The highlights (and headgear) of the '08 hunting season.

My hunting partner and I spent most of this year's hunting season out in the Lake Diefenbaker area of Saskatchewan. This is, practically speaking, my second year hunting. Jacob, my friend and hunting partner, spent some time hunting in Africa - but this was, for all intents and purposes, his first Saskatchewan deer hunting season.

We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the season scouting out the area we were hunting. We patterned the movement of some whitetails in the area, and on the morning of Nov. 11th we set up an ambush on the way into one of their daytime bedding areas. I got two antlerless whitetails that morning - both within about ten seconds of each other (we can get a good amount of antlerless tags for certain areas - but you have to fill two before you can get an either sex muley tag).

I went and purchased my either sex tag on the afternoon of the 14th. The morning of the 15th, we were out in the field well before the sun made its way over the horizon.

The country we hunt is pretty rough - at least for Saskatchewan. The lake edge is riven by deep, wide coulees and clogged with thick brush - it's an odd mix of vegetation - some juniper bushes, poplar or aspen trees, and some less friendly greenery - small cacti and various thorny growths.

Jacob found out firsthand, early in the season, that the latter do not, in fact, make for comfortable seating. I'm still grateful he didn't ask me to perform cactus spine removal . . .
His wife must be a good woman.

The coulees themselves are studies in contrasts - one side of the coulee is often dry and mostly barren, while the other side will be relatively green with lots of brush and trees. The coulees drop down from the surrounding fields 300-400 feet - sometimes gradually, sometimes in plateau-steps, and sometimes in 75-100 foot near-vertical walls.

It was at the top of one of these vertical drops that Jacob (my hunting partner) and I set up to glass the area. The rising sun slid light into the brush and trees immediately below our position.

At about 8:15 AM, Jacob, who was set up about 50 feet away, motioned to me - putting his hand to his ear in an "antler" sign. Sometimes when I've gone without benefit of my morning coffee as I did that morning, I'm a little thick, so I looked back and gave him the palms up "what are going on about" sign. After a little bout of frantic but subdued back-and-forth gesturing, I realized that he was trying to tell me about a big muley buck headed into the area (he didn't have his either sex muley tag at that point).

The buck was walking rather unconcernedly into the area. I waited until it was nearly broadside, and . . . completely botched my first shot. I don't know how - the whole thing felt right - maybe it had something to do with shooting at an extreme downhill angle. The buck started to move a little quicker - at first, a lively trot, then the typical muley "bounce." I did some quick mental recalculations, led him a little, and put the next shot through his spine at about 130 yards. He dropped in his tracks.

I don't recall too many moments when I've been quite that excited.

We made our way down to the buck, and realized that he was quite a grand old fellow. I'm guessing his live body weight was about 250 lbs. I know for a fact that the ribcage and quarters, without skin, head, and innards, weighed 180 lbs. My guess is that he was somewhere around the 7 or 8 year old mark - he had almost nothing left for back teeth (about 1/8 of an inch). It was, to say the least, quite the jaunt to get him out of the coulee.

Jacob, after coming up empty most of the season, finally got 2 antlerless muleys on Nov. 30th. He was also able to get his either sex muley tag, and downed another old bruiser, in the middle of a snowstorm, on Dec 6th - the very last day of the season.

For those interested in numbers . . . After drying for a while, my buck scored somewhere around 152 4/8 B&C after deductions - Jacob's hasn't dried yet, but it seems like it will score about 154 B&C after deductions. I was shooting standard Federal Power-Shok rounds in a Remington 700 in .25-06, topped with a Elite Bushnell 3200 4-12X40. It performed beautifully on all four of the deer I shot this season - most of the energy from the shot was expended inside the animal.

My Buck

Jacob's Buck

On Hunting and Heredity

I was having a phone conversation sometime in mid-November with my uncle Dwayne. In the course of this conversation, we mused about how it was curious that, despite my lack of upbringing in the hunting tradition, I had come to gain such an interest in, and enjoyment of, hunting over the past couple of years. Dwayne's thought was that perhaps my interest in hunting was hereditary. This was an interesting notion, although I wasn't sure what to make of it, or whether I fully agreed.

However, it did get me to thinking. My maternal grandfather (Grand-dad) passed on, if memory serves well, in 2003. In my own estimation, I was still at that stage of growing up where one's relationships with other grown up's are becoming more - well - grown up. In these more 'grown-up' relationships, at least to my mind, one of the things gained is a certain mutual empathy between persons. There is a sense, I think, in which as adults (although we can be at many different stages in life still) we share common (albeit sometimes mundane) concerns, like bills, and taking care of loved ones, and the serious questions of life, so the sorts of conversations we have change according to this mutual empathy (I'm sure this point could be argued - I don't mean this as a sort of sociological commentary - just an attempt at describing experience).
I never really got to have any of these 'grown-up' conversations with Grand-dad. I felt that, at the time of his passing, I was really just starting to get to know him a little bit as a person.

This is why it was interesting to me that, in the course of the same phone conversation, it came up that Grand-dad had been an avid hunter and outdoorsman. I had never really known that side of him. By the time I was self-aware, I think he had probably already hung up his rifle. As much as one can gain this feeling though a sort of 'second-hand empathy,' I felt like in learning these things about Grand-dad, I was allowed to know him just a little bit better, even after all this time. I seem to have acquired a love of hunting very similar, if descriptions are accurate, to Grand-dad's love for the same. As it turns out, I have no really pithy comments to end this blog entry with, so I'll just end as follows. I am thankful for the way in which I've been formed, and I'm thankful that I've grown up with the traditions and family that I have. I'm glad that my forebears were farmers and hunters and, most importantly, people of faith. I don't know what kinds of traits and dispositions are hereditary, or if they are, but at least if I want shoes to fill, I've got them.