These quail, which are called Jumbo Browns or Coturnix, reached maturity in eight weeks, not the twelve I’d originally thought. And that’s no joke; they were crowing at exactly eight weeks. No eggs yet, but that’s not far behind. But the original plan was to have a feed at the end of trap season, which is twelve weeks from the day I hatched them out. While they were growing, they were doing OK at 1/2 a square foot of cage space per bird, but now that they’ve grown up, they’re really squeezed too tightly. I’ve been medicating them as they pick on each other, with a blue antiseptic spray that really makes the chickens lose interest in feather picking. But it rubs off the quail a lot faster, and they’re really bored.

So when I found one dead today, killed by the others in its pen, I knew it was time to start thinning the flock. It’s a good thing Seamus was home this afternoon, as this was a bit of a learning process. I’ve never done quail completely from start to finish before, and have only watched wild quail being cleaned a few times. But I did some reading, and decided that the fastest and most humane way for these birds would be to cut their heads off with kitchen scissors.

I picked six of the most vulnerable birds, and loaded them into the carrier to my processing station on my back porch. I heated up my scalding pot to my usual 150 degrees and got my stuff set up. Turns out I didn’t need much, and the feed bag I’d just emptied in the turkey pen was just right for a garbage sack. Seamus was my third hand and my photographer.

Snipping the heads off turned out not to be very traumatic at all, and having an extra hand helped a lot. I’d hold the bird firmly with one hand and stretch its head out with the other, which left Seamus to do the snipping. That’s why we don’t have any good pictures of that part of it. Immediately after the snip, as the bird’s body was convulsing, I just aimed it down into the bag to bleed out. They don’t have a lot of blood.

The wings are useless. I remember Junior cutting them off of wild birds, so that’s what we did, again with the kitchen shears.

By the time the wings were off, the bird had bled out and I could go right to the scalding pot. I’ve accidentally cooked chicken skin a little with too hot water for too long, so I was very careful just to barely swish these around. They have such thin skin, and I didn’t want to damage it, so I’d planned to experiment a little with scalding times. My first scald of barely a few seconds was more than adequate and didn’t cook the skin at all.

I always hose the birds off to cool them down for easier handling after scalding, and found that I could blast at least half of the feathers off with the hose. That made plucking easier, and future lawn mowing puffballs of feathers are not my problem. That’s what I have kids for.

Plucking the remaining feathers hardly took any time at all. I didn’t worry about pin feathers along the spine, as that was going to come out.

I initially tried to treat this butcher process like a chicken, but that wasn’t working for me. There really wasn’t any place for a knife in the whole business; it was all easier with the scissors. After the bird was plucked, I cut off the feet. I suppose I could have saved the feet like I do for other poultry, and made a teeny-tiny stock with them, but that’s just silly. The cats weren’t interested and I don’t really want to get the pigs eating raw poultry when they live next to the chicken yard, so into the trash went the feet.

At this point on a larger bird, it would be time to enter the body cavity for evisceration. I wasn’t too worried about piercing the bowel here, as small as it is, so I flipped the bird onto its breast and went straight in with the scissors, cutting up each side of the spine. It wasn’t at all hard to cut through those tiny bones.

The vent and the neck and all of the guts came right out with the spine, with a little help to fish out the lungs from where they’re bound to the inside of the rib cage. After a little trim of excess skin and a slight bit of flattening with my hand (and a lot of rinsing), I had a spatchcocked bird ready to fry or to put on the grill. Total time for the first bird: maybe ten minutes. They got easier as I went along. I had six to do tonight, out of a total of 60 for the project. I’m saving back 20 birds for breeders for future meat and egg production.  I will spread those remaining birds out so they have more space and are happier.

I’ll have to report back on the flavor, but they sure look good!

Now, this auction was mostly set up for show pigs. Local 4-Hers with plenty of money could go buy themselves a nice starter pig. The genetics on these things made them look like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the pig world, all bulked out. I got there just in time to hear one go for a grand. Ugh, way too rich for my blood. That one was an exception; most of them went for under five hundred dollars. Still way too much for my budget.

