Posts Tagged → rifle
Hunting season is always glorious
To a lot of American hunters, including me, hunting season is a unique and special combination of extended holiday, camping trip, hiking trip, family gathering with the family members you like being with, nature viewing, rest and relaxation in pretty places, occasional deep naps way out in the woods, and opportunities to talk with God in remote spots that probably only see humans once every year or two when some hunter clambors his way out there for an hour.
Even for the urbanites who will be joining me over the coming weeks, simply hanging around “hunting camp” has a special role in re-charging personal batteries long depleted in bumper-to-bumper traffic and urban clutter with endless noise. Some urban guys are real go-getter hunters, while others enjoy sleeping in, drinking coffee and catching up with old friends, and having a cigar inside. Yes, this is a guys-only, cigars-permitted environment. People also say naughty things and tell politically incorrect jokes.
Comparing hunting knives, blade sharpening techniques, and new rifles is of course de rigeur.
After all, where else can a guy go and hang about with a bunch of other guys and talk about guns and knives all damned day and night long, while eating way too much food that their wives would never approve of: Only at hunting camp.
And whether you actually get something big and hairy, or not, the time spent there is always glorious. Believe it or not, there is plenty of Bible study, too.
I am looking forward to this hunting season, as I always do, and perhaps more so now that I am in my early sixties. Decades have flown by, some friends have died along the way, some have moved too far away to join me, and some of them were never really into the hunting anyhow, while others have jobs and businesses that absorb every waking moment of their lives. Which is a way of saying that I am appreciating this special time even more so this year.
We have not killed a bear here since 2006, not that our guys have not tried, and missed, since then. Nor have I killed a big buck here in years, despite having many opportunities. Seeing a big trophy buck in the woods gives me great pleasure, and 9.9 times out of ten, I will sit and let him walk by. Does, almost never.
Hunting season is not really about the killing; it is more about the hunting. Our hunting camp tee shirts this year say “One hunts not in order to kill; rather, ones kills in order to have hunted.”
Just being here, and being afield in the Big Woods with friends, is a deeply satisfying feeling. I hope the hunters who read this have a successful and safe season. And to the as-yet non-hunters reading this, get with it. We can mentor you, and show you the way of being a complete and whole human being.
Hunting season is also about running into old friends. Pam Mould was our township tax collector for decades, and our neighbor until about five years ago. Ran into her at Wolfe’s General Store in Slate Run today, while getting milk etc
Back hair, chest hair, belly hair…baby, I got it all and more
Confession time: I have a hell of a collection of back hair, belly hair, chest hair, even butt hair and ear hair. Fo’ real.
I know, I know, a man of my age does not age well, as “things” begin to grow from every orifice and heretofore unknown location, but so why then do we have to write about it…sorry, my apologies. There is an honest purpose here.
You, the lone, long-suffering sole reader of this blog, are probably already thinking to yourself “Good Lord, this guy has finally gone off the deep end with this TMI shock jock shtick. ” And were we actually talking about real body hair from my own voluptuous, idyllic form, you would be correct. However, as racy or as disgusting as this may sound, the fact is that I do have a pretty cool record-setting collection of all the aforementioned clumps of hair, but they are not from my own body.
Again and now even more so, whoever is left reading here at this point is gagging, and wondering what happened to the erudite intellectual who used to occupy this lonely outpost of fascination. Well, the bad news is I yet remain under the mal-influence of one Bill Heavey, the also-lonely humor writer of the once-wonderful magazine known as Field & Stream, now digitally un-dead and unknown to Americans under the age of sixty.
The good news is that I am not talking about human hair here, but rather the hair, or fur, of the many deer I have shot arrows at over the past five decades. This is true. I am not lying.
See, I fancied myself an archer at a young age, and so I got somewhere (probably at the kind of now-gone country auction that elderly collectors dream about and salivate over) a cheap recurve bow and a motley assortment of mis-matched arrows and dull broadheads, and set out to bag a deer.
Yes, I practiced, for years, as only the uninitiated and un-groomed and un-mentored can practice. Which meant that on Tuesdays and Fridays my archery “form” aligned well enough that I could hit the broad side of a barn, which were plenty, large, bright red, and quite broad where I grew up. And on all other days of the week my arrows sailed off into the wild blue yonder, to sit hidden in the fallow weeds and maybe puncture a neighbor’s tractor tire the following spring. Or maybe eventually catch my eye and be re-purposed as an arrow, more defunct stick than game-getter at that late point, but available and at-hand, and so useful nonetheless.
As a young man, I shot at deer from the ground and from neighbor’s hillbilly blinds, AKA rickety wooden death traps in today’s more refined hunting circles. My woodcraft was then and remains now unbeatable, and I am not lying or exaggerating when I tell you that I could stalk within feet of a dumbfounded deer, and let fly. Only to watch my arrow clip hair from the aforementioned areas and parts of the deer’s external anatomy, time and time again.
Bill Heavey would tell you, had he been as cool as me as a kid himself, that the deer died of laughter from the ridiculousness of the experience. But no, my deer did not die of anything. Not from shock, not from surprise, not from overwhelming mockery of the incompetent human mere feet away, and not an arrow in the heart. No, my deer stood stock still, with grass or acorns or corn hanging out of their slack jaw, staring at me in disbelief. Some even provided me with two shots.
I could have died from the shame of it all.
This routine of Bad-Indian-Sucky-Bow went on for decades, even as I graduated to used but working Fred Bear Kodiak recurves and then to custom “stick” bows. My prize and pride is a beautiful reflex-deflex longbow made by none other than Mike Fedora, the dean of modern traditional archery in America. Back in 2000, Jack Keith and I traveled from Harrisburg to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous, then at Denton Hill in Potter County (home of many more bears than people), where we connected with Jack’s dear friend John Harding, and where I was introduced to Mike Fedora.
At ETAR, Fedora traced my bow-holding hand, did some phrenology-like measurements of my various body parts, and pronounced that the bow of my dreams would be ready within a few months. And no sh*t, Mike Fedora did produce a beautiful bow that was like an extension of my soul. I could then and still can shoot that thing into bullseyes all day long. At archery targets, me and that custom bow are deadly.
