Friendship ...... Day 1

"A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." ~ Samuel Johnson

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones All,

I have been putting off this Gadabout for a few months because – well, I don’t really know how to tie the three days together.  So, what I’m going to do is just show a couple of pictures of the first two days with quick descriptions.  The last day was more “Gadabouty”.

By now you are probably asking, “Geoff, what the deuce are you babbling about?”   Well, you should. 

Al, my roommate back at the Trade School in the 70s is amongst my oldest friends.  Having retired, we have established a yearly tradition.  Every year in late October, Al and his wife Lisa drive over from Bay City to spend a couple of days at the Wisco Cabin.  Late October is when Grouse and Woodcock Season is at full roar.  Al and I spend a couple of days stalking the wily Grouse with Rowdy.  Both years so far, we have not exactly put a ding in the game bird population, but we have a good time. 

I have learned a lot about the grouse habitats around North Burnett County.  Which means that I can put Rowdy in a place that almost always has birds.  Rowdy has really improved at finding birds.  So, we flushed lots of birds, just didn’t bag many.  Grouse are like that.

To the pictures. 

On the first day, Ann and Lisa drove Al and I around in the Ranger. This allowed us to walk out a hunt and get picked up without having to backtrack our walk.  This is a great thing for my aging carcass.  We started off by going to a nice short walk over on Loon Creek.  The creek at this point flows out of Briggs Lake over towards the Minerva Lake Chain.  We got this nice picture.  

Loon Creek looking towards Briggs Lake

We flailed around unsuccessfully for a couple more walks and finally Al got a bird not far on the other side of the creek from that picture above.   

Al and Rowdy and the Grouse.

 I made everyone form up for a picture at the back of the Ranger.  Rowdy mugged for the camera. 

Rowdy gives Ann the Grouse.

 

Roughly a mile east of there is nice little trail that runs the crest of a hill down into the Loon Creek basin.  I really had high hopes for that hunt, but we saw nothing. 

There are birds out there, laughing.

As we drove back up the crest we stopped and got these pictures.    Logging companies really cleaned out this forest about a year ago.  In about 8 years, when the popple stands grow up, it’ll be great grouse cover.  

Standing on the logging slag.

  

Once we got back to the cabin, we started a fire out on the deck, had some adult beverages and swapped some lies.  It was a good time.

 

On that Happy Note, I remain,

Dad/ Geoff.

Canis Latrans

 

   "The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow" ~  Robert Goddard

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

When I was first grounded by heart disease in ‘15, I heard about Coyote Hunting.  (Again, if hunting tales bother you, please stop reading now.) 

When my oldest son, George learned I was “into” coyote hunting he bought me a really interesting book: “Coyote America” , by Dan Flores.

The introduction contains a great notion I will summarize.  You can tell a person’s political leaning by how they pronounce “Coyote”.  If it is “Koy Yo Tay” then they lean left.  If they say: “Ki yoat” then they lean right.  I will return to this notion later in this tale.

Coyote hunting intrigued me because it was something you can do year round.  A little Google-Fu led me to a series of YouTube videos featuring Tony Tebbe and “Predator University”.  He uses dogs to help attract the coyotes.  This intrigued me and I spent hours watching the videos.

Soon, I laid out $100 American for an electronic coyote caller.  Next, I found a cheap camouflage ghillie-ish suit at Gander Mountain on a going out of business rack. I was set! Now fully equipped, I went out into the Wisconsin Wilds filled with enthusiasm to try out my brand-new Small Game license that allowed me to hunt coyotes all year round.  Quickly, I learned that coyotes are smarter than I am and it was extremely unlikely that I would successfully call one to me, much less actually shoot it. 

Soon after that, we got Rowdy and I moved on to learning how to be a bird dog hunter.

That’s one strand of this story.   Here’s the next.

Last week, a friend in NW Iowa called and said “Hey, you wanna come down and hunt pheasants this weekend?”  “Well, heck yeah, I do!” so off we went last Friday.

We worked a lot of fields around Le Mars, Iowa, home of Blue Bunny Ice Cream and Ruba Seed.  Rowdy and I got a lot of good experience working with other hunters.  We expanded our horizons from the closed-in Wisco grouse woods to wide open Iowa.  The actual bird harvest count was not great, but as far as I’m concerned it was a rip-roaring success.  Rowdy and I learned a lot and got some great practical experience.  If we tried a field that had birds in it, Rowdy found them. 

Here’s a picture of the bird we got.

Ryan, Rowdy and the Rooster

 

Here's a picture of nuggets Ryan made:

 But I’ve got a better story to tell than mere pheasant hunting.

Michael found a nice piece of cover that wound up having a lot of birds.  Rowdy did a great job of steadying down and not chasing the hens we flushed.  We flushed a lot of hens. 

The four of us were walking downhill on a nice little drainage ditch between two cornfields.  Rowdy was working the roughly 20-yard-wide ditch hard.  I was really proud of him, he knew exactly what he was doing.   I’m walking out on the hard earth between the corn stalks on the right side.  The younger guys took the hard walk on either side of the grassy cover and I was thankful for that.  Michael is way over on the far left in the other field.

