The bad thing this year has been the actual hunting. I’ve never seen a year so bad, and most of the houndsmen I run with say the same thing, and they have a lot more time on the ground for comparison. So many weekends have been spent driving around looking for tracks or scents for absolutely nothing that it’s got me pretty well burnt out on the whole thing for a while. So much money and time invested, and I only got to see three bears taken. What a terrible year for training dogs this was too, as it’s really hard to teach them what to hunt if we never actually find what they’re supposed to be hunting.

I didn’t want to put my green dogs in on cold tracks for fear that they’d mess up someone’s paid-for hunt, and it’s not as good for training as hot tracks are anyway. They have a hard time figuring out what to do if the smell is too faint. So Jane got in on three hunts, and only made it to the tree on two of them. I never did manage to walk the pups in to a tree, since I was busy messing with Jane and only have so many hands. It’s next to impossible to train young dogs without a lead dog of your own, and I don’t have one.

The dogs are driving me nuts at home too, always barking, like hounds do. I’ve had a lot of animal drama going on lately with Angus killing poultry and me having to take one of the hound kennels for him. Add to that the job insecurity and the irrationality of spending one to two hundred bucks in fuel each weekend to hunt these dogs, besides the costs to feed them and keep them healthy, and it starts to overwhelm me. I’m losing sight of the joy in hunting; it’s all work and no fun any more. I’m working hard on simplifying my life to ease stress levels, and the dog pack is a huge part of my stress.

So after a great deal more thought than I spent acquiring the pack (and that was a lot,) they are now for sale. I have someone coming over tonight who likes Cara a lot and used to own her grandmother. He may take the other two as well, for another friend who’s down a few dogs. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this but rationality says that it’s the right thing to do. It’s just not the right time for me, and getting a green houndsman involved with a green pack was a poor decision. If the financial things shape up, I can get back into it at any time, but next time, I’ll buy some trained dogs to start with. Puppies are just more headache than they’re worth.

I’m having a problem with feeling like a failure and I definitely got more attached to these little hooligans than I should have, but I do think that my life will be easier without them. The box will come out of the truck so I can use the bed, but I’ll keep all of my equipment. I liked being a houndsman, but I think I will like lowering my blood pressure just as much. I’ll miss them but my poultry and the neighbors won’t. At least I’m in good company; more than half of the houndsmen that I know have sold off all of their dogs at one point or another. Grey Fox himself used to sell dogs left and right, and completely got out of it more than once. But if I get back into it, it’ll have to be from another angle. I’m not a dog trainer, at least not at this stage.

The adrenaline rush is incredible. When you’re at a tree below a bear and the dogs are all singing their hearts out doing what they were born to do, it’s all about the moment. All of the preparation, all of the work to get to that point just drops away, and it’s just the team and the bear. This is when you forget about the dogs being nuisances in the kennel at home, and you don’t care that you’re exhausted and still have to pack everything back up and out of the canyon. Everything that’s always churning in the back of your mind is absolutely drowned out and for once everyone there, dogs, people, and bear, are all focused on the same experience.

People who haven’t done this may not get it. It seems really strange from the outside, even to some other hunters. We kill ourselves all year getting our dogs trained and ourselves in shape and enough money together to get to do this. It’s a ton of work in the off-season, but at that particular moment at that tree, that’s when it’s worth it. I can explain it all I want, but until you’ve been right there, you’re not going to get it. Some people still don’t, but some do.

I had the privilege of passing this experience on to a friend this weekend. Junior is in Colorado, but I always go up even when he’s gone, just like I used to do before we met. And this time I wanted to show my friend Shelley how cool this whole thing was. I’ve talked it up since I met her, and she was really excited to go.

I warned her that we might not even see anything. Bear hunting is really variable, and we can go weeks without treeing a bear. Even getting in on a race would be interesting, and getting to a tree would just be gravy, so that’s what I hoped for. And it turned out that we couldn’t have picked a better weekend to do this.

It had snowed on Thursday night but not too much, which makes for really nice hunting. The snow on the ground shows the tracks really well and keeps the scent longer, and the dogs don’t get overheated later in the day like they can in the early season. So as we do, we split up into several groups to start a bear for the client. We were following Maverick doing a little dog training when Dean called and said that he had something going up high. So we threw the rig dogs back into the boxes and hightailed up up the mountain into the deeper snow.

It took us a while to pinpoint the dogs, but once we did, it was clear that they had that bear in sight. They make a whole different noise when they’re just chasing one from when they’re looking at him. I happened to catch a track across the road out of the corner of my eye, and we got out to have a little show and tell. That track happened to be a big bear, and fresh, and with dog tracks right with it, so it was the one we were after. Dean had seen it earlier too, and knew we were after a good one.

