Along comes the end of Black Hills deer season and it is time for hunting season to be winding down. I grew up in a canyon out west of Rapid City and Black Hills Deer Season was what I lived for.
As a youngster, I did go with Dad on an opening day pheasant hunt and as a teenager my buddy with a truck and I would do some jump shooting for ducks and a couple of outings for prairie grouse, but deer season was the reason for living. Fall turkey did get us out in the woods but the hunt was just an excuse to scout our favorite spots for deer.
In the social circle where my family survived, everyone hunted deer. Some did the “walk and stalk,” some did “stump sitting,” and still others did “drive and blocks.” My Dad was more of a stump-sitter, which demanded far more patience than I had (have now, too) so I would eventually start moving. Often this is referred to as “still hunting”. In my case, “Still” would be an exaggeration. But, I actually did learn some stealth and shot a few deer doing this kind of walk and stalk hunting. Inevitably, though, especially in the early days, I pushed a lot of deer over to the Old Man. I suppose that might be why he quit counseling me about “learning to develop the patience to let the deer come to you.” With Dad stump sitting and me not-so-still hunting, we never faced a winter without venison on the meat pole.
My dear friend, “Fang” (a nickname I gave him to help him get over his self consciousness about the errant direction of his canine teeth until the orthodontist got hold of him) read about the “Minnesota Walk” in a magazine when we were teenagers and so we tried it with some good success. The way it is done is a team of two hunters take turns alternating sitting and walking on parallel paths through the woods.
Fang shot the best buck of his career, a beautiful, symmetrical, 6X6 whitetail doing this technique. I did not happen to be his partner that day but nevertheless it is testimony to the method. Fang, the ungrateful lout that he is for me hanging that name on him, has all kinds of excuses about how if I had been with him that day, he would not have seen a thing.
But I digress. So, after living all year for Deer Season, and Deer Season now being officially over (this is before I took up archery deer hunting) the winter gloomies would set in. It would be a few weeks yet before the ice would be safe enough on Hills Lakes for Charley to be willing to venture out. What to do?
My Dad had gotten me shooting a longbow when I was 6 or 7 so hunting December cottontails became a way to escape the gloomies. My parents fed the things in the back yard in little pans on the ground but the Homestead Rule was that I was not to harvest game within two hundred yards of the house. Well, heck, with a bottomless pit of cracked corn and the little brush piles the Old Man carefully assembled every fall, why would Bugs venture 200 yards from our house?
I am not the Lord’s gift to the world of intellect, but it did not take long to figure out that nobody in the house could hear the twang of my bowstring well enough to know if I was 200 yards from the house or, maybe, uh… a mere 150, or 50, maybe… 35 if it was on the side of the house where the windows did not present a clear view of the brush pile. At any rate, a little bunny hunting went a long way to help ease me into the grip of winter, especially before I gained my mobility and took up the serious pubescent indoor pursuit of 2-legged “dears”.
The short days and long shadows of the late fall and winter still give me some difficulties. Since leaving the Canyon of my Youth, I have only been out after the wee cottontail bunnies a few times with archery tools. They were always good times, and my success ratio has much improved with the “modern” equipment of my later years.
Zwickey JUDO points are deadly and work good at controlling loosing arrows, even in some snow cover. With practice, a compound bow can be deadly on sitting cottontails, but I prefer to use my old Damon Howatt Hunter recurve and instinct shoot at them. I always managed to blunder into at least one on any given outing. Cottontails cooked up on a barbecue using the “indirect heat” method are great. Makes me wonder why I have not done this in 10 years, especially with my backyard population in need of thinning.
I have a really good friend who grew up on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Second only to deer hunting, they are addicts of hunting snow-shoe hares. I asked him about how it works.
Basically, you hunt on snow-shoes (they get over 200 inches of annual snowfall in a larger part of the “U.P.”) usually with a shotgun and the real enthusiasts hunt with a pack of Beagles. You take the dogs to your favorite patch of woods and you and your Dad and Uncles and cousins string out around and through said woods far enough separated so as not to get anyone shot. Then, you loose the Beagles and they head off to do the hard work.
Apparently, as my pal tells it, snow-shoes have a tendency to run in large looping circles when hotly pursued so if you are in an area with snow-shoe hares and lots of well worn trails, sooner or later the quarry will be buzzing by. Whereupon you swing and take your shot at the running little buggers. After that, I don’t know what is done with the rabbits - I think the hunters routinely eat them but I guess I never did ask him.
In the early to mid-Sixties I did get in on a lot of jackrabbit hunting come winter. There was a meager market for the animals for fur and with a carcass selling for 35 cents and a box of 22 shells selling for 75 cents, there was money to be made. Well, not counting the gas to drive out to the prairie from our house in the Hills, recreational beverages and miscellaneous expenditures like extensive car repairs.
One of my rabbit hunting associates had an old car with an acetylene torched through the roof above where the back seat was once installed. This made an excellent porthole from which to shoot at jackrabbits out of the moving vehicle in hot pursuit. This was considered both a day and night sport as this chap and a number of others in the area equipped these chase vehicles with spotlights.
Looking back, I am sure this must have been illegal, but it was F-U-N…not that I personally ever participated in any such unsportsmanlike activity. Although HAD I done so, I would have to blame my Dad for my genetic disposition toward such antics.
It seems that Dad and one of his running buddies back in the 20’s bought an “Eaglerock” biplane that had been crashed by some Barnstormer and had the body and engine and tail pieces freighted up to Fort Pierre where they went to work on it. They assembled body and tail section without wings and fitted it out with skis and used it to chase coyotes on the hardpan flats out in the West River. One would sit in the front cockpit and pilot the Deathtrap, and the other would hang out the 2nd cockpit hole with Dad’s 1897 Winchester 12 gauge and wreak havoc on the Wiley coyotes of West River Dakota.
I recall a picture (which unfortunately was lost in a house fire back in 1988) showing my Dad, his pal, the plane and 37 coyotes proudly draped on the fuselage. Great thrill, I am sure, that came to an abrupt end one bitter winter day when they “flew” it off into a deep ravine and the Rock Eagle stopped abruptly on the opposite bank while its contents went flying and rolling another 50-60 yards.
Put it this way, there was never a shortage of balsa wood, and I mean BIG pieces of it, around the house when my brothers and I were growing up and needed some of it for various model boat, car or airplane projects.
Compared to the thrill of that screaming ride, going out and sitting under a bush blowing a predator call with my pal Sagebrush is pretty tame. I think if I could turn back the hands of time and share one experience with my Pa, it would be spending an afternoon on the hardpan flats. Preferably not the day they flew it headlong into the ravine, however.