In recent years my interest has naturally been growing in the ages-old outdoorsmen’s debate: which goes first, the eyes or the legs?
So far, the eyes don’t have it, and the legs clearly do: I now know far too many aging hunters and anglers who have been forced to quit either or both activities because of leg problems, but mercifully not one -- yet -- who has been stopped by failed vision.
There is a tracking snow falling outside my window, but no deer season yet, and I wonder if there will be one for me this year. When I check my outdoors diaries it was a decade ago that I took my last deer, my best white tail ever.
Since then I have spent most of every November in my favorite deer country looking for Horseshoes, the name I gave 40 years ago to the high and wide-racked mule deer bucks I would encounter with such long runs of luck that they have always foiled me.
What I have been doing for 10 years now is “counting coup,” getting close enough to bucks to “shoot” them with a camera, to prove I could have taken them with a rifle, afoot first, and from elevated stands. Eventually I found it impossible to climb into those stands, and getting harder to walk rough ground without falling and get up again when I did. Just three years ago I found it was not just aging, but a mysterious muscle disease.
I shot my last pheasant three years ago while I walked with a cane attached to me with a blaze orange lanyard; this year I blocked ditches for pheasants from the high seat of my new crimson walker.
Fortunately, many years ago I started banking highly productive sites for ground blinds against the day when I might be unable to walk the woods I love. The past three seasons I have been doing my watching, besetting, and “shooting” from what I facetiously call my Mobile Ground Blind, my rig of the day, formerly a Toyota FJ Cruiser, now a Toyota RAV4.
Over the years I have learned from farmer and rancher friends who have taken deer while they were doing chores, that deer aren’t really bothered by familiar vehicles. Watching ”my” deer from my MGB the past three seasons, I see them stare at my rig occasionally, then seem to shrug and get back about their business, as though saying “it’s just the old farmer again:” familiarity breeds content.
Friends have suggested I should look into the special permits available to hunters with disabilities. There is a four-liner in “2012 Alberta Hunting Regulations” indicating that licences are available to the eligible relating to Off Highway Vehicle use and discharging a firearm from an OHV, etc. Because of the confusing definition as to whether or not my RAV4 qualifies as an OHV, I thought I should consult Fact Sheet #12, “The Facts about Hunting from the Mobility-Impaired Hunter” from the Hunting for Tomorrow website.
The fact sheet bluntly states: “An ‘Off-Highway Vehicle’ is any vehicle not designed to be registered for highway use.” That rules out my RAV4 which, ironically, was purchased for the ease with which I could get in and out of it, compared to the much higher FJ Cruiser. I and most of the disabled people I know would find it difficult to impossible to mount and dismount what does qualify as an OHV.
Serious, ethical big game hunters choose to shoot from a rest to ensure precise, quick, merciful kills. As opposed to a standard 4x4 with the sills and mirrors on which to rest a rifle, there are seldom rests on what qualifies as an OVH, thus ensuring unsteady off-hand shots that wound animals. The drafters of the regulations for disabled hunters did not know much about the problems of the physically disabled, or the aims of all hunters.
These special licences do not seem to be a big hit. I can find figures for only five seasons, from 2002 to 2006, during which the OHV permits issued are stuck at a little over 425 and the firearms discharge from an OHV permits issued reached a high of only 32.
I will not be applying to add to those numbers. Either or both permits would not help me take a deer, nor would they contribute to the shooting precision I have always insisted on in my big game hunting.
But that tracking snow continues falling softly, seductively, causing my sap to rise, yet again. Yes, I’ve decided, I’ll be out in my MGB at first light opening morning of yet another season, watching for the magical appearance of the deer and “counting coup” with my camera, as soon as increasing light permits. Actually I can do this at any time of year, without benefit of $74.00 worth of deer licences, even in deer season, and I don’t have to gut a picture, or skin it either.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.