"The Evening Campfire" from
The Herald, November 4, 2007
Muzzleloader hunt provides
walk in the autumn woods
A couple of weeks ago, I
took my 54-caliber in-line muzzleloader for a walk in
the late-October Warren County forest. I wasn’t really
serious about hunting that day, to be honest. I’m not an
archery hunter, and October seems way too early in the
season
to be killing a deer. My inline’s wood stock is
plaingrained and its barrel is heavy and short. It looks
more like the old Mossberg
bolt-action shotgun I used for rabbit-hunting as a kid
than a deer rifle or a primitive weapon. But the gun and
the season were good enough excuses to be out in the
woods during autumn, and I’ll take that opportunity
anytime.
My brother Billy entered the game-lands fire trail with
me just before daylight, displaying a higher intensity
of interest than mine. He has taken three deer in the
past five years during fall muzzleloader alone, while
I’ve shot one muzzleloader deer in my entire career, a
doe I dropped four years ago in January with my Thompson
Center 50-caliber flintlock.
Billy and I had a plan that morning. We’d hike the first
mile of the trail in the predawn dark together, then
he’d climb the steep slope to his favorite deer-hunting
boulder, a massive rock that hangs out over the top of
the hollow 800 yards above the trail, while I would
continue another mile west and then angle up on a
high ridge and drive back toward him.
Shortly after we split up, daybreak dawned, and I
noticed
a number of shagbark hickories growing along the edge of
the fire trail. I was just thinking how much squirrels
like hickory nuts when I spotted one, a deep-woods black
squirrel as big as a house cat bounding acrobatically
through the treetops. I watched him disappear down the
mountainside, waited a moment, then started up again.
Huge sandstone boulders rose above me on the high side
of the trail, some of them 30 feet high and 50 feet
wide, all of them deposited here on the mountainside
during the last ice age 10,000 years ago. They’ve
remained here apparently unfazed and unchanged while the
history of western civilization has throttled by. We
deer-hunt from a number of these boulders every year,
and I wondered that morning how many Native Americans,
countless years before us, did the same.
I kept moving on the trail, and suddenly I noticed how I
was holding my muzzleloader. Normally when hunting I
carry my rifle or shotgun in a position of readiness at
port arms, but this day I had it angled back up over my
shoulder like a kid playing soldier in his back yard.
Shows you how un-serious I am about fall muzzleloader
deer hunting, I guess.
But I was enjoying my morning in the woods, and an hour
later I climbed up on top of a certain boulder I often
use for rifle deer season. It’s strategically placed on
a heavily-wooded high escape bench just below the
mountaintop plateau and just above the steep bedding
ridge.
I looked all around at the familiar terrain. My
imagination took me back to last November, when a fine
eight-point buck followed a doe into the shooting lanes
above my rock at 7:25 a.m., and I
stopped him in his tracks with one shot from my
bolt-action 30.06. And I remembered opening day from the
year before, when a hefty seven point passed laterally
below the boulder, and I took him late in the day and
dragged him out in the dark.
But this day I saw nothing in the woods but trees and
rocks and leaves. If you really look at trees, I
thought, you can see their struggle for prosperity as
their trunks and branches twist and wend their sometimes
straight and sometimes crooked ways upward, yearning for
the sun. Their dying foliage looked beautiful on that
late October morning.
I gazed out at the three-dimensional mosaic of bronze,
golden, and scarlet leaves, leaves within touching
distance, leaves far down the mountainside, leaves in
the canopy and the understory, leaves on the ground. It
was fine, it was pure outdoor pleasure to be out there
among them.
At the end of the morning, I clambered up onto Billy’s
rock and listened as he told me about the two does he
saw meandering through the forest above him just out of
shooting range a half hour after daybreak and the
six-point buck he watched for 10 long minutes as it fed
on acorns down in the hollow.
“You see anything?” he asked.
“Not much,” I answered. “I guess I’ve been daydreaming
some.”
Your mind tends to wander, I thought, when you’re just
out taking your gun for a walk in the woods.
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