At deer, I still drop the ball. No can hit. Must be nerves, which are steely when I am hunting with a rifle. And so my arrows continue to clip bits of hair from all over deer bodies all over Upstate New York and Upstate Pennsylvania.
I am telling you, my collection of these bits and clumps of hair is large and legendary. If nothing else, no human being alive has missed so many deer at so short a distance for so long as I have. A living, walking, malfunctioning Guiness Book of World Records I may be in this regard, around these parts it is nothing to brag about. Rather, I inspire pity from even little kids dressed in camo who have already arrowed several Pope & Young bucks by the age of seven.
In the not too distant past, someone with my pathetic archery hunting skill would have perished from starvation long before amassing even the beginning of such a fine and rare collection.
And yet, I have discovered hope, salvation for my pathetic-ness and hopeless skill-less-ness. As much as I hate to admit it, I, a traditional archery snob who mocked bows with “training wheels” (compound bows) and belittled “bow-guns” (crossbows) as un-sporting arms that no worthy deer would allow itself to be taken by, I have finally fallen to the siren song of the modern crossbow. Or, to be honest, the cross-gun that shoots a short arrow like some kind of James Bond super-weapon.
Despairing of my ineffectiveness at archery hunting, and desiring to finally carve some notches in something to prove my prowess as a traditional hunter before I expire, I went and bought a Ravin R10X crossbow. It came highly recommended by contractor Ken Pick of Renovo, PA, whose son aced a very nice mountain ten point with one two weeks ago at the distance of 87 yards.
I can barely hit a deer with a modern centerfire rifle at 87 yards, so when I saw the photos of the young chap and his buck and his James Bond cross-bow-gun, I decided if I could not beat them, I had to join them. And join them I did, by buying said Ravin R10X at Baker’s Archery in Halifax, PA. Vindication and verification and all related cations came at me real fast as soon as I took that scary-ass contraption afield.
This is no lie and no exaggeration: Ten minutes after I took a little mosey to a spot where I had not hunted before, but where I thought deer had to be (this is the woodcrafty Josh), I had whacked an anterlessless deer. I had only put the scope reticle on the spot where I thought the arrow would hit the deer, and before I even pulled the trigger a loud THWACK resounded in the woods.
The deer ran twenty yards and died of fright, with a gigantic hole coursing through its body where I must have aimed but do not remember doing so, due to my own shock at having actually killed something with a stick and a string.
Life is full of surprises. Don’t deprive yourself of these dangerous-as-hell you’ll-shoot-yer-eye-out-kid bow-gun contraptions. Dude, they are cool and totally worth it.
Take my experienced word for it.
The trophy of my dreams: A yearling button buck taken with a James Bond super weapon on a ground stalk
A young man who was mentored in traditional archery, with good form, at ETAR 2020 at Ski Sawmill
People’s trail cameras are literally everywhere. This was sent to me as I was preparing to ask this kind young man to help me drag the deer fifty feet to the gravel road
No joke about it, my friend and archery and life mentor, Jack Keith, was the real deal in everything, and I miss him every day.
People who subsist on archery can’t afford to write silly essays about sucking at archery
Traditional archery legend Fred Asbell showing how to correctly hold the bow while hunting. Fred took all kinds of animals all around the world with traditional archery tackle
A young man with even better archery form at ETAR 2022
Hunting season re-cap
By popular demand by our one, single reader, we are going back in time a week or three, to when most hunting seasons ended. I was asked for a recapitulation of my own end of the hunting season, which, depending on which one we are talking about, could have been the end of January or mid February or even last week.
This past season was tough for me, for the simple reason that I am still recovering from a covid-related “medical event,” which really took the starch out of my shirt, the wind out of my sails, the gumption out of my Gump. Bit over a year ago, I was running the sawmill, stacking lumber, sawing logs, working very hard, getting ready for an annual out-of-state solo wilderness hunt that I do just about every year. It is a great hunt, whether I actually pull the trigger, or not, and it has resulted in both super Zen mind settling re-sets as well as the biggest bodied buck and the biggest bear I have ever killed.
So I was working overtime in the crisp Fall air filled with the sweet scent of falling oak leaves, trying to get a bunch of logs to disappear and become lumber, and enjoying the feeling of being in really great condition, and feeling physically powerful. Nothing like bossing big oak logs around with a cant hook and a pickaroon to make a guy feel strong.
By the end of the week I was in absolute beast mode. I might have been a bit heavy, but I was incredibly strong and in fabulous cardiovascular conditioning (proven by a radioactive dye test that same spring where the cardiologist told me I had the heart of an 18 year old). Over the years, I have made hunting guides and forest rangers alike laugh and shake their heads at the improbability of my non-svelte ability to carry a heavy pack and a rifle, and just go go go keep going to wherever we are going in the Scottish Highlands and many other mountain ranges from Maine to Alaska.
So I was ripped and in fantastic condition, ready to make the long drive to the out of state destination, just exit the truck, throw my pack on, grab my rifle, and head in about four to six miles. When finally out there, I live out of a Seek Outside teepee tent, which with a small titanium wood stove provides all the comforts of home I could ever need. Living on home made dried fruit, jerky, and Gatorade powder keeps everything super simple.
Hours before leaving, I woke up, feeling like I was about to die. Eventually convinced that I was in fact dying, I drove myself forty minutes to the nearest hospital, and turned myself in to the ER staff at 4AM.
“Whatever you are here for, you are in the right place,” said the wizened old lady at the ER check-in. Apparently I looked just as dandy as I felt.
Handfuls of blood clots from a freak Covid clot were sprinkled around my lungs and heart, which accounted for why I felt like I was dying. That I did not die right away amazed everyone medical. Had I reached my hunting destination without dying on the highway, I would have died in the teepee tent, and forest rangers would have had to recover my fat body in the middle of a designated wilderness area. Which would have scored me no points with people I am always trying to impress.
So, when your aging carcass nearly croaks like that, and you cannot breathe or move for months, your body begins to atrophy. Overnight. On an old body like mine, the warranty ran out long ago, and things and parts and bits of it just start going their own way. Months and tens of pounds of fat later, I was learning to walk again. Forget carrying heavy packs and rifles, just walking from one end of a damned log landing to the other end was a chore. Carrying a chainsaw? Unimaginable.
