I got my first buck seven or eight years ago. JJ took me up to his family’s deer camp, where I was privileged to be one of the first non-family visitors in a generation. We hiked in, deep into the Dardanelles. It took all day to get in; I have no idea of the mileage, but it’s the kind of country where there just isn’t any hunting pressure on the deer. Few hunters get in that far, so they’re not particularly alarmed, although they are more shy of people than the herd that’s around us all the time.

JJ’s grandfather took me to his honey-spot up there, while JJ and his dad went out in their own direction. We were quietly walking around to a bowl when his grandfather spotted three bucks. I sat down and gave myself a good rifle rest, and then just waited. I could see that the largest of the three had walked behind a tree, and was waiting for him to walk out. Eventually he did, not noticing us at all, and I calmly shot him once and he went down. Later, JJ’s grampa said that he wondered if I was ever going to shoot, and pointed out that I clearly didn’t have buck fever.

Well, it’s been a long time since that little forked horn, and I’ve spent a lot of hours deer hunting in between, without seeing a legal buck at a legal shooting time. I’ve kind of moved my emphasis over to bear hunting, but I still deer hunt on the side, mostly after we get back in to camp. Early Saturday morning though, I woke up around five AM listening to the rain plink on my trailer roof, and knew I would be deer hunting that morning. I thought about where I was going, and I laid there awake for almost another hour before I got up and put the coffee on.

I would have liked to go with Jeff and Dennis, who had been up there for a few days. I so rarely get to hunt with them, it seemed a shame to pass it up. But they were driving a little two-seater Gator-type thing, and I had no inclination to ride in the back of that. Besides, when I pulled past their camp just before hunting time, there weren’t any signs of movement yet. I wasn’t going to waste the first storm of the season hanging around waiting for those guys to get up. Fran said, as I left, “Get a big one,” and I said that I’d call for help if I did.

I got past the little section of private land on my way to where I was going just as it became hunting time, a half-hour before dawn. I looked out the corner of my eye, my eyes that never see deer unless they’re standing right in front of me thumbing their noses, and there was an unmistakable sillhouette of a big buck, bedded down right in the open, broadside to me. I stopped the truck and got out with my rifle, and scoped him a little bit. Sure enough a big buck, even though with him facing me, I couldn’t count points well. Spike bucks’ antlers don’t come out past their ears though, not in this country. So I went to one knee for stability, and took a hundred-yard shot. I hit him, he went down, and I started walking over to him.

When I got about half-way there, two bucks stood up. One, a three-pointer, looked so much like the one I’d shot that I was doubting myself for a minute. Did I miss? No, I saw it hit, and there was no way he’d be getting up again. The two compadres looked at their buddy, clearly wondering what the hell was up with him, and walked calmly up the hill. I walked on, and came up on him, with his spine broken but still alive. I wished I’d brought a gun with me to finish him off, but finished he needed to be, and quickly, so I put him down with my knife, carefully, so I didn’t get stabbed with antlers in the process.

Then came the hard part. Down the hill was easy enough, but back up the other side was a bit of a challenge for a fat old asthmatic woman. I kept going back to the radio and calling out, and they kept not hearing me. So I just took it slowly; drag ten feet and breathe. Drag another ten feet, and try the radio again. Another ten feet and a pull on my inhaler. When it came to the steep part, I got him to within my rope’s distance from the truck, threw a loop over his horns and around a tree, and backed up until he popped up on the road. Of course, then he was at road height and the truck tailgate is four feet off the ground, and there was no way I could lift him by myself. So I thought about it, and used what tools were available to me; I dragged him up the embankment on the opposite side (which, come to think of it, is probably where I tweaked both my back and my knee) and backed the truck up that way. Then I could just roll him onto the tailgate, slide him up, and drive on.

I was almost back to camp when my radio and its wrong antenna worked enough to raise my crew. They were just rolling out bear hunting, and when I called asking for a saw and some muscle, they knew. I’d left camp a bare half-hour earlier. Most of us met on the road, and they took my photo. Don was particularly pleased; he knows how long it’s been, and he was proud of me.

