Both of the kids asked to spend Friday night at their Dad’s this week, so I took shameless advantage and got myself a three-day weekend by burning four hours of vacation time. Not to relax, of course; you know me.

Nope, I got up at oh-my-god-it’s-early again and hit the road at 4 AM with my day-hunt partner in crime. Since we forgot that dawn’s a little later than it was two weeks ago, we had to sit and wait for a while when we got there, but it finally came. As soon as we could distinguish colors, we were off.

We were road hunting, since I’m having a small problem with asthma this week and even the smallest walks are killing me. Saw a couple of deer, which made me feel better than last weekend when I was cursed.

Marv had me stop to look at a deer, and we both realized that it was a buck. He hopped out of the truck and I stayed in, waiting for the shot. When it came, I was expecting to see him dragging something back up the hill in short order, but not so. He’d been scoping it to see if it was legal (it was) and once he saw that fork, he moved the scope to the body. Just a hair before he pulled the trigger, the buck jumped, and he missed it entirely. And right then, the noise made a second buck pop his head up to see what was going on. That one was a nice four-pointer (or eight for you whitetail people; we count ‘em differently out here.)

And of course, they both took off. We lurked around there for a while hoping that they hadn’t gone too far, but another asthma attack made me fairly useless. Came back in the evening to stand hunt and still didn’t see them. The game warden said that they’d been hanging out there for a month and that the big one had been shot at and missed too.

So it was mostly driving; 250 miles worth of it in 17 hours, mostly at around the 5-8 mph range. We went on some new roads, took some pictures. It was an awfully long day, and peeing every fifteen minutes due to a bladder infection didn’t help. I better get that cleared up before next weekend, because it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to pee with eight men around than just one!