Two types of blood clots are related to Covid: The kind of “regular” red blood cell clot, which got me, which my cardiologist said they saw an enormous spike of from early 2020 to 2022, and the white, gooey clot that seems to result from the purported Covid “vaccine” shot. I never got the faux Covid vaccine shot, but I did have Covid at least twice, possibly three times. And so even a year or two later, people like me were still experiencing “late Covid” symptoms. Including death clots from out of the middle of nowhere, including originating from impossible parts of the body (not in deep muscle).
Whatever China cooked up in their Frankenstein lab in Wuhan, it was a real bitch, and China owes America at least a trillion dollars for all of the damage and death they inflicted on us. Screw you, China, you bastards ruined my fabulous annual solo hunt and kept me from doing it again the next year, too. Make your bill two trillion bucks.
So, this past hunting season, beginning in October, I was just starting to really move again. But it was slow going, and slowed down more by the incredible amount of excess baggage I had stashed away around my gut. But whaddaya know, those old timers who used to talk about their elder years being their best hunting skills time…they were right. Because when I started moving through and across our hills, fields, and especially our Pennsylvania mountains, I was by necessity moving slooooowly.
And when you move slowly, you move silently, and with more attention paid to your surroundings. This results in seeing more animals, at closer distances, than usual. Being close range to prey animals with a rifle in your hand is usually a recipe for success.
In rifle season I killed two deer up in the mountains this way, the slow, sickly, deadly old man way. Then I returned south to the mostly Flatlands, and proceeded to again slowly sneak up on a doe in the middle of a wind storm with snow on the ground, and shoot her with a lever action rifle at about twenty-five yards. I was starting to feel a lot better physically, and about life.
Later on, in the late season, I really struggled to master a new flintlock rifle, for which I had waited two years, after taking a year of my time just to assemble the parts. I will write about hunting deer with this beautiful new flintlock rifle tomorrow, as Part Two of this report.
Is sitting in a box actually hunting?
Hunting season is cold, and getting outside to seek deer or bear or really any other wild game animal requires a person to put up with some level of discomfort. You can put a lot of effort into hunting, and still come up empty handed. So to up the odds of escaping the attention of deer and bear, some hunters created hunting blinds up in trees. The least difficult ones were railroad sikes driven into a tree to be used as a ladder, and we would hoist ourselves up onto a stout lower limb, and there wait for a shot at a passing deer.
The truly old tree blinds from the 1930s and 1940s were ridiculously frail, made of random assortments of surplus lumber; practically death traps as soon as they were nailed up to living trees. The better old fashioned tree stands would usually be put on what we called an “Indian tree,” where someone a long time ago had deliberately bent over and caused a tree to grow parallel with the ground.
When the horizontal bent limb was at least a foot in diameter, enterprising hunters would find creative ways to attach a stable platform, usually reached by a dangerous rickety wooden ladder made out of woods trash and nails. Platforms ranged from plywood to rough cut boards, some with railings and tattered old olive drab canvas and maybe a stool. Deluxe versions had some sort of roof or covering to keep rain, snow, and sunshine off of the hunter. These elevated hunting blinds were usually eight to ten feet up off the ground, and if the rickety blind did not fall down and kill you, the hunter, then you could usually use it to kill a deer. Despite requiring skill just to stay in them, these blinds were always in demand, and elders got first dibs.
Here I am talking about the American Northeast, and Pennsylvania, specifically. Not about India, where the elevated machan gave hunters of dangerous game not only an opportunity to shoot before being detected by tigers and leopards, but a chance to get in at least one more shot or even a stabbing blow with a spear before the claws and fangs were at your throat.
Fast forward fifty years, and now elevated blinds are everywhere. But they are not like the old rickety kinds jimmied onto trees with long spikes us older guys fondly recall. Witness the rise of the elevated box blinds, which are light years ahead of the rickety wooden tree stands in use when I was a kid. These new ones look like Martian landers, and are sold along the side of RT. 15 from Duncannon to Williamsport, as well as anywhere farm machinery and grains are sold, or even in Amish farm yards.
These modern elevated hunting blinds are airtight, have windows that open and close, and safe ladders or steps made of treated lumber of metal. They are downright sophisticated, and one farm lease I know of has propane heaters in all of their elevated “huts” where guys literally cook their breakfast while waiting for a deer to show up out one of the sliding windows. Some of them are big enough to hold a whole family, and indeed these are like little remote hunting cabin outposts, where everyone from Pap to the youngest kids can comfortably take a poke at a deer from a steady rest with plenty of quiet encouragement around them.
The question is, Is this elevated box blind business actually hunting?
My four-plus-inch-thick 1987 Random House Dictionary (the resilient if lonely, unknown cornerstone of our written culture) says Hunt: To chase or search for game or other wild animals for the purpose of catching or killing.
How much chasing or searching do you see going on from the ubiquitous elevated box blinds?
Not a lot. Well, none. Shouldn’t hunting involve actual pursuit and physical exertion? Don’t we need to earn our kills?
Go on YouTube or Rumble, and you can watch hundreds of “hunting” videos of hunters sitting in elevated box blinds, overlooking crop fields and power lines. These hunters usually have a long period of self-discussion to their camera about what they are looking for, any shots taken and misses they have had, etc. They have tripods and bipods, heaters, shelves with food, windows, and are generally protected from the punishing elements that mark hunting season.
The most dispiriting of this video genre has little kids holding forth, as if experienced adults, about the relative merits of various bucks caught on cell camera trail cams that very morning, and whether or not any of them are good enough for our young camerman.
And so I think we have to ask if this elevated box blind is not really hunting, then is it good for hunting? If maintained as a hunting method after their first one or two confidence building kills, the little kids are for sure being ruined by this stuff. Because it is not reality.
People who think that hunting season solely involves sitting in one spot all day, especially an enclosed and elevated spot, and then stiffly climbing down to either bitch about the lack of deer or worse, to boast about one’s prowess whacking “the big one“, are not hunters. They are shooters. If they have at all practiced target shooting before season, and they have some huge Hubble Telescope mounted on their Million Magnum Blastem Rifle, then surely they can make that three hundred yard shot on some unsuspecting deer eating dinner in a crop field.