Eventually we narrowed down the best place to walk down to the tree. We had our choice of one side of a creek or the other, but the road around to get to the other was miles and miles away. But we got there, and the men went down with Shelley, Seamus, and I just a touch behind. We were fortunate enough to get down to the tree without any problems. Maverick handed me some dogs as soon as I got there, so I didn’t get any pictures. But Shelley got to see the whole thing. The client used a bow and stuck the bear with his first shot, at which time it came barreling down that tree. Dean and Maverick backed the client up with pistols, as the last thing we need is a wounded bear around. Bears are incredibly tough, and it kept going down into the creek with several bullets and an arrow wound in him.

That creek was as far down the mountain as we’d already come but much steeper. My knee is giving me fits, so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to go down any farther only to have to struggle my way back up. Seamus wanted to go and he’s getting pretty trustworthy about handling himself, so when the rest of the men went down, I checked with Crawler and  sent him down with them. Shelley and I packed out some extra equipment for the guys and slowly followed our backtrail back to the trucks, about a mile and completely uphill.

At that point the challenge was to find a good place for the guys to get the bear out. This creek wasn’t really accessible by any roads; we couldn’t winch it out with mule tape like we can if it’s fairly close. And it was a big bear, the biggest one of the year, so dragging out whole by sheer manpower wasn’t an option either. After some driving back and forth to evaluate both sides of the creek, the guys decided just to skin it out and pack the head, hide, and meat out separately. Fortunately, Dusty showed up with the cavalry; he had the squirrel hunters in his truck, a group of young and strong men that have recently started hunting with us. He sent them down with extra packs to help with the muscle.

Seamus was rather pleased to get to do all of that without a parent around. He and Crawler started a fire down there so the boys could work on the bear without getting too cold; it was 27 degrees all day.  And he came up out of that canyon packing someone else’s rifle and a great big grin; it’s good for a kid to be treated like a man once in a while. Shelley seemed to really get a kick out of the whole thing too, and I think I may have gotten her as hooked as quickly as I was. I’ll lay odds that she gets a bear tag next year. Once my dogs are trained, I’ll sure do my best to get her a bear of her own, but getting to be in on the biggest and prettiest one of the year was a special treat. I’m thrilled that I got to share it, with each of them getting something different out of the whole experience.

Senior and Bill told us the lake had been restocked with trout that week, so fishing seemed like the thing to do. Pat and his two boys and Grey Fox’s grandson were hanging with us. So we scraped together enough tackle, never a problem when my father-in-law is around, and headed off to the lake.

My father-in-law is a fantastic teacher, and he loves to help kids. Fortunately, I’m such a beginner at fishing that I qualify for the help too. He got the four of us set up on the bank while he, Bill, Pat, and Junior supervised. It wasn’t long before the fish were hitting the baits and we were reeling them in. Hatchery fish are apparently really easy to catch, as they’re used to being fed, but that didn’t hurt our fun. I’ve had such a fishing curse for so long that it was a real relief to be able to actually land one.

The looks on the kids’ faces when they’d catch one was great. I was torn between wanting to fish and wanting to take pictures, so I did a little of both. Once I’d caught my limit, I could focus on the kids and try to get some action shots. They had such a good time, and Senior did too helping them. They kept all of the dads busy taking hooks out of fish; as soon as one kid would get his line cast back out, another kid would have one on the bank and another kid would need fresh bait. A few hours went by in a flash.

Senior and Junior set up an assembly line when we got back to camp. Almost all of us had limited out, so they had a lot of fish to clean. Senior filleted them all while Junior cleaned the bones off of the fillets and I washed them. We ended up with a lot of fish, and shared ours with Fran and Todd down at the other camp. Bill and Senior have been fishing all season and are pretty tired of trout, so they were happy to send theirs off for other people to eat too.

All in all, it was just a lot of low-stress fun. We got back to the hunting on Sunday, but the change was pleasant. I’d like to do it again, but maybe before hunting season opens. There’s a lot going on this time of year.