But I’d talked to one of the students who clued me in on the barn sale after the main auction. There they could set me up with a couple of feeder pigs that wouldn’t be winning any shows, but would still put meat on. That was more my speed, so after a long day there, I came home with two pigs in my dog crates in the back of the truck. I ended up with a Duroc barrow and a Yorkshire cross gilt. I was hoping to get two dark pigs, as I don’t have a ton of shade for them, but you gets what you gets at the barn sale.

When Seamus and I unloaded these pigs in the pen, they didn’t want to come out of their crates. I doubt that they’d ever been off concrete in their lives. It didn’t take them long to learn to run and play though, maybe fifteen minutes. They found the food and the water, but were still not thrilled about people. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks feeding them treats and now they love me, which will make it less stressful for them at butcher time. Pigs are smart though, and the female pig still has her doubts about me. The male pig just wants to eat my shoes.

Pork isn’t the only meat I’m raising right now. I’ve got four different bird species destined for the freezer. The quail project is coming along nicely. They’ve matured to a point where I could eat them now, but frozen meat isn’t quite as good as fresh, so I’m going to slaughter most of them right before a party we have planned. I’m keeping some of them back as breeders.

I’m also a big fan of domestic duck meat. I’m not real fond of wild duck, but if I can control their diet, domestic duck is fantastic. So I bought ten Giant Pekins to be shipped as day-olds. I thought raising them would be similar to raising other poultry. Boy, was I wrong. Ducks are hugely messy, and they stink! Oh, the stink. Ducks are also different in that they grow and then feather out, as opposed to birds like chickens and turkeys that feather out and then put the majority of their weight on. Fortunately, they also like it colder than chickens do, so after a couple of weeks of gagging over the brooder in the garage, they were turfed to a pen outside. Right now they’re very happy with their little swimming dish. Ducks are a very suspicious lot, and such drama queens! I do plan to keep a breeding trio of these, because I’m sure not going to brood more in my garage again, that was gross.

Quartered with the ducks right now are four turkeys. Two are Midget Whites, and if they’re a pair, I intend to use them to maintain a smaller line of turkeys. I think they’re both jakes though, as I caught them both strutting in the brooder at a week old. And the other two turkeys in the duck pen are the regular Broad-Breasted Bronzes. Heritage turkeys, like my other ones, are delicious but just don’t produce a stereotypical carcass. Since I host Thanksgiving and Christmas for a lot of people, I needed a big turkey, and these two will certainly be that. I’ll probably have to butcher them in the summer while they’re small enough to fit in my oven.

And the last main meat project going on now is chickens. We eat a lot of the extra cockerels that my hatching hobby produces, but like the heritage turkeys, that’s a different sort of carcass than you find at the grocery store. Very flavorful but a little chewy, and they don’t do their best roasted whole for a Sunday dinner. Cornish cross birds, on the other hand, are exactly what the big poultry processors grow. They hit butchering size within eight weeks, they grow so fast, and younger than that for those little birds you get already rotisserie cooked. I bought one just tonight. They’re very tender because they’re young, but that’s also why they don’t have a ton of flavor. Last year I tried a red broiler that grows just a touch slower, but Seamus needs a pair of these to show at the Fair, and my red birds just aren’t standard around here. So we got ten of the regular ugly white birds.

Just looking at these things is enough to put one off meat for a while. They’re bred to maximize feed conversion into meat, and don’t waste a lot of energy with silly things like growing feathers or moving. They’re half naked and can barely get around the pen. Eat, sleep, and poop is all these things do. It’s a little pathetic, but it is an extremely efficient way to put meat in the freezer, which is what they were designed for. At least mine get to be outside, and pick at bugs and grass if they can find the energy. I’ll grow them a little longer than the chicken houses do too, so I should have some eight to nine pound roasters in the freezer by the time I’m done. And they’ll taste a little better than the storebought birds, and be a little cheaper, but not enough to knock your socks off or anything.