 

 

 

 

 Hell, I was rather proud of me too. Wild Man came back to camp with me; couldn’t have asked for a better helper, as he was once a butcher and still has a heart of gold. He butchered out five kills that I saw that weekend; mine was the least of it, as I did the gutting and skinning myself. After we got it into the tree to hang, we caught back up with the houndsmen and went on to have a very good bear race, but that’s a story for the next entry.   

I’m thrilled. It was a clean kill, no bruising of the meat, and he smells so good that I can’t wait to get it back from the locker. He turned out to be the smaller of the two bucks in our camp this weekend, but he’s still quite a respectable size for California. I was considering having the head done, but you can’t mount every one you get, so I’m just going to save the antlers, and the meat, of course, and I’m having the hide tanned too. No waste!

And the best part is that my hunting’s not over. I left the trailer up there for the season, and I get to purely bear hunt until December. I won’t be able to break my habit of looking for deer, but I sure don’t have to haul another one uphill alone this year. I can’t wait to go back.

I’ve been intending a sanity trip for a little while, so 5:30 this morning saw me on the road to find me some peace.

I did too, gobs of it, and in the process rescued some boys who’d gone out looking for adventure. I figure they’ll have plenty of adventure getting their Jeep out of that tree tomorrow.

I was on the last leg of the trip (which I’ll go into in bits over the week, as it was sort of epic for one day) and I came around a snowy corner to see a couple of camoflaged young twenty-somethings pop up the embankment. They looked sheepish and I didn’t see a vehicle in sight, so my first assumption was that they’d walked past their truck.

Uh, no. They’d slid their Jeep off the road not twenty seconds before I came by, and sure enough, there were the tire tracks leading straight to nowhere and I could barely see the red roof when I got out. It had rolled all the way over, landing somewhat vertically, and a tree had stopped them. There are lots of trees up there.

They were OK; one had crashed his knee up but didn’t think it was broken. I didn’t either, from the way he was walking. I took them up the road to where a buddy of theirs was parked and turned them over. Sadly, I did not take pictures; those boys were rattled enough, and to have someone who undoubtedly looked like their mom pick them up was bad enough; they did not need to be humiliated.

But check this out from earlier in the day:

 

 

I’d been driving on completely frozen puddles all day already. Must have gone over fifty of them with not so much as a crunch.

 

 

This one had a particularly interesting freeze/thaw pattern going on, so I deemed it photo-worthy.

 

 

Sure, it was a little damp on the bottom, but it didn’t look bad.

That is, of course, until I drove right over the middle of it (d’oh!) and heard an ominous “snap” and then immediately dropped six or eight inches. Into what appeared to be sucking quicksand. Seems this had been one of those deep puddles. Oops.

I was already in four-high, so I kicked that mule into four-low, rocked it back a little, and bulldozed my way on out of there. Barely, too. I was contemplating walking in to Yosemite and leaving notes as I did it.

Dear Santa:

I would like a winch for Christmas please. A nice big one. Oh, and if you could see your way to have it delivered to the middle of nowhere in January, that would be great!

Kisses!

Cowgirl Walking

But that truck has earned himself a name: “That Ol’ Mule,” and not in any derrogatory sense either. It’s not that the truck’s stubborn, so much as it is willing to dig down deep and put some muscle in it when it matters. And it’s never left me in a lurch either, even when I do stupid things like this.

So that ol’ Mule spun a little, flung mud up one side and down the other, and gripped and ripped that damn ice apart and got me out of that hole. Four-low and first gear is a force to be reckoned with in that truck. I patted ‘im on the dashboard and said, “atta-boy,” and got out to take pictures, because that’s what I do.

 

 

Once I broke through, it looked like the ice was about four inches thick. Which would have been fine if it weren’t for the quicksand. Or my stupid sense of invincibility (is it any coincidence that my Calvin and Hobbes treasury came today? I think not.)

 

 

But I still want a winch. And possibly some common sense (I did have survival gear in the truck, but what a monumental pain in the ass that would have been, eh?)

A couple of people, including Nance, have been mentioning Project 365, which is just a goal to take and post a photo every day. The more I think on that, the more fun it sounds, and it goes well with my intentions of keeping the good camera with me more often.

I figure I’ll hit some days and I’ll miss some days, but on the whole, it can’t help but give me some more photography practice, and it might give me things to write about when I’m otherwise literarily constipated. I don’t think I’ll be posting seperate entries about it every day, but you never know; I might.

