Hunting Walk II


Hunting Walk II
By Allan Olson
For the second weekend in a row, I braved the elements and headed out hunting. Not that it paid off for me, but it was still an interesting weekend.

Also for the second year straight weekend, I ventured on a hunting walk with Abigail. This time, I added Alivia to the mix. Two girls, one hunting walk, one dad – I was outnumbered.
The questions and conversation were endless from the get-go – especially from Abigail.
“Where we going?”
“Can I go back now?”
“I’m cold.”
“I’m scared.”
The list went on. I asked her to be quiet. That lasted for a few steps, then she would say something else, and the odds of me seeing a deer went down even further.
Alivia, while not her usual chatterbox-self, still added her own conversation to the mix. At least she would whisper (loudly) her questions or comments.
Then we throw in the difficulty of trying to walk slowly with two girls who kept wanting to walk in front of me. It was an interesting venture. The route I had planned when I left the house was quickly altered to a much shorter one.
The course of the trip was virtually question upon question, but it was still a fun little walk. The girls were bundled up like Eskimos and quickly shed their gloves so they could pick up some treasures along the way.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I took Marcus with me for a walk the next day. Before we left, I informed him (like I did with the girls) that he needed to be quiet when we were walking so we don’t scare the deer away.
I let him know that he needed to stay close (he stepped on my heels a few times), and he needed to be quiet (the only way I knew he was behind me was due to the whisper of his snowpants legs rubbing together). His only complaint was that he was tired and it was too long of a walk, (we took the long route) like I had planned the previous day.
During the course of the walk, I even tested him: “Which way do you go back to the house?’ I asked. “Follow the path,” he replied. Okay, that was the correct and very logical answer. “Which way do you go when you get to the road?” He pointed in the general direction of my parents’ house. Okay, he knew his way back.
The route I had chosen took us in a complete loop, and when we came back to the gravel road that led to my folks, he had to think for a few seconds to figure out which way he was supposed to go to get back to the warm house.
That evening, I brought Nikolai out with me to the deer stand for the evening post. He was eager to go. I delayed him as much as possible, and still we ended up on the stand about 40 minutes sooner than I had planned.
I made sure that he would be prepared for the evening by grabbing some candy and cookies for the stand. Little did I know that he had prepared, too, bringing a couple bags of chocolate candy out for himself as well.
It only took a few minutes before he was munching down his candy. Not long after that he started getting antsy in the stand. “How much longer?” was a question asked many times, even though I informed him I wouldn’t be leaving the stand until dark. With only an hour left in the stand, I sent him in. He was cold and bored, and it didn’t appear that I was going to be doing any shooting anyway. As to what happened to the remaining candy between the deer stand and the house, I’m not sure. It’s possible that he ate it all “to stay warm.”
As for me, the only thing I accomplished in my weekend of hunting was narrowly getting run over, and I don’t mean by a car.
For the first time in nearly 20 years of hunting, I and my older brother were nearly bowled over by a deer, running from the woods, across the road, to the next patch of woods, after dark. We were heading back to the house, and the noise coming from the woods caused us to stop, thankfully, as a couple steps further and we would have returned home battered and bruised instead of just sore and tired.
Hopefully, things will go better for me this final weekend of hunting, if I can get the deer to cooperate with me.
Thanks for reading, and remember to watch out for those school buses. As always, feel free to drop us a line and/or a photo with those prized trophy deer, and have a great week. For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com

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