So it’s a good thing that I’m married to a mechanic. When my dryer died, his construction light bulb went off over his head, and he and another chickeny/mechanic friend have plans to convert the motor and drum of my old washer into a chicken plucker. It’s really a lot of work to do this many birds by hand, and using salvaged parts like that makes the project affordable. Well, more affordable. It’s still cheaper in the long run to go to the store and get your meat from people who have the economy of size going for them, but I enjoy this hobby and I enjoy producing our own food.

Seamus has pretty much lost interest in the birds, while I’ve become more interested in them as time goes on. I went to a few open shows, the kind in which both kids and adults can enter birds to be judged. I didn’t see much in the way of competition at the big one in Stockton, not for my breed at least, so I decided to dip my toe into the showing pool. I entered an open show in Fresno.

I did a lot of research, but that was only enough to get me started. I looked over my birds and picked a pair of Silver Laced Wyandottes. Then I noticed that my cockerel had a flaw in his comb that would be a disqualification, so he was out. My other cockerel had been in a fight and wasn’t looking very beautiful, so I was down to one pullet. I pulled the one out of the breeding pen that looked the best (some look rather well-loved) and put her in a cage in the coop so she would get used to being handled more.

I gave her two baths, and pedicures as needed. Bathing a chicken is actually a calmer experience than one would think. The warm water (I do this in my laundry sink) seems to hypnotize them and they seem to really like the blow dryer. It takes a long time to blow out a butt full of fluff, so she gets to sit in a crate in the garage mid-dry to let things settle down a bit before her final fluffing.

So on Friday night, with my freshly washed bird, I drove to Fresno with only mild complaining coming from the back seat. When I got there, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I couldn’t even find the table to coop in at, where they give you your paperwork with your entry number. But eventually I managed, and got my bird set up in a nice cage for the night, with several hundred other birds for company. I did enjoy the banquet, as I sat with my friend and her granddaughter, also learning the show ropes for the first time.

Chicken shows, like all other hobbies, seem to have their own culture. There are experts and rookies, and some of the experts are nice about helping out the rookies. I was admiring one man’s snowy White Plymouth Rocks, and he talked to me about getting white feathers truly white, and how to keep them that way. The people that are serious about showing their birds keep two flocks, it turns out. One for breeding and one just for showing. I don’t really have enough birds to split them up like that, or the facilities to house them all separately. So I doubt that I’ll get serious about it, although is it a good way to have someone else evaluate my birds and see if I’m breeding toward the standard or not.

In any case, my pullet was the only bird of her variety and didn’t get disqualified, so she won Best of Variety. She did not win Best of Breed – there are several color varieties to our breed, and the ones who placed higher than she did had better looking bodies. The birds are also split by class, and Wyandottes are in the American Class with Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and some others. The beautiful White Rock cockerel that belonged to the man who was giving me white bird maintenance tips won Best of Class. He was a gorgeous bird, but the thought of keeping something that white that clean makes me shudder. What a lot of dedication!

And of course, at a show there is usually also a sale. I persevered most of the day, but by the end I caved. I came home with the cutest little pair of Bantam Partridge Wyandottes, a new color variety for me and also my first bantams. They are terribly cute and will get a lot of handling before Seamus possibly takes them back to where we started, at our local Spring Fair. But they’re for me, not for him, and simply because they were cute.

So when he, his dad, and our friend Mike cooked up a quail feed project between them, I was more than happy to help them out with the bird raising. We’ll just keep it to ourselves that I love this part, and it’s really cool to raise a new kind of bird, shall we? So he’s in charge of designing and building another brooder and a couple of quail hutches, and I’m in charge of the bird part.

I bought a hundred Coturnix quail eggs on eBay, and the lady graciously shipped us extras. And since I have that fancy new incubator, it was no trouble to juggle things around so they could incubate while my regular schedule of chicken hatching continued. They were so cute when they got here; so tiny and speckled and perfect.

