and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to re-create it.  Frank would be taken away by heart failure the next spring and that just reinforced the fleeting beauty of the times spent in the hunting tradition.  The loss of a friend like Frank, while sad, also galvanizes me every year to go out and make as many memories count as I can.  And in less than two weeks my friends, my family, and countless others will re-embark on that journey.

Enjoy your journeys as much as I’ll enjoy mine and maybe I’ll see you in the fields.

A Deer Season Digested

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.

A November Gearhead-Gear to Take on a Deer

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 20^th 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 19^th).

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.

Taboo of the Day: Being a Jerk

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.

The Bruce Peninsula

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.