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Cara’s a little braver, but she’s always had the better nose when it comes to the house cat. Foxy is nervous around a dead bear, but she relaxes after a little and will at least go up and smell it. They’re good with the other dogs, even with strange ones stuffed into their box. They tie out at camp just fine, and ride around without complaining most of the day. For the most part, when I need them to be quiet in the box so we can listen, they are. And when I let them out for a break, they spin around like wild things, do their business, and then come back when I call them. When I let them out to play with their siblings, Jake’s three pups, it gets a little wild but it’s fun to watch. Next year will be some more intensive training, as they’ll be old enough to run with the pack. We’ll have a better idea of what they are next year. Pup training is a long process, and they don’t all make hunters. Two years is a big chunk of time to invest in what may be nothing, and that’s why a lot of guys won’t even mess with pups, but will buy started young dogs.

I sure didn’t think I’d get to have a dog in the races this year. But then Jane came along. And I didn’t know what she’d do either, but I thought I’d try her. We’re not even sure how old she is, and I didn’t think she’d ever been hunted, from the way she looked and acted. The first time we threw her up on the box to rig, on opening day, she seemed to be excited but really nervous. She figured out how to ride up there pretty quickly, but I don’t have a lot of slack in my dog chains, so she couldn’t get in too much trouble anyway. When Dean’s dogs struck that day, I had to encourage her to bark along, but she did it without much heart. She didn’t know what was going on, was just following the pack. That’s OK, it was a good start for a stray dog.

We turned her out that first weekend too, to see what she’d do, and if she even could follow the pack. Now, she was starving to death when I got her and I may have overcompensated a little in the feeding department, so she’s a touch chubby. And my one-mile walks are nothing to get a hound in shape, so I didn’t really expect her to be able to keep up with the pack, but I’d be happy if she at least went in the same direction, and she did. She didn’t keep up with them, as I’d expected, and I didn’t know what we’d find when we went back to get her. But we followed her tracking signal right back to where we’d turned out, and there she was, following a Jeep down the road. It’s good if they go back to where they started instead of wandering off into who-knows-where. It’s easier to pick them back up that way.

So we’ve started throwing her in to the the really hot races. She made it to one of the trees at Seth’s bear, and it was really something hearing her bawling so hard. She has a really distinct bawl mouth, almost a scream, and I hadn’t heard it before, as she doesn’t make a peep in the kennel at home. It sent shivers down my spine, hearing my own dog at the tree. I couldn’t go to that particular tree, as that bear was nervous and we didn’t want too many people there, but Junior said she was looking at it and going nuts, just like she’s supposed to do.

We’ve been rigging her like she’s a strike dog too, not expecting anything to come of that. But since we don’t have a strike dog, there’s room on the rail and we might as well see what she can do. And on Saturday morning, she surprised us again. We were running with Maverick, and his dogs hit a really hot one. We rolled up behind him a few minutes later, and Jane lost her mind up there on the box. She wasn’t just booger barking because the other dogs were excited; she was really getting after it. I thought she was just going along with it until Maverick looked up at her and pointed out that she was winding the bear too. Now, that’s a really good thing. This bear was probably so close to us that he could see us, so she got a good dose of what a good, fresh bear track smells like, and she wanted some of it.

So when we turned dogs out, we dumped her in with the pack. I got her in fourth or fifth, not so far behind that she’d have to play catch-up. This was a short, fast race too, and I could hear her every once in a while. She doesn’t seem to bark much while she’s running, which is a pretty neutral thing. They treed in a hurry, and we got there and were tying dogs back before she showed up. I think she was in the area, but a tree can be a little overwhelming for a young dog. Once she was finally there though, and got a glimpse of that bear in the tree, she came uncorked again. She bayed just as hard as any of the rest of the dogs in the pack, and didn’t act at all gun shy when it was taken.

We always let the dogs get their piece of the bear as soon as we know it’s dead. Last time, she hadn’t been at the final tree, so this was her first opportunity to get that old bear right away. I didn’t know if she’d be timid about that either, but she wasn’t. She dove right in there with the rest of the dogs and made sure that thing was dead.

She’s done really well for a stray dog. The other houndsmen seem to like her and she hasn’t shown any traits yet that will automatically disqualify her. If she were fighting at the tree, for example, I’d have to get rid of her right away. We can’t have one of those in the pack; it teaches it to the others and then there’s chaos. She does seem to have the hunting instinct; if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point to keeping her either. You can’t teach that to a dog.

It’s been amazing, getting to run my own dog. I didn’t expect to do it this year, but here I am. Sure, I’m still dog training more than hunting, but it’s at a higher level than I thought I’d get to do. The whole process is teaching me so much. I always had a hard time picking most of the other dogs apart by sound, except for a couple with distinct voices, but my own dog is clear as a bell to me. And it was always hard to tell which dog was which by sight; they’re all mostly the same color and when they’re all running around together, you have to really look at them to tell who’s who. But my dog jumps out at me like she’s been colored with a highlighter pen; it’s that obvious. I can tell my pups apart from the other pups at a glance too, even though Foxy looks an awful lot like her brothers Ace and Bo.

