Posts Tagged → sick
Flintlock season recap
- Gunmaker Mark Wheland with the gun of my dreams, a flintlock English Sporting Rifle made just for me
Writing a blog is a delicate walk, because as much as I want to write about the righteous boss daddy treatment President Trump gave to weasel rat dictator Zelensky the other day, I have to stay focused on what our audience of exactly One Person has requested. If I turn off my one reader, then I will literally be writing solely for the air and the stars.
For the record, just because you or I call Zelensky (Ukraine) the weasel rat dictator he is, does not mean that you or I automatically like or support dictator Putin (Russia). Both of these men are in power because they have subverted their nations’ elections, amassed wealth and power at the expense of their countrymen, etc. Yes, Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and yes, Ukraine can and should negotiate a settlement that ends the bloodshed. And yes, Trump should demand and expect to receive rare earth metals in return for all of the taxpayer support Americans have given to Ukraine. This is all normal.
Wanting the war to go on and on with greater bloodshed and destruction on both sides and with more powerful rockets is not normal. That is warmongering.
Anyhow, the late hunting season here in Central Pennsylvania was exciting, but had no filled tags. I used to rabbit hunt a lot, but gave up when the rabbit populations showed signs of vaporizing due to abundant fishers and bobcats. For five or six years now I have hardly seen one rabbit in places where I have created the best habitat, and where rabbits should be swarming. So for many years I have just hunted the late flintlock season for deer, instead, just about daily.
And also trapped for predators, including fishers and bobcats. Not this season, however. On the December flight back from Florida, a man behind me kept coughing and sneezing. He never covered his mouth, and made no attempt to keep from infecting everyone around him. Sure enough, a week later I was showing signs of the same horrible illness half the country has now had, a persistent dry cough and a close brush with pneumonia. Lots of people are getting the pneumonia. So, I was sick as hell during the time I normally set traps, and my kit and steel just sat and sat.
Instead, just about every day after Christmas, I would go out for a couple hours and try to intercept a deer with the new flintlock, coughing quietly into my clothes to muffle the bark. I got off a lot of shots, collected blood and hair, but filled no tags. A new white checked Filson wool coat helped me blend in with the snowy woods.
Made for me by Mark Wheland, the new flintlock is a 62-caliber rifle based on the English Sporting Rifle design, which I have come to admire. It has a 28 inch decently swamped octagonal barrel by Getz from about 15 years ago, a beautiful patent breech made by Jason Schneider at Rice Barrels, a RE Davis late-flintlock era Manton-style waterproof lock, and a gorgeous stock of highly figured and irridescent English walnut. Wheland turned a perfect ebony ramrod, as well as its horn end and its threaded steel connector end.
The Manton-style lock has a roller frizzen, which is both very fast and also very touchy. Hunting in brush without bumping the heel of my hand up against the back of the frizzen would result in some blade of grass flicking it open and dumping the priming powder on the ground. So it requires some special handling, because it is so sensitive.
I also struggled with this gun’s sights all season long, probably also slowly acclimating to the short barrel. This barrel is ten inches shorter than that on my long-time go-to 54 caliber flintlock barrel, that is 38″ long, and my eyes have not yet made the transition. Moreover, the new gun has classic British rear sights, one standing and one folding leaf. The rear sites were conveyed to me with only the most rudimentary and shallow “V” filed in the standing sight, and the front sight was about a half inch high. It was up to me, in a short amount of time, to get this gun sighted in just days before bear season began, which is just days before deer season started.
So I just struggled to get the gun sighted in, and by the time actual flintlock season began, the day after Xmas, it was printing dead center and 2.5″ high at 50 yards. With 130 grains of FFG Swiss pushing the 335-grain lead round ball about 1500 feet per second, I reckoned it was probably dead-on at 100 yards. Or minute-of-deer chest within 100 yards.
I lost track of how many shots I took at deer. Mostly at does. One probably legal buck I let walk past me. Some deer I literally just walked right up to in the snow, and missed, maybe forty yards away. Others I ambushed from concealment on trail crossings, from fifty out to about 95 yards, while sitting. Each miss resulted in a little more blacking being put on the rear sight, a little more color added here or there, and by the end of the season the front sight was filed down to about 1/8″ high and painted bright neon orange. The rear sight has a bright neon yellow inverted V wedge under the V aperature, surrounded by black. I am thinking about scrapping the entire arrangement and going to front and rear fiber optic sights. Old eyes…
One doe was flattened by what seemed like a perfect broadside at 75 yards. I saw her go down through the cloud of smoke, and when I walked up I expected to find her stone cold dead. But while there was a perfect outline of her body in the snow, with plenty of blood, the actual deer was nowhere to be found. With dusk fast approaching, I used my headlamp to follow as far as I could in the snow and the thick brambles, and then went home. The next morning I returned and took up the trail, which resulted in three deer fleeing from fresh beds, one of which had some fresh drips of blood, but not much. Not even the coyotes would end up eating her.
My last shot of the season was taken like a mortar, at the biggest buck I have ever seen in the wild. He was just a bit over 200 yards away, and had been spooked out of his hidey nook by my prowling. When I snuck back towards the anticipated cut-off, he was indeed standing right there, looking all around, on high alert. While down wind, I was as close as I could get without being seen. So I took some pictures of him, which of course did not come out well, and then took careful aim with plenty of “Kentucky elevation” and let ‘er rip. At the shot he flew away with wings, and on my follow up I found where the big lead ball had hit the ground at plane, leaving a 20-foot-long long streak through the snow and dirt directly in line with the buck’s shoulder, but about 20 yards too short. His tracks were among the biggest I have ever seen. Guessing a 200″ buck.
The doe was flattened, and leaked some hydraulic fluid, but was gone and lived on
I have a lot more practice to do with this gun.
What looks like a shallow white “W” is just the higher visibility part of the huge buck’s enormous rack
Overnight beds, tiny amount of blood, a mere flesh wound and a long-lived lucky deer
The long path cut by the 335-grain round ball on its way towards the big buck
Nice view down into the woods, perfect for a flintlock. Yes, the barrel key is loose, which accounted for two missed shots
Hunting around an enormous buck capable of leaving big rubs like this one is excitement enough. Actually seeing him and getting a shot…even the miss is the highlight of the season
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.
Ryan Loskarn – to be judged
Ryan Loskarn. Look him up. No need to say here what he did. Today he took his own life. Now only One will judge him, and not a jury.
Viewing child pornography creates a demand for child pornography, and it creates the conditions where children are subjected to the worst physical abuse imaginable. It is not a victimless crime to watch child porn.
The worst retribution is justified. Suicide is the easy way out. Hanging yourself is the right thing to do. Thank you.
Update**** I extend my condolences to Ryan’s family. To his credit, his shame was so overbearing that he could not live with it. Like defeated Roman generals and honor-bound Samurai warriors of old, Ryan took his own life to atone for his great failure. It is to his credit. And one more thing: Like the traditionalist he was, wrestling with his inner demons, he took responsibility for his actions. I wish another political party out there showed a smidgen of the same awareness among their own failed leaders. Instead, red-handed murderers like Ted Kennedy are exalted.