Suddenly Rowdy stops quartering and fixates on a spot about 5’ in front of him.  All of us yell something on the nature of “Look out he’s got one!”  Rowdy lowers his belly to the ground and just freezes not moving.  I’ve seen him do this before when the bird holds to the cover.    

The guys on either side start walking toward the spot just in front of Rowdy to flush the bird.   

Suddenly a face rises up out of the foot high grass and Rowdy is nose to nose with a Coyote!  Everyone yells “Ki Yoat!”  

Rowdy does a 180 and exfiltrates the battle.  The two guys in the middle just light the coyote up.  I don’t have a shot because they are in my line.  There are at least 6 shots.  It was like the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush scene - that dawg didn’t have no chance. 

Rowdy loops around to my left and heels up with being told to.  He’s looking at me like “Reoff?  What in the world do I do now?  You ain’t gonna make me retrieve that thing are you?”

The perspicacious reader will have noted how the other hunters referred to the coyote in the Moment of Truth. They are children of the corn and rooted to the land in the farming business,  There is no doubt where their political leanings lie according to the Flores Criterion.

Here’s the hero pictures.

 

 

 On inspection, the poor dawg had a bunged up back leg.  That's probably why it didn't bolt.  For you gentle readers, running into us probably shortened its sad end-of-life experience.

There is a business in town that pays fairly good beer money for a coyote carcass.  Would you sport a coyote fur collar?

This story alone made my trip.  Now I can honestly say I’ve bagged a coyote over a dog that I trained. 

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad/Geoff

Acarophobia

 

“Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.” ~ John Wayne *

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Over the last year, this blog has become mostly me bloviating about hunting with Rowdy, but this weekend, I got a chance to do some Gadabouts with an old friend.  There will be a string of stories, this is the first.   

Al Cave and I were roomies at the Trade School 45 years ago.  He and his wife, Lisa came to visit Ann and I here in Wisco last weekend.  The major reason was for Al and I to hunt grouse and woodcock together with Rowdy.

The visit gave me a chance to see the greatest act of Christian Love and Courage that I’ve witnessed in my three score and 7.   Bear with me while I lay it out….

Lisa and Rowdy seem to have a special bond.  She loves dogs, Rowdy senses it and he just bounces around happy as a lark when he sees her and he just wants to play and play. 

Next, you cannot enjoy the great outdoors here in NW Wisconsin without coming into contact with Ticks.  Deer ticks, wood ticks, big ticks, little ticks, we got ‘em all.  Every night before I bed down, I stand in front of a mirror and check for them.  Rowdy gets a NexGard chew at the beginning of every month and he’s a tick killing machine.  No tick can survive longer than 24 hours on the Doodle’s non-shedding coat.  Which is great because he just gets freckled with the evil insects as he beats around looking for birds.  Multi-Tens of them and you can see them on his light coat.

The tick cycle up here morbidly fascinates me.  Once the first hard freeze hits, you never see a tick again all winter as you would expect.  But come March or April, after the first thaw, within days, there is a tick bloom and Rowdy just gets loaded.  As the summer progresses an inevitable hot dry spell hits in July or Aug, the ticks die down and I don’t see any on Rowdy for some time.  But come cooler September after the first full rain, the ticks bloom back again in earnest.  This year, the last two weeks have been especially bad as the wet cool fall drags on.  Great for hunting, awful for ticks....

The first day Al was here, we beat the woods hard.  Ann and Lisa drove around behind us on the Sylvan Assault Vehicle picking us up when necessary.  The ladies didn’t plunge into the woods but they did get exposed to the ticks.  It didn’t take long for Lisa to discover that a few ticks had jumped on her, many had jumped on Rowdy and while she still loved the dog, understandably, she didn’t want to pet him anymore.  We had a great time and came back to the cabin to clean up and make dinner.  Rowdy wants to play some more and is puzzled that Lisa won’t have any of it.  He’s all ticked up and there’s really not much to do about it but let the drugs work.  I think Lisa knew this intellectually, but that first day reality hit hard.  She really doesn’t like ticks.  Heck, I get phantom tick crawling sensations on my skin that I can't ignore.

Al has been finding them on him and tossing them in the roaring fire place.  My preferred disposal method is to “bury them at sea” in the potty. 

Ann made a wonderful chili, we sat down to eat and said Grace.  A few minutes later, I look over at Ann.  There is a small, black deer tick, not much bigger than a grain of black pepper and the same color, crawling on her left cheek, just below her eye.  Lisa is sitting between Ann and I.  Without thinking, I blurt out: “Lisa, there’s a tick on Ann’s cheek, grab it!”  You can see her shudder.  This is when I witnessed bravery at its finest.  She set her shoulders, reached over and grabbed the tick off of Ann, pinched between thumb and forefinger, even though she really didn’t want to.  Then, she looks quizzically at me.  I held out my hand, she drops it onto my palm, looking very relieved.  I went back and buried it at sea and we continued dinner.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad/Geoff

*Yeah, I know, the Duke was a racist and he’s been cancelled.  We all stand before God with both our wisdom and our faults displayed in full measure.  I think it’s idiocy to throw out wisdom because there is also evil….