But the biggest surprise for me, in this dog running business, has been the pride. It’s undeserved; I haven’t taught this dog to want to chase bears, that’s all her. But I’ve worked with her and given her a chance to do what she was born to do, and every time I see another light bulb go on in her head, I get a grin that will split my face. I’m proud of her; she’s learning much faster than I even expected, and doing much better than I had any right to even hope for. This is a dog training season for me, not a hunting season, and I had no idea that I would have so much more fun with this than I ever have before. It’ll get frustrating, that’s for sure,  but for now I’m on a high that I didn’t know existed. I owe that to Grey Fox poking me into doing this, and to Maverick for getting me started, and to Jane for being a good dog.

They keep a few specific tools around, like giant rolls of plastic wrap and foil, and set up the tables with plastic to keep them clean. Some years they have a great big tent set up in camp to use during the really cold times; this tent also doubles as a poker-playing room and triples as extra guest sleeping quarters if needed. But this time of year is still well warm enough to do everything outside.

They’ve got the process down. Everyone has a role and they set it up like an assembly line. Gutted and tagged deer are hung in the shade for up to a couple of days, well-wrapped to keep the flies and the meat bees from traveling into the body cavity through the nostrils or mouth. When it comes to wrapping time, the equipment is laid out and ready, and the men go and pull the bag off and lower the deer to a good working height to skin it. If someone wants the skin, they’re a little more careful, but if nobody does, it goes really quickly. I’m good at skinning but a little obsessive at getting it off whole without any holes, so I’m slower than they are.

They take the big primal cuts off the skinned deer next. The shoulders and hams are removed and carried over to the tables. The tenderloins were cut out with the gutting, and probably have already been eaten, but the backstraps come off at this time. Any meat left on the carcass is trimmed off to go with the rest of the stew meat. The head is set aside to have the tag validated, if it hasn’t been yet. If it has, they’ll take a saw to it to remove the antlers after everything else is done.

Once at the tables, there are a couple of people for each specific job. Two take the meat off the bones, in whole muscle groups. A couple more people clean the fat and membranes off the cuts, and hand it on down to whoever’s putting packages together. Some people like their steaks and chops to be already sliced when they pull a package out of the freezer and some like the piece left whole in order to cut to whatever size they need when they’re cooking. I’m in the latter group.

Then the meat is handed on down to the wrappers, in chunks of about a pound or two. It’s wrapped very tightly in lots of layers of plastic wrap, squeezing to get all of the air out. Meat can last a really long time in the freezer wrapped this way; I recently opened a package of venison that had been lost in the bottom of the freezer since 1999, and it was still good. That’s twelve years, and it didn’t even have any freezer burn. Since the fat is cut off, there’s nothing to go rancid either. After the plastic wrap, a layer of foil is wrapped around the meat too, and the name of the cut and the date are written on it in permanent marker. That’s how I knew that piece was so old.

Then about half an hour after the deer was hanging, someone’s got a cooler full of fresh venison to take home and freeze. Presto, and the only expenses were in the wrapping, and if you buy that at Costco or Smart & Final, that’s nothing to speak of either. And it will last longer in the freezer than butcher paper will, and it will taste better. And you don’t owe the butchers anything but your labor on the assembly line for the next one.

He always did love a good camp feed and we were lucky enough to get to have a campfire this early in the season. Grey Fox always loved to build a fire as big as he could and then sit out around it talking long into the night. I learned so much from him, sitting around those fires, and I hope I can remember it all. He started teaching me about picking and running hounds years ago. He knew that I’d get some one day. He did know that I got these; I just wish that he could have seen them. He’d have got a kick out of seeing me run around with a dog up on the box. He loved to train people and to train hounds, and teaching me to how train hounds would have been right up his alley.

So somehow we lost most of the opening day convoy to hangovers, and on Sunday morning we were down to three rigs: Dean’s, mine, and PeeWee in his Dad’s truck. It was Grey Fox’s grandson Seth’s day for a bear. There were no clients and hardly any greenhorns, but not as many houndsmen as we usually run with either. We missed Grey Fox a lot and it was a little jarring each time we’d catch a glimpse of his truck. Maverick couldn’t be there due to work issues either.

We met where we often meet, and hit a hot strike right off the bat. Dean put his first string out and they took off up the hill. I thought it was hot enough to put my Jane in with them, but she got a little confused and came back to the truck so we scooped her back up. We have to carefully balance training with not interfering with the actual hunt, but everyone has young dogs to train this year, so it’s not like we’re the only ones.