Sorry to be negative about this, but we are losing our souls to these elevated blinds. Yes, they make hunting season more comfortable, and they make ambushing and surprising our quarry easier, but they are really dumbing down and whittling off our hunting instincts and skills, our woodcraft that separates us from the flatlander slobs who have no self reliance abilities. Hunting is not supposed to be easy, or comfortable, it is supposed to test us and make us earn the trophies we kill.
In Europe and Asia, hunting was used until the 1800s by warriors to hone their combat skills. Nothing like dismounting your horse to face off at ground level with a mean 4,000 pound Gaur or a ferocious 1,000 pound wild boar, armed with a stout spear in hand and a short sword at your hip. Back then, hunters were tough. As were our own American Longhunters on our frontier.
You want to actually hunt? Go do a deer drive like the BNB Outdoors kids, or with The Hunting Public guys. Or take a quiet, slow still hunt woods walk like John does at Leatherwood Outdoors. These hunts take skill and effort, which is the heart and soul of the chase. Everything else is just a hands-on video game at this point. No thanks.
A deer taken while still hunting two weeks ago, with open sights. Don’t look too closely, it was hit between the eyes.
Checking nearby cell cameras to see where the deer are while sitting in a blind…
Not picking on anyone here, but you boys can do better than this
Calling Elon Musk, we have landed on Mars
Why do people trespass on private property?
During one of his many temporary incarcerations, infamous bank robber John Dillinger was asked by a news reporter why he robbed banks, and he famously quipped “Because that’s where the money is.” Funny enough, true enough, but Dillinger eventually ended up being shot to death by both civilians and a ragtag assortment of law enforcement agents who were fed up with his lawlessness.
I have been similarly wondering: Do people, particularly hunters, trespass on private property because that is where the wild game is? Or is there some other reason that turns otherwise normal people into lawless jerks who instigate their victims into acts of violent retaliatory fury?
My observation and experience is hunters, in particular, trespass on posted private land, and end up poaching wildlife there, because they are drawn to the mystery and promise of new territory. They think that a plot of private land that is carefully cultivated wildlife habitat must have some really nice, abundant, maybe even trophy wildlife on it. And sometimes these outlaws do, in fact, stumble into a kind of bank vault of wildlife, where they feel like they have hit the jackpot.
The problem with trespassing on posted private hunting land is that someone else, the landowner or a club that leases from the owner, has probably spent a lot of time and resources maintaining that land. Paying the real estate taxes on it, managing it, making it a sanctuary or haven for wildlife. All year long that landowner runs chainsaws, plants and prunes fruit trees, sprays herbicides, clears trails, plants various crops like clover that most wildlife find attractive.
These considerable efforts are done for the benefit of the landowner, his family, his friends, or for the club members who pay him for the opportunity to exclusively hunt there, in a very brief window of time. Hunting seasons are usually just a few weeks long. This investment of time and money is like any other investment, say, a savings account at your local bank. Or your retirement pension.
Trespassing and poaching are not victimless crimes. A landowner’s entire year’s work can go out the window from it.
Trespassers enter into the private property and, purposefully or by mistake, disturb the wildlife, maybe scare it away and off the property; poachers kill the wildlife. These disruptions come at a great cost to the landowner, who for 50 prior weeks has been working hard, husbanding the land’s natural resources, and suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage when he should be reaping his just reward.
Someone else has come along and taken advantage of all his hard work and investment, someone else has claimed his reward that he was looking forward to. Most often, the trespass intrusion and poaching so greatly disturb the property’s carefully arranged balance, that the landowner gets little to nothing of what he had worked so hard to attain. And hunting seasons are so brief that there is no time to wait out the disturbance.
This is exactly how both trespassing and poaching are forms of theft. Thievery. Scumbag-ness. Dirtball-ness. A-hole-ness. And when someone has stolen something from the landowner, the landowner can get angry about it. Sometimes really, really angry. Especially if the thief acts like the whole thing is no big deal. Because it is a really big deal to screw a landowner over and steal away from him his hard work and promise of success.
Confession time: I have been a scary person when encountering trespassers and poachers (scary to them and often to me). Not long ago a warden asked me to consider becoming a deputy warden, and I responded that I could not do that, because I get so angry at trespassers and game thieves that it would be unbecoming to see someone in an official uniform lose their cool. Yes, I have had people charged in court, but often my hand tightly around someone’s shirt collar while they get roughly dragged off the property is enough to convince trespassers that other venues hold more promise and less danger. I don’t know if many other landowners operate this way, but I am super old school. A facility with firearms and knowledge of the law also helps build confidence when dealing with armed trespassers and poachers.
As one state trooper said to a trespasser I had roughly collared, “Yes, Josh is armed. But YOU are armed, too. Is he supposed to let you shoot him so you can make your getaway? Here is your citation, do not come back here.”
Some people trespass because they are looking for things to steal, including rare plants or animals, or to drive off wild game they don’t want the landowner to get. Others trespass so they can poach wildlife through illegal hunting. Others may simply get a jolt of excitment, or are simply curious.
Folks, trespassing and poaching are a really big deal. Some landowners make a significant income from leasing their hunting land, and poachers undermine that investment. Some landowners treasure their privacy, and seeing an armed thief skulking around their property makes them feel directly threatened. So don’t do it. Don’t think it is no big deal to slip past the No Trespassing purple paint or sign and “just take my gun for a walk” or take a Sunday drive up that posted driveway.
That walk that comes so casually to you, the trespasser, comes at someone else’s expense, even if you do not see it right then. And it could end up costing you everything. No wild game animal is worth getting in trouble over, and certainly not losing your life or mobility for.
The answer to the temptation to trespass on private land is to listen to that little voice in the back of your mind warning you not to take the chance. Go to public lands for your hunting and fishing adventures. Here in Pennsylvania, public lands are super abundant. If you don’t like sharing public lands with the general public, why then, go buy yourself a piece of land and make it your very own wildlife sanctuary.
Had the once popular John Dillinger stopped robbing banks when he made that cute quip of his, he could have easily slipped away into anonymity and comfortable living, or even into celebrity and wealthy living as a free man. But he pushed it too far, and paid the ultimate price. Like too many thieves pay every day….Guys, don’t trespass and don’t poach.
And yes, baiting is a form of poaching and wild game theft. Don’t do it.
