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Opening day addiction

Opening days are addictive and I just have to get out, even if only to see what is going on.
RichardsHarleyMugMay23jer
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Opening days are addictive and I just have to get out, even if only to see what is going on.

This year’s November 1st deer opener was quiet, judging from reader reports from various parts of the province and my own observations south of Rocky Mountain House.

At the Stump Ranch cabin on Halloween, Robert Short recalled how the opening morning last year had been so unquiet for him that he had cashed two of his tags, one a fryer white tail buck and one on a supplemental white tail doe, thus virtually relegating himself to guiding for the rest of the season.

“. . . and relegated the rest of us to hearing you whine about your tagony,” I said. “Tomorrow morning you don’t shoot unless it’s a big buck.”

This year I don’t shoot, period; I have no mule deer tag and just watch white tails.

There was at least the encouragement of the year’s first skiff of snow as I left the Stump Ranch cabin in the pre-dawn dark. But as the rising sun lit the alfalfa field I was watching, it revealed there were no deer feeding out there.

As I watched from the same spot until dark the evening before, one white tail doe and her fawn splashed across the creek and jumped the fence into the field, then fled in a panic immediately they saw my new rig. Obviously there had been insufficient time for “my” critters to learn that Farmer Bob in his all-black MGB (mobile ground blind) is no more of a threat than he was in his former, bigger, black model with the white top.

By 8:30 opening morning not one shot had sounded, so I decided to do some travelling to take attendance, maybe even talk to some hunters. The world’s greatest road hunting is along a trail that runs through a wilderness of public land. Usually you have to take a ticket to get in line, but long after sun-up on opening morning of the season, the skiff of snow revealed that mine was the first and only rig to have travelled the trail.

But one hunter had trudged along the road for a couple of miles, a new, retro-take on road hunting. Not all nimrods realize that a moving, upright human will panic the critters, while a slowly moving vehicle often seems to “soothe them,” particularly if it’s a diesel just ticking over, as a Montana outfitter once confided to me.

By 10:30 I was basking in bright sunshine that had melted the scant snow and waiting for Robert Short to show up to help me install a trail camera, when the cellphone sang. Robert, faint and far off, told me he would not be able to make it because he was into a long, hard drag to bring in a big white tail buck, and was taking some time out to rest before getting back to it.

I remembered my longest and worst ever drag on just such a day, but on Nov. 11th several years ago. This was a heavy mule deer buck far back in the pine ridges. I stretched out my winch cable along a ridge top trail from my Jeep out on the sand hills road, plus every hank of rope, extra cable, wire, dental floss, you name it, to the point where I would drag the deer by might, main and manual come-along, from which point I could then winch him in to the rig.

Good plan, but when we got there, for the first time ever, a winch failed me.

Immediately I called Robert back and offered the only help I can these days, by suggesting he come over and borrow the PCV barrel sled my friend Don Hayden had given me several years ago and which, so far, has lightened several deer drags, all but one over dry ground and grass. The sled practically pulls itself on snow, but also slides well on grass, stubble, even bare ground.

The first use of the sled had been to drag Don Hayden’s white tail buck up to the hayfield gate on grass, the next to make the same drag on snow of Don’s best white tail buck in 50 years of hunting them.

Robert reported two days later that the sled doubled the distance he could drag the bare buck without resting. Getting the big body and rack under fences was a problem, as was trying to slide his burden along a low two plank bridge over a creek. Fortunately the deer fell off on the upstream side. Then it was up to the meat pole and a skinning job.

I’ll have a look at the rack up at Robert’s cabin when Don Hayden and I go there for dinner in a day or two, but Robert, from actual viewing, not to mention dragging, and I, from a couple of emailed pictures, both suspect this is Robert’s best-ever buck. This sled is doing well.

Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.