The direction they went was a really good one, so Junior and I went on top of the ridge to listen. We found them treed up there, so Dean joined us and we all started to walk down. I had Jane on a leash because I wanted to show her what she was after, but as we got close to the hounds, she went nuts wanting to join them. I let her loose to see what she’d do. She did just what she was supposed to do, and joined in with the pack. Just before I got to the tree, slowpoke that I am, I heard the tree bark popping and knew that bear was coming down in a hurry. All of the dogs took off after it. With the bear in sight, even the young dogs get a grip on their job; two of Dean’s younger dogs were in the race now too.

We could hear that they’d treed it again, and made it around to that tree too. I could see the bear this time, and he could see us. It was a really nervous bear, and really athletic. Once it spotted the people, it started to get antsy again, climbing up and down the tree it was in. At one point that bear took an amazing sideways leap from one tree three feet laterally into another like a grey squirrel, slapping the trunk with his claws as he landed. I’ve seen them jump before but never sideways like that.

Since the bear was so nervous, we decided to try to slip a couple of guys in without the whole herd of the rest of us. Junior and Dean went in to back Seth up. They got the dogs tied back, but that bear was moving again. Fortunately, this time he moved up, but the best angle for a shot was towards the rest of us down the hill. Seth took the shot he could safely make, and connected, but the bear came out of the tree still running, and running right for us. We don’t like to keep too many guns around for safety reasons, but PeeWee and I were armed specifically for this. I had my pistol out as the guys up top were hollering at us, as the bear was coming straight for us, and PeeWee backed me up with a rifle. At that point I was extremely glad that we’d disarmed the pilgrims, as I ran in between them, towards the bear. I would not have been happy to have been shot in the back by an over-excited greenhorn.

As luck would have it, I’d forgotten to take my gun off safe, and didn’t get the best shot I could have. I did get a shot at it, although I didn’t think I’d hit it, and that turned the bear 90 degrees. PeeWee and I leapfrogged each other trying to get a clear shot at it; we knew exactly where each other were and can stay out of the other one’s field of fire. But by then the guys up the hill had turned the dogs back loose. The dogs came charging down the hill and shooting was no longer a good option. They started to blow on past the track where the bear had turned, but a whole lot of shouting on our parts got them lined out again. We could see when Pete winded the bear again, and they were off.

At that point three of the shooters were still up the hill, with two of us down below. There was a chance that the bear would run back up towards where we’d treed the first time, so I made a snap decision to go back up there while the guys dealt with it if it stayed low. I commandeered Uncle Donnie and his hoopty, and he ran me back up to the top. It turned out that we were out of it, as the bear had stayed parallel to the hillside, but every decision can’t be the right one. A wounded bear won’t always tree, and is too dangerous to leave on a mountain, so something had to be done with it. PeeWee and Dean and Junior found it below me when it did tree again, and took care of it. By the time I got back down, they were dragging it out; game over. So I was wrong, but I could have been right; it wasn’t a terribly bad choice. It could have put me and Jake, who met me on the ridge, by ourselves with a wounded bear, but I think we can handle that.

But I had a strong feeling the whole time that ol’ Grey Fox was right there with us, grinning from ear to ear at the whole situation. He always did handle himself really well in a rodeo like that and he would have loved seeing all of these people that he personally trained taking care of business. And the joy of hearing my own dog singing at the tree for the first time would have just tickled him to death. He knew it was in my blood, the hounds, and he told lots of people about it. Even I had no idea how deeply it was a part of me until I heard my Jane right in there with the pack. I was almost as proud of her as I was of Seamus taking his first bear last year, and I was every bit as proud of Seth for doing it this year. It was an honor to be part of fulfilling one of my friend’s last wishes, and it was just gravy to have my dog a part of it. Grey Fox was giving us a little help yesterday, I’m sure of it.

So we went up with the camper shell on the back of the truck again. During regular season we do the camp up right but it’s nice to be mobile during archery season. It gives us the freedom to go check out different places and figure out where the deer are hanging out. We can make camp wherever we happen to stop.

We hadn’t seen anything at the first ridge we walked on, so we were driving over to another spot that may have been more likely. We weren’t even really paying attention to anything, talking about fishing or something, when Junior caught something out of the corner of his eye. As things do, his brain figured out just what his eyes had seen a half-beat later, and we stopped and backed the truck up to look at it.