********
UPDATE December 2, 2024: Today I was sitting on a remote hillside in Northcentral Pennsylvania, with a rifle across my knees, overlooking private land surrounded by about two million acres of public land, enjoying the snow-covered serenity. Suddenly, loud voices approaching from behind grabbed my attention. Through a normally silent piece of state forest emerged four young men, in hunter orange and preparing to drive off the piece of private land.
Looking at the leader, who was giving specific directions about how to spread out and push the deer off the private land, I turned to face all of them and asked “Did we grant you permission to hunt here?”
“I mean, we have a bunch of people down in there right now, deer hunting, and they don’t expect to have anyone walking through.”
The curse-word filled abuse heaped on me caught me off guard. Me, easily the age of the fathers of these four young men, very much their elder and merely a private landowner asking an elementary question that any landowner would ask of uninvited guests, was now the bad guy.
“Eff you” Eff this” “Eff him” “Eff that” were the nicer things said to me as the young men checked that the boundary was clearly marked and backed up and regrouped.
I do not know or understand who raises such poorly behaved and aggressive young men, but for those who are inclined to ascribe poor behavior only to people with dark skin, I am here to tell you these were four white guys. Out in the middle of the big nowhere, armed with rifles, and acting like a criminal gang. With all their anger, I wondered if one of them was going to shoot me in the back.
They had already loudly walked a half mile from their remote parking spot (that itself is a long and arduous drive to reach) through laurel-choked oak woods that normally is full of deer, as the abundant deer tracks in the deep snow attested to. What if these four “hunters” had done a silent deer drive from their vehicle out to the private land they intended to sneak on? They might have already bagged a deer. Instead, they talked so loudly, so boisterously, for so long, that I thought they much have been forest workers. Never in my life have I heard hunters this loud in the woods.
Their behavior makes no sense, unless their goal was simply to spoil the posted private land that they already know is off-limits and that they were jealous of and wanted to ruin for hunting by anyone else….
Two great shows coming up soon!
Two great shows are coming up soon. If you live in central Pennsylvania, then fortunate you. If you live farther out or even far away, even out of state, both are worth traveling to, even from far, far away.
The first show starts this Friday, the 18th Century Artisan’s Faire, now (as of last year) held in Carlisle, PA, at the Carlisle Expo Center at 100 K Street. It used to be called the Lewisburg Show, because for decades it was held in Lewisburg, PA, along Route 15. The Carlisle Expo Center is SO MUCH BETTER than the prior hotel venue. I went to this show last year and could have easily spent both days there. Better lay-out, better room, more room, higher ceilings and far better lighting.
If you are afflicted with history-itis, with a passion for hand-made tools and utensils of all sorts, including eating utensils like forks and knives and plates, with blacksmithing and historic reenacting, with hand-carved curly maple furniture and gunstocks, leatherworking, with anything black powder or flintlock or percussion, with 17th and 18th century clothing, then this show is for you. I have been attending for I don’t know how many years, a long time, and every time I go it’s worth it. The nationwide talent that is assembled at this show is amazing to experience.
The second show starts this Saturday, the Great American Outdoor Show. It is held for the whole week in Harrisburg at the Farm Show Complex on Cameron Street. This is the “new” show built on the ashes of the old one, which I helped end by starting a boycott.
The prior show was run by a British promoter, and they had no feel for America, Americans, guns, gun rights etc. In the immediate political backwash of another Democrat-run mass school shooting, that British promoter tried to prohibit exhibitors from having AR-15 platform rifles. That set off a slight negative reaction among the paid participants, advertisers, and attendees that culminated in the boycott, which ended the show that year. And it ended that tone deaf promoter’s role in the show ever-after.
In the press interviews I did about shutting down that show, my favorite quote was “The British did not understand Americans in 1776, and they still don’t understand us in 2012.”
To which I think we can easily now add the entire Democrat Party, because it is openly and officially the political party of big government, of citizen disarmament and gun confiscation, of digital currency and your money control, of high taxes, of speech control, of thought control, of censorship, of car control, of health care control, of Covid lockdowns and private citizen movement control, but not USA border control.
Nope, under the Democrat Party the American border is wide freakin’ open to tens of millions of anyone and everyone from around the world.
So, go to these two shows. Both are very family friendly, regardless of what your family members each like. You will be really happy you did go. Enjoy America and freedom while you still can.
On Friday and Saturday you can rub elbows with gunpowder horn makers, flint knappers, flintlock and percussion rifle makers, black powder bag makers, historic dress and bonnet makers, tri-corner hat makers, and blacksmiths.
On Sunday you can go to the Farm Show Complex and see the whole world of tactical socks and vests, endless semiauto blast-em rifles as well as very cool historic lever action rifles and Wild West revolvers, bushcraft duck calls, high fence deer hunting legends and other TV created one-dimensional personalities, useful ATVs, fabulous boats, and cool end-of-the-world survival RVs, high tech synthetic and high tech wool outdoor boots and clothing, hunting guides from all around the world, and all kinds of fishing stuff. The Great American Outdoor Show really is an amazing experience. I highly recommend it.
I myself will be both a visitor and a volunteer at the GAOS. After many years of volunteering at the show and its predecessor, I took 2021-2023 off. This year I will be volunteering one or two days with the Pennsylvania Trappers Association, a wonderful conservation group of which I am a Life Member. Come on by the PTA booth and chat with us!
Gunmaker extraordinaire Mitch Yates
Leatherman’s new proprietor with his wares, which many black powder hunters use nationwide
Hoffman Forge. Jymm Hoffman made the outstanding modern steel anvil that we use in our own forge
I am a proud volunteer with the Pennsylvania Trappers Association at the GAOS.
Do deer processors give you back your own deer?
Pennsylvania rifle season for deer is nearing the end of its second and concluding week. On average, Pennsylvania hunters annually kill 400,000-500,000 deer, and I would just hazard a guess that 2/3 of those carcasses are taken by the hunter to local deer processors.
Tonight, deer processors across Pennsylvania are working triple-staffed and double overtime to process the hundreds of thousands of deer being brought in by successful hunters.
A perennial question asked by both new hunters and well seasoned is “When I pick up my deer from the processor, will it actually be my deer I am getting, or will it be someone else’s deer?”
There are two certain answers to this question, and I base these on my own experience and the experiences of many friends and acquaintances.