And, of course, I didn’t have the camera with me when I took the dogs for a walk yesterday, so I faked it by taking one today.

I call this one Dog Noses in the Dirty Mirror:

 

 

And today’s picture has a story to it, and is a resolution of one of the things that was hanging over my head.

 

 

I’d made myself a little decision tree regarding the trailer.

If it was totalled by the insurance company (and I was pretty sure that it would be), then I was going to cross my fingers and hope for a fair settlement that I didn’t have to argue. If the buy-back price was less than $1000 and the pay-off amount let me buy it back and still pay off my loan on it, I had decided to do that. If they wanted too much for the buy-back, I was going to let it go and look for an older trailer to replace it. I do not want to be under another loan, not with this uncertainty about my job looming overhead. I also did not want to be completely without a trailer.

I figured, better the devil I know than the one I don’t if I bought it back. I know what all works in this thing, and I have a good idea of what it would take to get it sealed up and functional again. And believe me, my standards for repair when it’s coming out of my pocket are pretty low.

So it all worked out. I got a decent settlement from the insurance company, who were actually quite nice to deal with since I wasn’t in a hurry, and I bought it back today. I brought it home (well, to work) to patch up so I can use it for varmint season this winter, and then in the spring, Marvin’s going to help me fix up that front end. We’re going to move the propane tanks and batteries around a little to get rid of that plastic nose piece, and reframe the inside front bed. We’ll seal up that corner too, but for the meanwhile, I’ll tarp the hell out of it. Which I should have done this afternoon, but forgot. I have to get a salvage title from the DMV, but since the brakes and lights all work, that won’t be a big deal.

It’s going to be ugly, but functional, which is fine with me. In a few years, I can look into replacing it with a newer one. If I can sell it for a little money then, that would be cool, but if I can’t, I can junk it without too much heartache. It would probably part out nicely.

On Saturday morning, we split up into two parties, each with a dog rig and a full-size diesel following. Not intentionally; that’s just how it worked out. While Todd went around one side, Don and I went around the other, circling that same apple orchard and old ranger station that’s proved so profitable over the last month.

Todd’s bear was treed close to the road, and while we were on our way over to meet him, Don’s dogs struck, and hard. He turned Chalk out to see if it was worth chasing, and it was, so the other three went out too. We heard them go over a ridge, but then they came back, and Don sent me down to listen further than he was, near where I had faced rattling brush that turned out not to be a bear a few weeks ago.

When I stopped and listened, it was clear that Don and I had them bracketed, and they were coming my way. What’s worse is that they were headed down into some majorly rough country, the Lumsden Canyon which goes right down into the Tuolumne River. At one point, I could see the hounds running just across the canyon from me. We leap-frogged back and forth, the dogs and I, and every time I stopped, I’d holler and honk at them to try to get them in.

But they know damn well that I’m not their person, and why should they listen to me? My heart sank when they got in front of me past the gate down into the Lumsden. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for a long, hard day of trying to get the dogs back out of that impossible place. Don was too far behind me though, and they had to be stopped, so I kept racing them, watching the road get narrower and narrower and the banks get steeper and steeper. I knew the sheer bluffs were right around the corner.

Finally I could hear them over the diesel, so I knew they were close. I stopped the truck and stepped out to listen one more time, and there they were, not ten feet from me. Only when I looked closer at the rattling brush this time, I clearly saw a brown back, not a tri-colored hound. I squirted back into the cab of the truck, having stepped out completely unarmed (not even the camera) although a really pissed-off bear would have come right in the open passenger window, which was right at eye-level to him on the bank.

Fortunately, he saw me too, and flipped a quick U-turn back up into the brush. It happened so quickly that I had to look around before I got back out of the truck and to check the road to make sure that he hadn’t crossed either in front of or behind me. I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t, but the dogs weren’t continuing to chase, so I sincerely hoped that he’d given them the slip.

The dogs popped out looking like they were worn out, and I snagged two. The third one was bleeding from her ear, probably from running through the brush, and she’d flung it all over her face, making it look much worse than it really was, and it took me a while to catch her. I could see the fourth dog, Shady, right up the bank in the brush looking at me, but she wouldn’t come. I was starting to suspect that she was hurt too. Right about the time I was weighing the odds of going in after her with a bear right close, Don pulled up, and managed to coax her down the last ten feet after ten minutes of talking to her. Sure enough, she’d been grabbed on the back. She’s got a few puncture wounds and is holding herself as if she hurts internally, so Don took her back home to doctor her up tonight. She’ll be all right.