Sure enough, there was a great big snake sunning himself on a log right next to the road. The tail was obscured from that angle and Junior does not care for snakes at all, so I went to see if it was a rattlesnake or not. Now, snakes don’t typically bother me, although I’m not terribly fond of the kinds that can kill you. So I walked down the road closer to it. I could tell before I could see the rattles that it sure was a rattler, and a big one at that. It was really dark and had that evil-looking head. It didn’t seem too annoyed by us though, so Junior had time to get his bow out and nock an arrow with a Judo tip on it.

His first shot was a little low, and stuck in the oak below the snake’s head. And the snake never even flinched. “Is it dead already,” he asked. Er, no, I didn’t think it was. Snakes don’t move all that fast before their blood has warmed up, but I would have expected at least a twitch. And now suddenly the question of just how, exactly, were we going to get that arrow back leaped into my head. Perhaps we should have thought of that earlier, I know.

He took another shot and this one hit the snake right in the head, a little towards the face, missing the brain. Ah, OK, now it was clear that it was alive. That snake went nuts, as one would expect. And as calm as I’d been up until then and as used to snakes as I am, that buzzing and leaping about sent waves of terror into my hind-brain, making me want to squeal and dance about like a little girl, and not in the cute way either.

Since this snake was now both not-dead and extremely pissed off, the arrow-retrieval conundrum had just become rather more difficult. Junior finally, after an eternity of at least two or three seconds, decided to get a really long stick and flip him into the road. He did just that, successfully, at which point I realized that he’d flipped the snake between us, and I had his bow. I can’t draw the thing and I was not at all happy about having to go around the snake to get back to the correct side. I was wishing mightily for a shovel with a really long handle. I can kill a snake with a shovel, I can.

But the snake was rather wounded, so I sneaked around him without him noticing. At that point I still didn’t know what in the hell we were going to do with the damn thing. Junior got another stick and mashed the snake’s head down with it so it couldn’t strike, and then gave me the stick to hold while he went to get a big knife. And of course, when I was holding it with one hand, it slipped off the snake. I then requested the dumb end, so he took the head end back and I smashed it down in the middle so it couldn’t coil up around his arm. And then he cut the snake’s head off with his knife, after stepping on his stick to make really sure that it wasn’t going anywhere.

I picked up the body of the snake and held it so it would bleed out, and he buried the head so some unsuspecting animal didn’t come across it and get bit by an already-dead snake. That can totally happen; the body was doing it’s best to continue to get me without being equipped with a head or teeth. If the head end could have got to us without a body, it would have.

Snakes clean the easiest when they’re still fresh, but I’d never seen it done. It’s extremely unnerving to cut something open to eviscerate it while it’s still trying to wrap itself around your arm, so I just let Junior show me how to do that for the whole length of the snake. I did really want to learn how to do this though, so once he got it open, he showed me how to skin it and I did that. I’ve never skinned anything so easy in my life, with no pesky legs or armpits to deal with. It just slips off like a sock, and the guts come out equally easily.

And there we were, with fresh dinner! Some kids drove by and saw what we had, and the girl wanted a picture of it. No problem, but I suggested to her that flip flops might not be ideal footwear in snake country. Once a mother, always a mother.

Later that night we fired up the grill for the venison I’d brought, and chunked the snake up too. I’ve only ever had it fried, but it turned out all right grilled too. It’s fitting to eat one’s first kill (of sorts) but we like snake anyway. And I don’t really see the point of killing one if you’re not going to eat it, unless it’s in a bad place for people or livestock. This one kind of was both, and so he became dinner, and he was delicious.

Now, after my last fishing experience, I might have been dubious. But I was fortunately on solid ground the whole time, and if I happened to refrain from being vertical, it would be entirely my fault. So I was all for it.

I don’t have a ton of fishing on my resume at all. A little stream fishing with spinner baits, a little out of the bass boat, and a couple of deep sea trips are all that I’ve done. Shelley likes to fly fish though, and we brought tackle. Well, I thought we had; turns out that the rods in the locker in the camper shell were fly rods all right, but only one had a reel and that one was a spinner reel. And we didn’t have flies or bait or anything. No worries; Mike hooked us up with a couple of flies and Junior tied enough line to his rod to get the job done. So we went downstream and they went upstream and so began my lesson.

I’ve always liked poking around creeks, and it seems to me that fishing makes an excellent excuse for that. Even if you don’t get any fish. Junior gave me the basics of fly fishing with inadequate equipment. The fish were there, all right, tiny little wary things. They could see us and they were not impressed.