They have a shorter incubation period than chickens, so it wasn’t long before they were popping out of the shells like popcorn. What started as one on Sunday night by Monday morning looked like a swarm of ants in the incubator, everything moving all around. When I noticed one stuck under the carton for a couple of hours, I broke protocol and took them out to put in the brooder. This usually lowers the humidity in the incubator/hatcher, and can keep the remaining eggs from hatching, but there were only about ten that hadn’t popped by then. I felt it was worth the risk.

I counted them as I took them out, and again as I set them in the brooder and showed them where the water was. Seventy-eight birds went into the brooder last evening, all fuzzy little tiny beasties. I put the unhatched eggs back into the incubator to cook some more, and as of this evening, I have five more. That’s a 69 percent hatch rate from the original eggs, not at all bad for shipped eggs. In fact, that’s the best hatch rate I’ve ever had with eggs that have braved the United States Postal Service, parcel crushers extraordinaire.

Oh, they are so cute too. You’re not supposed to raise quail around chickens, as there’s a disease that the chickens can pass on to the quail, but I risked putting a couple of quail with a two-day-old chicken, a large fowl Blue Laced Red Wyandotte, my project birds. Not only are the quail a quarter the size of the chickens, but they’re about four times as fast. They make that tiny baby chick look like Godzilla moving through Jello. I could at least count on the chicken holding still to get a shot snapped, but most of the quail pictures are nothing but a brown and black streak. Or, in two cases, a yellow streak.

It took me a lot of shots to get them both in focus, as those quail zoom right for the camera every time they see it (are you my mommy?) but a little serendipity got me a perfectly focused shot right when the quail scooted under the dumbfounded chick’s legs.  Chickzilla!

So now that they’re here and zipping around, I guess Junior had better get on the stick about building them their quarters. They’re going to bounce out of their current brooder within a week, and they need a new house. Things will get interesting again in four months, when they’re ready for eating. Sure, I’ll keep a few back as breeders, but we’ll see this project through to completion, and it will be delicious. But for now, cuteness reigns. All hail Chickzilla!

Last year I had really various hatching rates, but that was with a lot of shipped eggs. The post office can be hard on them and you’d never know it. The best hatches last year were from my own chickens and one batch that was only shipped from Oregon. This year I have my breeding birds all separated out and I’m hatching my own. I intend to sell some, but Wyandottes take so long to mature that I’m going to have to raise quite a few to adulthood in order to see if I have anything that’s worth breeding next year.

These four were all Blue Laced Red Wyandottes, and they’re very cute.

I’ll have more every Saturday until three weeks after I stop putting the eggs in the incubator. I’m collecting for Batch #5 with now.

Then on Saturday was the big Pacific Poultry Breeder’s Association show in Stockton. I’ve looked forward to this show all year. Last year was my first year attending, and it was so overwhelming. This year, I had some specific goals in mind for my shopping and I wanted to see what other people are doing with Wyandottes. Turns out, not much. There were only a few large fowl Wyandottes entered, which was disappointing. In fact, it spurred me to enter my own birds next year. I plan to start small, and will enter a show in Fresno next month, which is overwhelming in its own right.

Last year at this show, I’d put in for a raffle of some Marans hatching eggs. I was already home when I got the call that I won, and did not want to drive back up there, so I told them to reraffle them. I turned out that a lady I know won them the second time, so that was nice. So this show makes me feel lucky, and they raffle off some donated birds every year too. I bought a bunch of tickets and put them all on a trio of Blue Andalusians donated by a local breeder who has very nice birds. Then I made myself stick around for the raffle this time, and sure enough, I won them! I was very glad that I hadn’t filled up the crates I’d brought with gigantic geese.

But after the raffle, and as people were clearing out of the sales barn, I decided that I couldn’t go home with empty crates. I’d intended to buy some Pekin ducks to raise as meat birds if there were any for sale, but there weren’t. What there were, however, were some silly Runner Ducks. They were marked down and I could tell that a pair really wanted to go home with me. So they did, and they are destined to become beloved pets, not dinner. I’ll do the meat ducks a little later in the year.

