Seamus went hunting with me again this weekend. John was invited, as it was his turn, but he had something else to do and says that he’d rather camp without the hunting anyway. So Seamus very happily took his place.

It’s so nice, leaving the trailer up at camp. I can be packed and ready to go in a half an hour, provided I do some preparing ahead of time. I swooped into school as it let out and picked up my son, and we were off. Two hours later, and there we were, home again. The other home that is, the one with the campfire and the dogs and the clean-smelling air.

 

  

Seamus has a couple of projects for his 4-H wildlife club that he’s working on. One is a simple log of spotting animals, and another is something he wants to make for the Fair; a display of tracks that he’s seen personally. He didn’t find too many good tracks this weekend, as it’s been pretty dry up there, but he sure did well on the spotting part.

Saturday morning started off with a few cold trails. The dogs struck, but pretty weakly, and didn’t find much of anything. There was a lot of driving around trying to find them before we figured out that two had just lit out and were probably down in the canyon. I had to explain to Seamus that this is a part of hunting too, looking for dogs, and sometimes it’s not a lot of fun. He and I went back to camp and cleaned up a little, and then went out to guard where the dogs might come back through. They’re supposed to come back more or less where they were turned out, but these had been gone for six or seven hours.

We sat by the Ranger Station, not being especially quiet with our honking the horn to call the dogs in. I looked up at the meadow next to us, and there were two does and a fawn, completely unconcerned about our presence. So he got to watch their behavior, and how they heard an upcoming vehicle before we did.

More sitting, and then it was fully dark. Don sent us home, having caught one of the two truants. One our way back out the road, we picked up a dark shadow in the headlights. Sure enough, it was a bear running down the road right where we’d been sitting earlier. I bet we dropped some snacks. So he got to check that one off his spotting list too. That was pretty cool; I’ve never seen one from the road like that myself either. The boys back at camp were thrilled to hear it too, and I’ll give you three guesses where we started hunting on Sunday morning.

Sure enough, they struck right there. Fran was in our truck with me, as Todd had the shooter with him (it’s fun to ride with Todd) and all of the vehicles were well spread out. Fran had a feeling that the bear was treed over the ridge, and she was right. He wasn’t too far from the road, and we all made it in time to take quite a few photos. Seamus even made a video with his camera, complete with flinchy movements when the gun went off.

I think I received one of the best compliments of my life. The two houndsmen were under the tree seeing to the dogs, and the shooter was new. They sent him over to listen to me. Having those boys think that I know what I’m doing just felt great, like I might actually be learning something. Hell, give me a few years, a house out of town, and the freedom to take every single weekend off to run dogs, and I might turn houndsman (so to speak) myself. I’m really falling in love with the sport.

I may have received another nice compliment too. It seems that my crush may be mutual, as he was asking about me. Now the whole camp is conspiring to set us up. I’m OK with that if he is. And I’ve decided to just get over myself with the age thing. Men like him don’t come along every day.