Eventually the early morning backed by the late night caught up with Junior, so he took a nap on the creek bank. I wondered how he was going to sleep with bugs crawling in his nose, but his business, not mine. My business was fishing!

I got a lot of nothing and kept moving downstream. Eventually I started getting nibbles on my soggy little fly. It was at that point that I realized that I’d neglected to ask Junior what to do if I got a bite. Does one set the hook in fly fishing? Would doing so fling a startled fish back over my head to land in the trees behind me? I guessed that I’d figure it out, one way or another, me and the fish.

The fish had other ideas. They knew damn well that I wanted to eat them, and they laughed their little fishy laughs at me as I tried to sneak up on them. Turns out that camouflage doesn’t work all that well on fish. Eventually I found a bit of a murky pool with a log hanging across it. I thought that would be as good a place as any to tease some fish with bits of metal and feather.  And they were nibbling there, and spitting the fly right back out, so that was fun.

Imagine my surprise, and that of the fish, when one of them failed to spit the hook back out. I’m sure she had intended to, but it got caught in her mouth. I’d accidentally hooked a fish!

OK, great, now what? Shelley had optimistically lent me her forceps to get hooks out, and I had those in my pocket along with a ziploc baggie for a creel. I managed to get my hands on the fish, who objected strenuously, and then I got the hook out of the fish. And then I promptly dropped the fish. Slippery boogers.

But fortunately I was still sitting on that log, so I got to recapture my trophy. I even managed to get the fish all bagged up and stuffed into my pocket where it continued to flop for an alarmingly long time. Fish had mangled my little fly, so I nipped it off the line and went to tie on a replacement fly. I didn’t remember the exact knot, but I’m good with knots, so I winged it. It was about then that I realized that this was a sport for which I might want to bring my reading glasses, as my arms aren’t quite long enough to see what I’m doing. But I got it done and happily dangled my fly in front of more, smarter fish for another hour or so before Junior found me. I proudly showed him my trophy and he cleaned it for me. I probably won’t be able to get away with asking for fish-cleaning lessons more than another dozen or two times, but he’s good-humored about it.

Shelley and Mike had caught three of the tiny creatures too, just enough for little appetizers before our elk entree that night. And yes, that size is legal to keep in that stream. She even cooked them up for us. I do think that this was the first fish that I’ve caught and then eaten on the same day. They’re even more delicious that way, and trout are pretty stinkin’ good to start with.

I have a feeling that I could really get into this hobby. Not in the yuppie way; I will be buying no waders and no fancy trout-fishing shoes, and the bad fly I tried to stick to my hat just fell off. But redneck trout fishing is right up my alley, I think. Junior has managed to procure me a fly rod with an actual reel and the heavier line on it, and found a creel for me in his dad’s garage. Since I’m not all that enthusiastic about bow hunting, this may distract me entirely from that sport, and I’m OK with that. Fish are delicious, after all.

Apparently the whole world doesn’t see navigation as a necessary life skill. Go figure; people with different priorities in life. Imagine that!

I can see how some people, probably city people but not exclusively so, might not have the need to develop this particular survival skill. I would presume that they know very well how to navigate in their chosen environment, which most likely would flummox me a little. I never know which lane to be in for the bridge, and I really have to pay attention to my stops on the rare occasions that I use public transit.

So there I was, sitting in camp yesterday, minding my own business reading a book. I must have an “ask directions” sort of face. First the people in the minivan went by, up a road I’d just come down. I snickered a little bit to Shelley, as that sure wasn’t a minivan sort of road. And no, I saw them figure that out and then back out. They drove by me and asked if the other road was good, and I told them that it was. They’d come in via the third direction, which involved fording a small creek, and the road I was on wasn’t on the Forest Service map. No biggie, and they had good humor about it.

Not twenty minutes later, here comes a car from the direction in which I’d sent the minivan. And not just a beater car, which one might expect to find in the mountains, on a dirt road, on the opening weekend of archery season. No, this was a spotless, new-looking little white car. They looked extremely relieved to see a human being, and stopped to ask me for directions too. I suggested that they might not want to go up either the four-wheel drive road or the creek crossing.

My jaw might still be dragging on the floor from my shock at hearing where they were trying to go. They had taken a series of spectacularly wrong turns on the way to Tenaya Lake. Which is on the east side of the Yosemite Park, and the highway they needed was at least an hour south of us. We were northwest of the park, closer to the Sonora Pass than the Tioga Pass. Where we were camped, we didn’t need four-wheel drive, but it’s not even a graveled road. In order to get as lost as they were, they had to make a series of compounding errors. I don’t know what started it, but somehow they’d managed to go from a perfectly paved highway onto progressively worse and less-paved roads. I happened to be sitting in a folding chair at the very last point that their Honda could have got to.

