I thought our weekend was hosed when the mountains were snowed in. If we could even get there, the animals would sure be holed up, so the hunting would be kind of pointless. We planned a weekend of not much for once; a little blobbing, a little TV-watching, and maybe a little internet surfing.

But we got a call in the afternoon that someone had backed out of going to a crab feed and would we like to go? Well, sure! We love crab.

It was a good one too. The Builder’s Exchange puts on a much fancier crab feed than the local Little League does, although we always have fun at that one. I always win something bizarre at the local one, so when I saw how cool the raffle table was, I went back and bought some more raffle tickets. I figured if anything, I’d win something perfectly useless to me, like the cigars or a designer purse. But with 1100 people there, the odds were long.

So after a great dinner, they started the raffle. Junior had bought some tickets too, so we lined them up as we wiped our hands. It went on and on without anyone even from our side of the room getting much. But then almost at the end, one of our numbers hit! It was a ribeye and prawn dinner for two at a steakhouse up in Stockton. So we were pretty thrilled.

I was still kind of buzzing from that and it was almost over, so I wasn’t paying much attention any more. At the second-to-last prize, I fuzzily recognized that the first three digits were on a ticket I had. It took a second to realize that the last two were also. And I’m not much for carrying on, but I sure jumped up and squealed like a schoolgirl when I flipped through my book and saw that it sure enough was our ticket.

And what a prize! We won a 50-inch plasma TV and a base to put all of your peripherals on. I was so excited I was shaking; I’ve never won anything like that before. We hadn’t even brought our truck; we’d rode in Junior’s folks’ car. But one of our friends had, so the men all loaded up our prize and we dodged raindrops to bring it home.

I’m still grinning like a fool, and it’s two days later. Junior’s got big plans to hang it in the bedroom, bumping that one down to the kids’ game room. It sure was worth taking a weekend off from hunting!

It’s a tradition in my little house to go hunting on the Friday after Thanksgiving, if at all possible. Junior’s all for keeping that one up. So after getting up at 4:30 to smoke a turkey (which was too early by the way. 6 AM would have been fine.) we did it again on Friday morning. No, not to catch Black Friday sales. The only thing that could have got me out of bed that early after all of that work was hunting, not shopping.

So dawn found us rolling into camp. The bears are really getting slim around there, so the houndsmen are working on switching the dogs over to varmints. They’ll hunt either, but during bear season, we’re pretty focused on that. It’s important to find an animal or a track so they know what we want them to do now.

Bobcats are a little tricky to hunt with dogs. They don’t leave a whole lot of scent in their tracks, so the trail has to be really hot for a dog to be able to work it well. With bear, we can intercept a track from the night before and have a reasonable chance of finding the bear at the end of it. Their scent lingers. Even I can smell them, and have when one’s popped out in front of me. With bobcat though, you’re pushing it if you find a track that’s half an hour old.

Crawler had spotted a big one in a field and took a shot at it, but missed. He called the houndsmen at the same time I was trying to catch up to them. Grey Fox showed up first, but it had been that half hour. Even though we’d had visual contact, it took a long time for Shady and Pete to find a trail they could follow. That bobcat had tromped all over that meadow, leaving what scent he left all over the place, so it was hard for the dogs to find the one spot that went out. Eventually, they thought they did, but nothing ever came of it. Such is the way of varmint hunting.

It had snowed in the high country on Friday night, so come morning, we all convoyed up to the high country near our deer camp. The snow on the ground was promising, as even those of us without hounds would have a reasonable chance of spotting a fresh track if we all split up.

So that’s what we did, working our way higher and higher in elevation. The wind was crazy, even though it had stopped snowing. It didn’t feel like it if you got caught under a tree when a gust came up. It wasn’t a constant wind either. The trees learn how to deal with a hard wind blowing in one direction. No, this one was gusting and swirling around capriciously, making one tree in a stand wave wildly while the others held stock still.

So when Grey Fox calmly called on the radio that he could use a little help, I suppose it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. He’d gone down a side road looking for tracks, and when he turned around, there was a downed tree on the road behind where he’d come in. While he was hooking his winch up to get it out of the way, another one came down. This one landed right on the cab of his truck, narrowly missing his daughter-in-law, who was getting back into the truck at the time.

Nothing upsets Grey Fox. He’s seen it all. He called for help to get it off the truck, and we all converged on him. It turned out that it wasn’t two trees down; it was three. There was an even bigger one in the road blocking us from getting to him. Since we were in the front of that line and had the biggest truck anyway, save Crawler’s – he doesn’t like to scratch his up though - Junior whipped it around, wrapped the chain around the log, and pulled it out of the way.

The one on the truck turned out to be a little rotten. Junior and Maverick were able to lift it a little and roll it off the truck without too much damage. He’s got a dent in the cab and in the corner of the door that saved Inez, but no glass even broke and nobody was hurt. We all pitched in to move the one he was originally working on, and then hurried on out of there. The trees were still waving around and another could come crashing down at any minute. It was a little spooky.

That seemed to be the excitement of the day. Maverick later found a bobcat track that also proved to be a little too old. We saw a fresh pair of coyote tracks, but we don’t hunt those with hounds and we weren’t carrying an appropriate gun anyway. We were all a little shy of the trees and the wind, so we moved back down into the lower country where it was a little safer.

This upcoming weekend, we’re going to sight in one of the varmint rifles and pull the trailer back home. Varmint hunting is done more at night and the camping is a little more flexible. We’ll put the camper shell and the bed kit back on the Ford, which will now be the primary hunting vehicle. We’ll also be cutting back our hours to every other weekend, because I’ll be damned if I’m sleeping in a truck bed in the snow with three children. Besides, it’s been a long season and it’s time to get ready for Christmas and for trapshooting season.