Hi all,
So things are good up in the mountains. Whereas my opening week last year was colored by an Ahab-like obsession on a 140-class buck, this year has been more peaceful and easy-going, due mostly to the weather. You can’t see deer well in 60 degrees and sun – most are loath to move on account of the heat and when they do they’re practically invisible. You certainly can’t sneak up on them in the cymbal-crash dry leaves. So I’ve taken to long stretches of book reading on the stand, followed up by some afternoon napping in an oak grove up around 2,000 feet in elevation. On Tuesday I was jarred awake from one of these naps by running deer – let me tell you, my heart was just barely dexterous enough to handle this to the point that I literally sought out and ate canned pineapple when I got back to camp as a reward for the ol’ ticker pulling through for me. Anyway, when my eyes focused I saw two yearling does running back and forth with their tails pinned between their legs. One was clearly chasing the other one, and it was clearly an act of play. I’ve seen fawns act like this but never yearlings. And what’s even cooler is that one of the does was piebald – she had a white circle around her right eye which immediately brought to mind Petey in the Little Rascals, and a stalagmite splotch that rose from her belly white onto her tawny flank. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a piebald deer in the woods.
Otherwise I’ve muscled into the hunting territories of two different coyotes (in different places, at different times) and a bobcat – what a treat to observe these animals at length. The dogs hunt with their noses and rarely stop moving. On opening morning one circled around my stand – she was hunting the same pine flat I was, just coursing and absorbing everything with her nose. The cadence of her footsteps was anything but rhythmic – they speed up and slow down – but if you averaged it out the ch-ch-ch-ch of the footfall against the leaves it would roughly match the frenetic pace of the Smith’s 1985 hit Shakespeare’s Sister.
Fast, right?
Contrast this to the bobcat that was hunting with his eyes and moving much more slowly. I was humped up in some rocky refugia (I’m starting to pick up Sue Morse’s vocabulary, apparently) and he appeared from beneath some beech brush. Unaware of my presence I got to watch him sit and scan the woods for a moment or two before sauntering leisurely through the woods. They sit like house cats and crouch like house cats but they’re long legged so they don’t really walk like them – they look more like tiny lions when they walk. If you averaged out their footfall cadence it would sync to Robert Plant and Allison Krause’s aching beautiful Killing the Blues.
Anyway, miss ya’ll and hope things are good in the office. Em, use this as a blog for the newsletter this week and encourage people to send in their own deer stand observations, or pop-music-animal-cadence postulates, or general gripes about this shite warm weather. See you after I catch up with that buck.
D
PS, on the warm weather front, while we were cutting meat on Sunday we were all saying that we never used to have to butcher deer on the first Sunday of the season, remembering the good old days when you could let deer hang for at least a week on the north side of camp. So I went back and scanned the camp log to see if this was true or whether we were just being nostalgic. Here are the last ten years worth of opening weekend weather reports:
2000: Cold, rain/snow
2001: Cold, snow squalls
2002: Very cold; 6” snow Sunday night
2003: Cold, blustery
2004: Cool, snowflakes
2005: Sunny, 60s
2006: 65 degrees, sun
2007: cold, wind
2008: drizzle, 60s
2009: 65 degrees, overcast
2010: 60 degrees, sun