One would think that listening to one’s GPS when it tries to take you off the paved road might be a mistake, especially when one is trying to get between a regular town and a massive state park that one had been to the previous day. GPS units don’t work all that well in canyons sometimes, and as they would come out of one, it would probably recalculate a route for them, which they faithfully drove. But that stupid little machine brain refused to admit that it didn’t know what it was talking about, and they seemed not to recognize that they were not going in the right direction until very late in the game.

So I drug the Forest Service map back out. I had to guess at exactly where we were at myself, as our road wasn’t on it, but I know this country and can make a pretty good guess. I wrote down all of the turns for them, ironically on the back of their Yosemite entrance pass from the previous day. They still looked a little befuddled, so I finally gave up on that and just gave them the map, and drew the route on it in pen, with big marks on all of their turns. I told them that they’d have at least four hours of driving ahead of them, and that may have been a little liberal. After all, you can’t fling a car across some of those dirt roads anywhere near as fast as my truck can take them. But I did try to get across to them that this particular route would be on progressively better roads, and not to turn on any more dirt roads once they hit the gravel again. Oh, and I did check to see that they had drinking water, and they did, and snacks too.

To give them credit, they didn’t look like they were quite ready to kill each other yet. I can only imagine my husband or I getting us four hours’ worth of lost in a city and not having a rather high stress level. They couldn’t have seen very many people by the time they hit the gravel roads. I think that the wife was a little bit relieved that the human that they did find happened to be a woman and not some painted-up redneck man carrying a bow. Of course, the painted-up bow-carrying redneck men did walk back into camp just before the car got turned around and corroborated my directions, but who knows what they were thinking at that point.

I am still shaking my head. I have never met anyone so lost in my life, and I include in that number Big Jeff, who has no sense of direction and went downhill when he should have gone up and ended up at the highway instead of camp. At least he came trudging back into camp under his own power several hours later. Come to think of it, there was an early generation GPS involved in that incident too. Maybe the machines are out to get us. They’ll only eliminate those of us who can’t read maps.

But he’d picked up this hound at the trap club; she’d been running around there loose for about a month, living off of handouts. He said she looked like a Walker, and looked young.

So I did a lot of thinking over the weekend, and a lot of getting more and more aggravated at Fionn. Fionn and I do not have personalities that mesh. He’s very timid and screams at anything, up to and including wearing a leash to go for a walk. I don’t really think that he’s going to work out well as a hunter, but I’ll give him a year or so. I actually have a neighbor who wants him for a pet if he doesn’t work out for me.

So what’s the harm in trying another dog? We don’t know anything about her, of course, but we’re no worse off than starting the puppies from scratch. I decided to at least bring her home and see how she interacted with the rest of the pack. I’d make a good effort to find her previous owner and if someone claimed her, I’d give her back. But in the meantime, I’d treat her like she was mine, and that means putting a bit of money into her for vaccines and spaying and whatnot.

She was very clearly friendly when I met her. Not a speck of manners in her, but I’ll teach her not to jump on people or to yank on the leash. Looking at her teeth, she’s clearly not the six months that Senior guessed at; I’d say closer to three or four years. She’s pretty thin and can do with another five pounds of meat on her bones, but she isn’t emaciated. She had a collar but no tags or tattoos. She’s been around people and other dogs, but I’m not sure if she’s ever been hunted. I can only find one scar on her body, and that doesn’t seem to be from running through brush. Their ears and front legs tend to show wear if they’ve been hunted much, and her toenails are a little long for it too. I think I might be able to feel a spay scar too.

When we loaded her into the truck, she jumped right in. I tied her up short, not knowing what she’d do on the freeway, but she just hung her ears out in the wind and grinned all the way home. She was a little unsettled being mobbed when we got to the yard, and Angus was a little growly, but that eased over pretty quickly. I stuffed her into the kennel with a big bowl of food and let them all get to know each other through the fence. Then when I had people coming over to buy my goats, I had to toss the puppies in there with her. And they were all fine! I left them together all night and nothing happened.

So we’ll give her a shot. I’m calling her Jane, for Jane Doe, as she’s anonymous. I’ve put up found ads in a couple of places, but I suspect that she was dumped. She could have been someone’s noisy pet or a terrible working dog; we don’t know. But I guess we’re about to find out if she’s worth anything. What’s one more hound? It’s better that she be put to use than to linger and die in the pound.