But once again, I was grinning from ear to ear. That was the first time I’ve actually seen a bear on the ground during a chase, and to actually be close enough to smell him was high on the excitement scale.

After we all met back up and admired Jim’s bear, we all convoyed up through the apple orchard to see if we couldn’t get a strike while going back to camp. Sure enough, we did, and turned a couple of dogs out on it. In no time at all, we couldn’t hear any of them, and split up to triangulate them by ear. We eventually ended up almost across from camp, just over the ridge from where I killed my bear, with a very nice brown bear in an oak tree. One of the other hunter’s daughters wanted to shoot it, so we hung out and took pictures while they got there. It was nice, and close to the road, but nowhere near the adrenaline rush that I got by being out on foot with one running towards me.

I may be just a little bit hooked. I’m going back up in two weeks, and the guys have suggested that I postpone the trailer repairs so I can go varmint hunting with them. Oh yeah.

It’s been a quiet week, I know. I took the kids up to Roseville this weekend to drop off the bear and take my Gramma to lunch, and I had a whole post written about that, but WP ate it. Oh well, it wasn’t very well written anyway, so I didn’t bother to rewrite.

The taxidermist, though, Aaron at Western Wildlife Taxidermy, really impressed me. I’d spoken with him on the phone, but you have to see the work before you know if you want to drop off your trophy with someone. Once I saw his stuff, it was decided. I was having a hard time communicating what exactly I wanted to do with the bear, but he understood me. He flipped through the forms catalog until what I wanted jumped out at me; I hadn’t seen any examples of that on the internet, but apparently it’s done enough to have a stock form available. He seems to be quite an artist, and I’m completely comfortable leaving ol’ Big Bastard in his hands. I expect to get back that once-in-a-lifetime mount that really shows off the white spot.

I’d asked Aaron to send out the skull to be cleaned too. He uses Skulls Unlimited, which the kids thought was pretty neat, as they were profiled in Dirty Jobs this summer. Hell, I thought it was neat too; I’m as big a fan as they are (although with much dirtier undertones…call me, Mike!) But one Aaron got the head skinned out, he called back. I knew that I’d broken the jaw and one of the canines with my first shot, but he said that there are two more holes in it. The thing’s just too shot up to hold together well through the cleaning, and it really wouldn’t be worth the money. He’s going to saw off the three remaining canines so I can keep the yellow old teeth.

Seamus wants one of the claws, which Aaron said he’d pop off the back feet for me, so maybe I’ll make him a necklace with a tooth and a claw on either side of it. John too, although I don’t know that he wants one. You don’t even want to know about the penis bone, which will eventually get hung from my rear-view mirror.

I had no idea that 1) bears have a bone in their penis and 2) that it’s tradition to keep it. My first bear was female, after all. But when we were gutting him, Todd whipped out his knife, sliced the thing off, and handed it to me. I was sure that they were yanking my chain, especially with all of the double-entendre jokes that we flung back and forth for the rest of the day, but I dutifully (and dubiously) stuck it in my shirt pocket and carried it back out with the rest of the bear. Apparently the thing to do is to boil off the flesh (and wasn’t that just disgusting!) and then keep it as an odd, redneck sort of conversation piece. They all said that I might have the biggest one of them all, which struck them as terribly funny, and will be even funnier when I whip it out to compare sizes, which I’ve obviously never been able to do before. Dennis says that it’s a real thing, to keep those, when I cold-called him on it, but he may just be in on the joke. Could be the bear hunter’s version of snipe hunting, but it tickles my funny bone even if I am the target.

Note: those of you who don’t care for the killing part of my sport may want to click on by at this point. May I suggest Robyn? She’s cute and she cusses and doesn’t kill stuff.

So Saturday morning found us back at the apple orchard, chasing that same big bastard that had got by us the previous week.

I spent a lot of time listening to dogs down by the ranger station.