I’m still working on putting better tarps over my breeding pens, which are now all full of miscellaneous critters. The ducks will eventually run loose with the rest of the flock, as this is my meat bird pen, but they’re a little shy right now. I really enjoyed the weekend spent with my hobby; they give me a lot more joy and less hassle than the hounds did, reinforcing my conviction that getting rid of them was the right thing for me to do. I miss them, but my poultry generally don’t bark, and that’s much more pleasant to live around.

A couple of friends of mine have sons his age who are big duck hunters, so they know how to handle a shotgun too. When the trap league didn’t have enough kids interested to round out a junior team of five, I asked these other two boys if they wanted to join in on the fun. They were thrilled to be asked, and very much interested in shooting with Seamus this year. I discussed this back and forth several times with the league secretary, who promised me that they’d have a spot and she would help find a fifth kid to round out the team (there was already another boy on it.)  The club associated with the league was even offering to sponsor the team. While I was at the New Year’s Eve party, I got a call from another parent who couldn’t commit her son to the team unless she had help driving him now and then, due to her work schedule. I told her that I’d help her, and just like that, we had a junior team!

Or so I thought.

On Friday, barely 24 hours before the first shoot, I got a text from the league secretary, the one who’d committed to these five kids that they could shoot this season. She said that she now had to fill one of the spots on the team with a member’s kid (we are not members at the moment, due to some shenanigans she pulled on our family a few years back) and that only two of my kids could shoot, and that I would have to pick which one couldn’t. So I called her up to try to find out what was going on.

She said that another league board member had promised another kid a spot on the team, and that the girl was dying to shoot, and she had to hold up that promise. Now, mind you, this is fully a week after she’s committed to the team we thought we had in place. She’d already promised these five kids that they could shoot together, but was willing to go back on that word.

Oh no. I don’t think so.

I promised my three boys that they could shoot, and I sure wasn’t going to kick one of them off because someone else was weaseling. So instead, I did something that she completely didn’t expect. I told her that these three boys were shooting together no matter what, and if she didn’t have room for all of them, then they were all off the team. I’d find a team for them and sponsor them myself. If I had to stand up there and shoot with them, then that’s what I would do, fronting a regular league team that just happened to have four junior members instead of a junior team. She was not prepared for that, but at that point I was done with her nonsense.

So after a little calling to some friends, we had a junior team put together again, this time under my name. One of the kids is the son of a long-time friend of Junior’s, and the other one is a friend of the first kid, who happened to shoot with Seamus last year but had walked away from that trap club due to the politics. The same politics that I was experiencing first hand, as it happens. But however we found them, within half an hour, we had another team.

I felt bad for the original two kids on the other team. It wasn’t their fault, that’s for sure, nor the fault of the one trying to squeeze in. I called the friend to whom I had promised driving help, and told her what was going on so she would be aware of it, reiterating my promise to help her transport her son if she needed it. I didn’t have the other kid’s phone number, but I did see his father at practice the next day and apologized to him personally. He understood that I had to stand up for my own kids and didn’t hold it against me. As of Saturday afternoon, those kids still didn’t have a team set up, but it was no longer my problem. My boys were taken care of, and now the woman who’d failed to uphold her own commitments could do the scrambling.

Things came to light a little more clearly on Sunday morning. I saw that the other kids had a team, and the final two members were two girls who shoot very well but are starting to become interested in other activities. They’d had to be talked into shooting. The father of our last team member let it slip that he’d talked to the father of the original girl that the secretary was trying to slip onto the team. And that they hadn’t gone begging to the league at all, but it was the other way around. The league secretary had come calling to him recruiting his daughter on Thursday evening. I see what happened there; that woman is so interested in winning that she wanted a team with a known shooter in place of an unknown. After all, who knows how well my two friends’ sons could shoot? And that’s why she was so bent out of shape when I pulled Seamus from the team. He’s a pretty good shot for his age.

That’s not supposed to be what the junior shooting events are about. Sure, winning is nice, and some other clubs have some really good junior teams. But my three boys are there to have fun, not to dominate the event. And they simply wouldn’t have fun with one of them missing, or split up into two teams. It wouldn’t be fair to them. So even though she didn’t stick to her word, I sure did, and now I’m extremely proud to be sponsoring both a junior team and a regular league team.