First answer, Maybe. Depending on what you want done to your deer, you might get back 100% of your deer or you might get back 75% of your deer, with the 25% difference being parts of other people’s deer. If you just want real simple cuts, basic steaks from the backstraps and the hams, and roasts from the neck, leg, and shoulders, then you stand a better chance of getting your deer back. This is because it is almost as easy for the processor to cut your deer up into these basic cuts with a bandsaw and a boning knife as it is to grab whatever oddball cuts he has on hand to fill your order.
Second answer, when ordering sausage and hamburger, is absolutely No. This is because deer sausage, pepper sticks etc. are made from various trimmings and random pieces of deer as they are brought in from the very beginning of the archery season, based on the kind of demand that processor has experienced in the past. Additional batches of sausage are made as demand increases towards the end of archery season and into the rifle season. There is just no way that your deer can be turned into its own sausage mix. Your deer might be contributed to a big pot of deer trimmings destined for sausage, and you might be getting your portion of that sausage, but that sausage just isn’t going to be yours and yours alone. It will be a mix of various deer brought in the same time as your own.
I cannot tell you how many times I have gone through the expense of having my prize deer turned into beautiful shrink wrapped cuts at a processor, only to discover that the cardboard box I received my order in is short at least ten to fifteen pounds of venison (from a huge buck). And worse, some random pieces have been thrown in a try to make the balance, as the processor guesses it. And some of the packages have been frozen a long time. And the same cuts of meat are colored differently, as though from different animals.
The truth is that if you want to eat your deer, then you must either butcher your deer yourself, or get together with buddies and butcher all of your deer together.
Butchering a deer by yourself is much easier than most people think, especially if you are willing to cut up the backstrap and hams into basic steaks, and then grind up everything else for hamburger or sausage. In fact, I am about to take a deer I shot today over to a friend’s house where we are going to butcher it in his garage. This is going to be his first experience doing this, but I am sure it will not be his last time.
With buddies, you can pool your odd trimmings and leg meat for sausage. One or two guys or their wives run the sausage/ hamburger grinder and filler, and by the end of the weekend the sausage has been cooked/smoked, and everything is all done simultaneously. I have seen a historic hunting camp in Elk County that had the most impressive kitchen and butchery set-up, including scales for weighing both the whole deer and the various parts and cuts. This is nice so that the guy who shoots a 60-pound yearling gets his deer, and doesn’t unfairly get a bonus pay-out taken out of someone else’s 120 pound deer. Unless this is the way everyone agrees to work together: Everyone goes home with more or less the same amount.
Nothing against the deer processors, they have an important role to play. But the question asked in the beginning can only be satisfactorily answered by doing the job yourself, and I can say from long experience that butchering a deer is easy and gets faster and easier the more experienced at it you become.
Yeah, PA’s lame bear season in one picture
Pennsylvania is about to have one of its lowest bear harvests in decades. And like so many policies of any sort, the story of this failure is told not just by the data, but by a picture of the data (see below).
In sum, this year’s early bear seasons of archery and muzzleloader resulted in roughly 1200 bears being taken by hunters. These are predominantly individual hunters in elevated stands, not crews of drivers pushing bears to standers.
By the time the real firearms “bear season” arrives in late November, much of the steam has been bled out of the system, so to speak. The demand has been met. Many serious bear hunters have already taken their bear and they won’t be going “to camp” to participate in punishing bear drives through thick mountain laurel on steep mountains in the northcentral region. And when the most ardent hunters pull out of a camp, that loss of energy and excitement affects everyone else. We noticed many empty camps across the entire northern tier this past week.
Again, the 1,217 bears taken in the early season so far are 200 bears ahead of the roughly 1,000 bears on record for the “bear season” as of tonight, which is the end of the formal “bear season.” In other words, bear season wasn’t. It is actually producing behind the early season.
So is the early season the real bear season now?
Add a poor acorn crop to the situation, and whatever bears were roaming around in October’s early season have gone to den for the winter now in our “bear season,” or have moved southward by the time November arrives, because all of the available wild food has been eaten up. We are now in our third year of a failed acorn crop in the northern tier, and the silence of our woods shows it. No food means no wildlife. Hunters saw no poop, no deer rubs, no squirrels, no nothing. Hunters scouring rugged northern tier landscapes that are the historic high producers of bears are encountering woods devoid not just of bears, but of deer and turkey, as well.
Yesterday was a classic example of this dynamic. Our guys put on a drive across a NW Lycoming County mountaintop area that usually holds bears. I was the lone stander in the primo spot, a saddle between two hills with a stream running through. I could see far in every direction. There were no other drives happening anywhere around our guys, which is unusual. But another and much larger drive was going on behind me, and pushing toward the area we had hunted the day before. And half a mile down the forest road several long range hunters were set up looking across a canyon. If there were bears around, or even deer, the two drives would push them past the long range guys, at least.
And yet, by the time dusk arrived and our men had slid and tumbled down the mountain side to gather at the truck, no one anywhere had seen a bear or a deer, nor heard a shot. The long range guys were packing up as we were driving out, and they told us they had seen several deer on Sunday, but nothing else any other day, including that day that had so much activity.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission is a government agency, and agencies make mistakes. Sometimes the best-intended and carefully considered policies have unintended consequences. Maybe the Saturday opener (as opposed to the long-time Monday opener) to bear season is part of the failure we are seeing. Maybe it’s the acorn crop failure making a bad situation worse. Maybe it’s the early season stealing all of the thunder from the regular rifle bear season. I don’t know the entire answer why, but the numbers don’t lie, and this 2023 bear season was a flop. Yes, we will see another 100-200 bears taken in the extended season that is concurrent with deer season in some Wildlife Management Units. But overall, PA has not seen a bear harvest this low in a long time. And as I recall, last year wasn’t that great, either.
Something is wrong and something needs to change. A lot of small businesses in rural areas depend on these big bear and deer seasons to make their end-of-year financial goals. Let’s hope the PGC staff and the board are up to the task of fixing it.
Harvest results as of the last night of regular rifle bear season, 2023. Not final, but not going to change much. The early season was the best season.