Finally, they treed, and we hauled ass back out that skinny jeep road that had knocked the shit out of my truck last week. This time, I went farther, with 1/2-inch clearances on either side of the truck at one point. But when you can hear the dogs singing right up the hill, it motivates you to get there as quickly as possible. Todd and Derek and I hauled ass down and up that hill. It wasn’t very far, but it was steep and brushy. I just put my arms in front of my face and pushed on through, which earned me a lovely already-developing case of poison oak. There was a lot of sitting on my ass and just sliding down rather than tumbling head first.

When we got there, the dogs were all barking up two different trees. We looked, but no bear! He’d slipped out without them noticing somehow. We pulled them off, had to coax one up the rocks, and went back home for the day.

The next morning, Todd was surprised to get after him again in the same area. Usually they wander a little farther, but this one had a good thing going, what with the apple orchard, the acorns, and Cook’s calves nearby. Don and Hub and I again drove out to meet him and we turned the dogs out. Pretty soon, they were out of range, and we all did some driving in different directions to locate them.

Eventually, they treed the bear and we drove up another one of those tiny jeep roads. Knocked my CB antenna off and my mirrors in again. This time, Don, Todd, Derek and I walked off into the canyon; we could hear that they were partway up the other side. Since I’d already decided to shoot it if it were big, we only brought my rifle and my pistol; all of the other regular shooters had blown us off this weekend.

I was amped up enough to almost keep up with Todd and Derek, and they were still tying up dogs when I got there. I looked at the bear, but when they’re that high in the tree, I can’t really judge size. I didn’t want to mess with it if it wasn’t the big one we’d been chasing, but Derek said that it was. We three sat and looked at it while we waited for Don to get there; we took some pictures and waited for my shaking to subside. He had a nice white spot on his belly that would have been an outstanding aiming point, but he shifted before I was ready.

Eventually, though, it was time. Todd took my pistol to back me up, and I fired when ready. Derek said to aim between the eyes, so I did. The bear flew backwards out of the tree, but was still moving, so both Todd and I kept shooting. That’s what you do, because you really don’t want to mess with a wounded one on the ground.

But it was dead, which was good, because we were both out of ammunition. It was so heavy that we didn’t even consider packing it out without gutting it, so that was the next step.

The flattest way out was through the creek, but the creek wasn’t flowing enough to actually float the bear most of the time, so it was a long, laborious process of Todd hauling on it from downstream and me lifting and shoving every time it got hung up on a rock. Derek has really terrible knees, so he couldn’t risk walking on those slippery rocks underwater. After I took a dunking or two, he took my rifle and radio from me and went on a little ahead. Fortunately, I’d already given Don my camera; a stainless rifle holds up to water a whole lot better than a digital SLR!

Finally, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Derek came back with a couple of beers in his pack and we took a break and then he spelled me in the water. I was so exhausted that I was shaking; I’d lost feeling in my feet hours before and was just blindly aiming stumps on the ends of my legs at what I hoped would be secure footing. I lost track of the number of times that it wasn’t as secure as all that.

We got to the bank near the trucks, and the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen was hanging there where I almost missed it: the piece of lineman’s pull rope that was attached at the other end to Don’s truck to pull that bear the last hundred (vertical) feet.

It took all five of us a giant heave to get it up on the box of Todd’s truck, and then it was picture time. That bear’s head was probably three times the size of mine! The boys say that it’s the biggest one they’ve seen pulled out of there all season, which includes the other hunters’. When we called for help to get it out, all of the other rigs were mysteriously and suddenly busy when they heard which bear it was. The rancher around the corner will be pleased, as this thing was easily big enough to pick off a few calves.

After I picked up the kids and my dad appropriately oohed and ahed over it (it’s as big as the one that almost took him out before my sister was born,) I got to spend the next five hours in the back of the truck under the spotlights in the driveway, skinning it. I wanted to take the hide off in one piece to have him done up as a half-body mount. If I have a rug made, I’ll lose that spectacular white spot. He’s a good-looking bear too; nice and dark for up there and with a luxurious coat of fur. That and the two inches of fat under his hide make me think he was expecting a cold winter. I can’t quite lift the head and the hide by myself, and had to kind of drag and fling them into my game cooler!