Junior had told me about the politics of the place, and I believed him, but I hadn’t seen them in action before.  Now it’s clear that there’s a bad apple in that barrel. They’ve lost all three of these kids for the scholastics program they are trying to start, as well as the fifth kid on our team who had already walked away from that club. If Seamus chooses to shoot for scholastics later in the year, it’ll be at the competing club. They’ve been trying to recruit him for years anyway, as his 4-H leader is a part of the coaching team. And I was pushing for us to become members of this club, but that’s completely off the table now. They may need our help, but they aren’t going to get it.

All of this nonsense and strife was vindicated when the boys shot their first league shoot on Sunday. They had an absolute ball. They may not be the best team out there yet, but they sure seem to have the biggest cheering section. You can see the light bulbs going off over their heads when they suddenly understand something and start pulverizing targets. To see them figure things out is so satisfying, and they’re having so much fun. These boys are going to be a good team, and learn a lot, and enjoy themselves, and that’s the point of the whole sport.

I take the carcasses of at least two roasted chickens, plus cleaned feet and necks if I have them, for gelatin. To that I add a couple of chunked up carrots and a couple of yellow onions with as much clean onion skin as possible. I throw in up to a whole head of garlic, and several dried chile pods – right now I have New Mexico and some homegrown tiny dried hot ones, and they both get added. I toss in some bay leaves and a handful of whole black peppercorns. Then I top off with cold water.

This isn’t a science, of course, and I use all sorts of meats. This last weekend, I made one with just the bones of a smoked turkey, with no vegetables added. It’s really strongly flavored, thanks to the smoke, and would have drowned out anything else. Duck stock is good, rabbit stock is fantastic, and ham stock is really salty so I use a lot of water and mix it with some other bones.

Now, I do this in my five gallon pressure canner, so I’m using about four gallons of space, and at least three are of water. I do not make stock by halves, nosirreebob. I heave this contraption over to the stove where I process it on 15 psi for at least an hour, and two is better. Once it’s safe to open the canner lid, I strain the whole shebang through a colander lined with cheesecloth (which I buy by the twenty yard hank – this is a serious hobby of mine!) into my five gallon stock pot and refrigerate it. Once it’s good and cold, it’s easy to scrape the fat off the top.

I can it too, for storage, or else my freezers would be overflowing. Here, let me show you my delicious hoard:

It looks ridiculous, but this spring when I had pneumonia I had almost this much on hand, and I ran out. It was all I could eat for over a week.

When you can any meat or other low-acid, low-sugar products, you absolutely have to use a pressure canner. Water bath canning these things is just asking for a nice case of botulism. I can fit seven quart jars at a time in my big pressure canner, and they get processed for 25 minutes at 10 psi, exactly according to all of the directions I’ve ever found. Only once have I had the jars fail to seal on me, and I’m pretty sure that was because I hadn’t skimmed off enough fat, and grease got up under the seals. I just threw those jars into the fridge and ate them in the next couple of days.

I get seven quarts canned out of a batch and rarely have enough energy to can twice. So I eat the rest out of the refrigerator, making soup every day for lunch until it’s gone. It makes a satisfying gelatinous plop when it’s cold, and has a lovely mouthfeel when it heats up. It sounds like a lot of work, and it sort of is, but it’s not like I have to stand over the stove the whole time. And the end result is so good that it’s completely spoiled me for commercial stocks. Mine is much stronger, but I can always dilute it if I want. Can’t add flavor to a box of vacuum-sealed blandness.

Standard soup is a quart or two of the stock, chunks of whatever chicken or turkey I have on hand, and orzo noodles. I like to top it with fresh Parmesan and dunk crusty French bread in it too. A good summer soup is kind of minestrone-based, with tomatoes, grilled sausage, beans, corn, and whatever else I have on hand. Odds and ends of opened jars never last long either, as they get snapped up for making rice or cous cous.

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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