A few more thoughts on Alaska gear & public land
Even people who will never hunt in Alaska want to know what kind of gear a guy carried while he was there, and they might even have some opinions about it. Alaska is kind of the go-to place for all imaginary hunts, survivalist prepping, and bush homesteading, and you can go on YouTube and on any related video find endless debate about guns and gear by all kinds of people, 99% of whom have never been to Alaska. After the “Thousand Overnight Tragedies” essay here a week ago, I got some questions about my hunting kit from people who will never do anything more than a luxury cruise to Alaska. I know well that if a couple guys ask, there are more who want to know but didn’t ask. So here goes, my best advice on how to be properly kitted out for Alaska.
First off, before assembling your Alaska kit you have to determine if you are staying out in the Alaskan wilderness. Plenty of people get air dropped into a remote wilderness spot, tent up near the lake or river where the float plane landed to drop them off, and that’s their base camp they hunt out of every day. It is the same place the plane will pick them up from in a week or ten days. If this scenario is how you are heading into Alaska to hunt or fish, then you need all of the survival gear, various fire starting methods, a beacon, etc. kit that you would need while wilderness hunting anywhere else in North America. My Seek Outside tipi tent with the large titanium wood stove has made all of the difference for how I hunt in wilderness (thanks to Ranger Ian for his guidance on this years ago after I reported how I nearly froze to death in his service territory).
Second, the month of year really makes a difference in Alaska. I have been there in July, August, and September. July and August are usually quite comfortable. In September you are beginning to get some chilly nights, and possibly chilly mornings. Maybe a chilly day. Warm clothing you can easily layer on and off, like a Filson wool vest, becomes critical the later it gets after August ends.
Finally, where exactly in Alaska are you going? Central Alaska encompasses most of the state, and it is kind of the rugged classic interior Alaska everyone thinks of when they imagine Alaska. But all of the state’s coastal areas are really different from the interior, especially as you begin to head north or south of Anchorage. Southeastern panhandle Alaska is a temperate rain forest. It rains there even when it is not really technically raining. Something like fifteen to twenty FEET of rain falls there in the southeast. Obviously you have to be prepared for regular rain if you are hunting and fishing in the panhandle.
If you are hunting out of an Alaskan home, say your friend’s or your cousin’s, or from a lodge, and then driving or boating to your destination each day, with plans of returning before dark, then here is the kind of checklist you will appreciate:
- Rubber rain suit, jacket with hood and pants. My 25-year-old Cabela’s blue rubber rain suit worked fine for both repelling the constant light patter and sometimes more steady rain. It also served as my wind breaker with only a tee shirt underneath. Blue is a bad choice for hunting, because many animals see blue like humans see fluorescent orange. When my blue rain suit finally dies, I will get a green one.
- Good rubber boots and also good leather hunting boots. I used both, sometimes on the same day, the rubber ones in the morning and the leather ones later in the day, or vice versa. If you are hunting hard, you need rigid ankle support, and I have not found a better boot for hunting in steep, rugged terrain than the Danner Canadians. I especially relied on the Danners on the SE AK island we hunted for blacktail deer. For this recent trip I finally bought my first “good” pair of rubber boots, the only “hunting style” rubber boots that properly fitted my enormous duck feet, by Irish Setter. These worked great in all wet environments I encountered, many of which were the margins and shallows of salmon streams. A PEET boot dryer is a good thing to have waiting at home at the end of the day.
- A light day-use backpack holding extra clothing, extra ammo, food, water, GPS (I use a Garmin 62s with detailed mini SD card maps) a range finder, binoculars, etc is an absolute necessity. My LL Bean hunting pack has accompanied me on hunting trips from the Scottish Highlands to Alaska and a lot of places in between. It is a fabulous and extremely durable, well thought out piece of kit.
- Binoculars are essential in Alaska, because it is such big country. Doesn’t matter if you are hunting or fishing, you absolutely must be able to see what is happening around you, if for no other reason than Alaska serves up cantankerous grizzly/ brown bears by the minute almost everywhere you go. And occasionally mean moose. Plus binoculars help you see game you are after, or maybe circling marine birds distantly picking off scraps as larger fish feed at the surface, where you can easily catch them. Leupold has been my USA-made go-to binocular maker for a very long time, after using various Nikons for a while. Yes, you can’t go wrong with Swarovskis or Zeiss, but I am brutal on my gear, and I will cry like a baby if all 265 pounds of me face plants on top of the $3,000 binos strapped to my chest. So I use a pair that are almost as good as the $3,000 pair, but which cost about 800% less.
- Range finder. Any modern range finder is useful for hunting in big country like Alaska, except over water. If you are hunting directly over a large body of water, then you need to calibrate your piece, or it will give you whacky results. I use a Nikon Forestry Pro because I work in the forest products and land business, but it has also served me just as well in hunting. I have learned that this model is rugged, because I use mine so much, in so many tough environments.
- Knife. Yes, you need a strong, sharp knife to go hunting correctly. I won’t wade into the whole which steel is better than my grandma’s Old Hickory no-snob high carbon potato peeler knife. And if anyone ever says the word “bushcraft” within arm’s length of me, you’re gonna get a healthy serving of country whoop ass. Because I can’t take it any more. The whole “bushcraft” genre is such urban flatlander weekend warrior nonsense, for God’s sake, let it be, leave it alone, leave it behind. A hunting knife can be almost any shape, size, and steel type that has worked well for you in the past. The Inuit and Inupiat just south and north of the Arctic Circle use Old Timer pocket knives, grandma’s ulu made of whale penis and wrought iron, and occasionally a high quality modern “huntin‘ knife” left behind by an appreciative tourist hunter. And guess what…all of these various shape knives work just fine for the subsistence lifestyle a lot of Inuit and Inupiat live. And they kill, skin, dissect, and eat raw on the spot – with their varied assortment of knives – more critters in one month than you will kill in a lifetime of Lower 48 recreational huntin‘. I happen to use various JRJ knives made by John R Johnson of Perry County, PA, because his ATS-34 steel and overall craftsmanship were as good as any huntin‘ knife available anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately, John has not made a knife in almost ten years. Fortunately, for years I bought armloads of knives that he custom made for me, and I enjoy using every one of them every season.