All in all, a very successful weekend. We finally outwitted ol’ Big Bastard and I have a trophy of a lifetime just waiting on the right taxidermist. I’m delivering the meat to Wild Man tonight (and incidentally having dinner with Cowboy, since I’ll be in his town.) I’m not looking forward to the bill for having this thing mounted, but it sure will be worth it. I’ll probably never see another one this big in my lifetime.

I’ve got the bug, that’s for sure. I’m going back up on Friday, even without a tag. No more shooting for me, but I still have that camera, and I owe those boys some major pie!

After a very disappointing day on Saturday that mostly consisted of waiting on dogs to come out of the Cherry Creek canyon (the last one finally came out the next morning) we were off and ready to go at daylight on Sunday. Todd had finally come up, so we had both of our experts.

We changed terrain, and went down into some oak-bottom land near an old ranger station. The boys took their Toyotas up into an abandoned apple orchard while I stayed down below with my fat Dodge.

As soon as Todd got to the top, his dogs lit off like the bear was trying to crawl into the box with them. He turned them out, and the game was on. All four of the guys were out of the trucks, standing and listening to the race, while I listened from below. I was all prepared to be disappointed every time they crested the ridge away from me, but they kept circling back and I could hear them loud and clear again.

Then Todd called me on the radio:

“We see him! It’s a big one, and he’s on the ground! Don’t let him get by you! If you see him, kill him!”

So I raced down the road a little bit, hoping to intercept before they crossed it. I estimated a little short, and Todd flew on by me. As I was standing there, a deer hunter drove by; I warned him that there was one more bear hunter coming and to watch out.

The dogs got by Todd, so he told me to get on the road below; I hauled ass down there and sure enough, got slowed up by that deer hunter again. It took a minute or two for him to find a wide spot and let me by, and then I turned onto the side road, put the hammer down in four-wheel drive, and hauled ass. My eight-foot wide truck was barrelling down a nine-foot wide jeep road, knocking my mirrors in and my CB antenna off the roof, and pinstriping the sides, but by god, I was going to get to that bear!

I hit the end of the road, and I could hear the dogs right there. I jumped out, shoved my ass through the brush toward them, and had my rifle up, safety off, and aimed. And it was dogs popping out; I had missed the bear by no more than ten seconds crossing the road I’d just come in on. I could hear one dog up with him; I was so close that I caught them in the middle of the pack.

Todd and Don meanwhile were hauling themselves down the next lower road, so I got out of where I was and raced down there too. Of course, we got hung up by that same damn deer hunter; that guy cost us that bear three separate times. The bear slipped by Don, but he was close enough to catch up the dogs; sneaky ol’ bear had gone down into a really rough canyon and the gate on the only road was locked, so we called it off.

From the time we turned them out until the time we caught them couldn’t have been much more than an hour. All of the guys saw the bear, but none of them had their rifles out of the trucks with them. They said he was so big and black that at first they all thought he was a cow, so he was probably in the 400-pound range, with a big hump on his shoulders.

And that, my friends, is what this sport is all about. Even though we didn’t kill the bear, we all got a hell of an adrenaline rush that morning. Standing by myself in the middle of the brush with a pissed-off 400-pound bear running right towards me (I thought) sure got my blood pumping! I was grinning from ear to ear for the rest of the morning, and so were they. That one run made the whole weekend worthwhile, and I can’t wait to do it again.

 

On Friday, by the time I found my guys (Wrong-Way Charlie had gone right around them) they were done hunting for the day and it was still early afternoon. So we all went back to camp; they to kick back and play poker and me to go off deer hunting. Derek told me where he’d killed his buck on Wednesday and that he’d seen two more up there, so there’s where I went.

I hit a gate about halfway up the road, so I parked and loaded myself up with the neccessaries: the rifle, the camera, and my little fanny pack with the kitchen sink in it, and I went walking.

I like to look at tracks as I go, so I had my head down more than I probably should have. The first half was gravel, but still, every now and then I could see something interesting in the dirt at the side of the road.

When I hit the true dirt road though, that’s where it got interesting. I knew I’d been following cows, but it became as plain as day that I was following a cow and a calf right down the road, weaving from side to side as they checked things out.

I was taking pictures of things that interest me, as usual. I like to take pictures of tracks. The guys might find me a little weird for that, but I know that I like to show them to you all, and they don’t know that. It had rained a couple of days before, so instead of a highway of overlapping, undateable prints, what I had was all fairly new and well-defined.

