Thursday, December 01, 2005

Opening Week

The end of the first week of hunting season for us, and it's Deer: 3, Us: 0. Between us we've seen three bucks. One was a spike (not legal), one was a 4-point (not legal), and yesterday a big 6-point ran past us. B couldn't get a clean shot so we had to let him go.

I had a scary ten or fifteen minutes in the woods last night. I was walking back to the truck up the main trail while B went along the ridgeline parallel to me. I could hear and see him until I stopped to listen to some rustling nearby, thinking we'd startled a deer. When I started walking again just a moment later, my husband had disappeared. I whistled... no answer. I called him, still no answer. Now, a big man going through brush and dead leaves makes a lot of noise in empty woods, and I was hearing nothing except my own voice echoing back at me from the next mountain over. I called him for almost 10 minutes, at the top of my lungs, scared out of my wits thinking of what might have happened to him. I wanted to run get the truck but at the same time didn't want to leave in case he was lying in the woods someplace. By now it was dark and I had my flashlight out. I was two seconds away from firing off a three-shot distress signal when I heard a whistle from far off... and a minute later here came hubby down the main trail. Apparently when he dropped down over the ridge he couldn't hear me, nor I him, and he was almost back to the truck (a quarter-mile away) when he finally got up high enough to hear me yelling and came running. I wanted to beat him senseless but I settled for a hug. :-D My heart rate didn't drop for another half-hour though. Note to self: no matter that they might scare the deer, next year we WILL have two-way radios. My sanity depends on it.

Oh, and he was almost shot on Monday. We aren't going back there. Got some nice quiet private property to hunt on next week, thank God. The public lands attract ignorant, gun-toting, deer-fever-addled lunatics.

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