- Rifle. Yeah, some guys hunt Bigfoot with a souped up .44 Magnum or 454 Casull handgun. So what. A rifle is light years better than a handgun in every way, and I hunt big game only with a rifle, especially in real big country like Alaska. On this recent trip I carried my friend’s Henry 45-70 lever action, loaded with the Federal Premium HammerDown 300 grain rounds. There are hotter, more effective 45-70 rounds available from CorBon and Grizzly, but I was happy with the 3″ 100-yard performance of this round out of my friend’s rifle. And I don’t know how up to snuff the Henry is with the hotter 45-70 loads. The problem with the Alaska panhandle is that the weather there absolutely eats guns. If the saltwater doesn’t kill your gun, the constant rain and moisture will finish the job. A stainless steel gun like the Marlin 45-70 SBL is probably the best possible hunting rifle for Alaska. And this gun can handle the hottest 45-70 loads. One comment about the Henry: Its rear sight was very frail and kind of sad. It moved around all by itself, which can result in a severe mauling or death by Griz, if you happen to not check up on the rear sight and adjust it as needed every ten minutes.
- Backup pistol and bear spray. Bear spray works very well in places without wind or breezes. If you use bear spray in a place with wind or strong breezes, you are likely to incapacitate yourself instead of the bear (insert stupid human hungry bear joke here). I happened to be hunting and fishing in a SE AK place with constant winds and breezes, so I dispensed with the bear spray and kept a .44 Magnum revolver on my hip, loaded with some bear-buster ammo and not the ubiquitous 240 grain JHP that is guaranteed to piss off Griz more than kill him. Speaking of backup, I carried an emergency beacon of unknown make or vintage on most of my hunts.
- Clothing. My old tried-and-true Cabela’s Gore-Tex hunting pants were perfect for the cooler days, and my old tried-and-true Columbia nylon zip-off cargo pants were perfect for the warmer days. A wool hunting shirt in red and black buffalo plaid (of course) with some thermal long underwear is all I needed in the early season. I wore a no-name fluorescent orange fleece hat as well as my 2020 Trump hat. Sometimes together when it was cold. Mid to late September and beyond, you need real cold weather gear.
Good luck if you go DIY hunting in Alaska. DIY solo is my thing, and I think it is the most fun way to wilderness hunt. The challenge with DIY in Alaska is it is so big, and the critters are so big, and the distances are so big, and the civilization is so small and so far away. You really can’t do a DIY hunt by yourself in Alaska. It is not safe, and a thousand things can go wrong after you are successful and kill the animal of your trophy dreams. Go with a friend, go with a guide. And be smart about balancing your kit with practical items you are truly likely to need. Hunting in Alaska is not automatically a survival test or a Bataan Death March. You don’t go to Alaska and automatically plunk yourself down in the woods and start doing a video on (puke) bushcraft. It isn’t all dangerous, nor is Alaska all wilderness. Plenty of good hunting and fishing is available a decently brief drive out of any of the major cities, but it does get better the farther out you go.
Speaking of going further out of civilization, all this amazing hunting and fishing and trapping in Alaska is possible only because of the huge critical mass of public land there. Yes, I agree that federal and state agencies sometimes mis-manage public land. And sometimes those agencies end up “mis-managing” their relationships with the American citizen taxpayers who pay the agency staff and who own the public land the agencies are supposed to steward. But I think that public land is one of the very few things that government does pretty well. And even when government staff screw it up, the public land is still there afterwards.
The king you got, not the king you wanted or needed?
Two days ago was Coronation Day in England, whereupon the former very very longtime Charles Prince of Wales became Charles King of England AKA King Charles III. Even in The Year of Our Blessed Freedom From Monarchy 2023, this is still a big deal, because like it or not, kings and queens can matter when they want to, for better or worse.
This new king follows on the heels of his most amazing and impactful mother Queen Elizabeth, whose traditional values and top notch leadership skills many people miss. It appears Charles also wants to matter, like his mother, to be of consequence, to make what he believes is a positive difference on Planet Earth. So, we take note of his ascendence. He may not be the high caliber of his mother, who many would have liked to have seen replaced by another woman or man of equal qualities (good luck finding such a person anywhere in Western Civilization today), but Charles is nonetheless now the monarch. For better or for worse, or most likely a mix of both really bad and some good, King Charles is not going to be invisible.
Setting aside the die-hard monarchists for a moment, there was still a lot of worldwide public interest in Saturday’s coronation, if only because several mini-dramas played out in the coronation process. One being the role of His Most Spoiled Brattiness Prince Harry (strategically blocked from camera view at the actual coronation by a tremendous red feather plume in his aunt Anne’s hat in front of him), two being the marked absence from the coronation of Harry’s horrendous harridan of a wife, MeGain Markle, three being the final and hard public point being put on Charles’ longtime relationship with Priscilla, which had been openly maintained even while Charles was married to the most glamorous human being ever to grace the earth, Princess Diana Spencer. Many people never forgave Charles for his affair and disrespecting of Diana, but now, it’s officially all over. Charles and Priscilla are officially married and officially King and Queen of England.
Surely there are other notable features of this coronation, but to me, the one that matters most is the one that almost no one (that I could find) took notice of, and that is King Charles’ masculinity and his love of field sports, notably hunting. With guns, and occasionally spears. In a world of the establishment war against boys, against masculinity and manhood, of forced and artificial feminization of men at every turn (like Bud Lite’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle in the USA), King Charles’ quiet but absolute manliness is a crucial symbol for normal people and for those who should want to return to being a natural, normal, healthy human.
If nothing else, King Charles may end up being a potent symbol of How To Be A Man. Laugh if you want about this, but at one time not too long ago, 99% of boys naturally wanted to become masculine men when they reached adulthood, to be service-minded police officers, brave firefighters, adventurous cowboys, heroic soldiers, and hunting was a bedrock experience that trained many boys for these fields. In a western world now under siege from within our borders and from within our own governments that are captured by our worst enemies, who among other things are doing double duty to weaken us by erasing manhood and masculinity from our population, having public symbols of masculinity and manhood, like King Charles, is more important than many people realize.
Setting aside his many bad policy positions, King Charles is no dithering dandy, no fop. Quite the opposite. He speaks firmly, rides tall in the saddle, properly and expertly handles rifle, pistol, and shotgun, and is not afraid to kill his own dinner or get blood or dirt on his hands or clothes. This is a king I could like and who we all need, if only because he is a real man. Long live this manly king.
Thanks to Westley Richards for this photo