So I stopped when I found what I think was a raccoon, and took pictures. I took one of the only clear bear track I’d seen, although there was plenty of poop.

 

 

I stopped and snapped one of a neat looking tree.

 

 

And then I came upon a nice puddle; not too wet, but damp enough to hold prints in stark relief. Cow, calf, doe, lion… wait, what? Lion? Oh, crap. And me without my pistol. So I took a picture.

 

 

The big prints to either side of the lion track are from a big cow, to give you a sense of scale.

I might not be very smart, because even though the hair on the back of my neck prickled a little, it wasn’t really prickling that much. After all, I was behind him, and it looked like a small one anyway. I kept on hunting, but I watched my back a little more and wished that I’d packed my pistol with me.

The next day, I told Don what I’d seen, and he told me some lion stories to get me good and spooked. One time, he’d walked off into a bluff with Dean and his son. The younger men went on and Don went back when it got rugged. He brushed up against something and hit the squelch button on his portable radio, and something right behind him spooked and ran off. A lion’s the only thing that will both follow you like that and be spooked by weird noises.

The boys say that the first thing you know of a lion attack is when he lands on your back. No time to get a pistol out. They suggested that I might not want to walk alone right there.

The next evening, I went back up there, planning to stay in my truck and do a little driving. Dean and the Wild Man met me on the road and kept me company walking though, which was awfully nice of them.

I might need to remember that I’m not invincible. They all knew where I was hunting, but it would be a real bummer if they had to set the dogs to find my body or if I had to walk out all chewed up. It’s pretty unlikely, but gets more and more possible as the lion population grows as it’s been doing. Fish and Game, how about opening a season up for a year or two? It’s been decades, and they’re overrunning us and wiping out deer left and right.

…and answer some questions, and because I thoroughly jacked up some of those pictures, I’m going to move a couple to this entry. The ones on this page will be clickable if you want to see them larger.

catie, I’m not the only woman up there historically, of course, but there hasn’t been another one in camp while I’m there in the five years or so that I’ve been hunting with these guys. Sometimes it’s just bad timing, as some of the wives and daughters do go. Most of them are raising teenagers lately, and have sports and events to attend to on the weekends. Those are some tolerant wives, that don’t mind their husbands hunting for four or five days every week for the six weeks of deer/bear season and the six more of pure bear season. And during the rest of the year, they do a lot of varmint hunting to train the dogs. It’s a consuming hobby.

I think the wives know about me (I know some of them do anyway.) I don’t know if it bothers them or not, but their husbands are safe from me anyway.

nanamama, damn straight that’s poker! They played every afternoon in camp; totally cleaned out a 16-year-old kid teaching him not to smile when he bets. I don’t play, so I still own my quarters.

On Friday night, I couldn’t find my alarm clock, so when I went to bed fairly early, I asked Derek to make noise when he got up and I’d get up too. So when I heard trucks moving and men yelling at dogs, I got up, brushed my teeth, got dressed, ate breakfast, and went out ready to go.

Nobody around, although the light was on in Don’s trailer.

What the hell? Did they leave without me? No, all of the trucks were still there, plus a couple more.

Finally I knocked on Don’s door, and there they all were, sitting around the table smoking and playing poker. It was only 11 PM! They laughed like hell at me (and so did I.) I went back to my trailer, found my clock, and went back to bed. Two mornings that day!

And with that in mind, I took pictures this weekend. Lots of them, because I had a feeling that mere words wouldn’t convey what I was seeing, and I wanted to show you all the everyday beauty that I live in the fall. So without further ado, my weekend, in pictures:

Whoops, scroll down. While it’s the top entry, the pics are too big to fit around my sidebar. Classy, no?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

No, we didn’t shoot the bear, since it was a sow with two cubs. Besides being illegal, that’s what produces more bears to hunt next year. We just made sure she was good and high in the tree and then pulled the dogs off and walked back out. Exhausting weekend, but very, very satisfying. I’ll be back in two weeks.

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Oh, and I got back into town kind of late Sunday night, cranky and tired. And I sat down at the computer while I was messing with the pictures and found all of those nice comments you guys left about the job interview. Thank you so much, you really completed a fantastic weekend!