Sneaking
out of the house was nearly impossible. Since the start of bird season the dogs
never took their eyes off me, particularly Maggie our youngster. Earlier in the
day, I had snuck my deer rifle out and tucked it in a corner of the entry.
Leaving sad faces behind, I walked out of the house in my deer hunting garb.
An
inch of snow covered the ground and no wind moved the air. An overcast sky
promised daylight fading early. The snow had fallen a couple of days before,
but constant cold temperatures had kept it from melting.
I
picked a course away from the house where the dogs could not see me entering
the woods with a gun. If they had my wife would have been forced to listen to a
sorrowful chorus.
Just
beyond the edge of the lawn, tracks showed where a bobcat had walked up through
the softwood trees and sat. Was it there in daylight? Did the cat know there
were dogs around? From its perch it looked up the hill at the house and our
shop.
An
old skid road lead down to the edge of the soggy marsh. The damp snow-covered
ground muffled my footsteps and I took care not brush against dead twigs. The
coyotes keep a worn path parallel with the wetlands, and I followed it west.
Judging from the tracks, only a few had passed by since the snow fell. Snowshoe
hare tracks were everywhere and I wondered how they survived. Their lives had
to be constant terror with all the coyotes in the neighborhood.
A
blown-down fir tree forced a course change. Stepping from hummock to hummock, I
crossed wet ground beneath firs and cedars.
Movement…I
froze. A blue jay landed on a low branch, then flashed away again.
Where
the ground grew firmer, I followed the stream beneath a canopy of tall softwood
trees. The ground there is predominately flat and slow streams meander through
from the north, joining the larger stream further west. Beyond where I could
see, the hill goes up through birches and maples, with patches of evergreens
breaking up the forest. Craggy, near vertical, ledges break up the slope,
making ascent or descent impossible in places. To the south, on the other side
of the stream, a smaller steep hill climbs upward through mixed woods. Some of that
hill is so steep that deer detour around it.
I
hope to find tracks ahead where the deer funnel between the steep slope and an
open field beyond. Two years ago there were so many tracks it looked like a
highway. The previous fall our trail cam caught deer there too.
A
twig snaps off to my right and I freeze. Up in a tree a squirrel chatters. I
wait and listen, watching for movement. A slow step to my right puts a fir tree
in front of me, a possible shooting rest if I needed one. The squirrel was very persistent,
but finally stops. I wait another fifteen minutes, then continue.
Tracks
show where a bobcat has climbed up on a stump and sat. Could it be the same one
that visited the house? Tiny tracks that look like lace ribbon weave across the
snow. Coyote tracks are everywhere.
I
reach the open field without seeing a single deer track. Discouraged, I turn
northward to head back along the north side of the valley, following the edge where the land starts to climb. That course
would make a giant circle around our home.
One giant white pine clings atop a craggy
boulder the size of a house and I wonder how it stays. A spruce holds on similarly. Holes in the mammouth rocks formed gloomy shadows.
The dark
craggy vertical ledges breakup the slope and I know deer cannot cross them. Just
beyond a giant white cedar, a stream tumbles down from above, creating a series
of roaring waterfalls. When I stop to watch a grouse explodes from the top of a
fir tree. Where was he when I had my bird gun?
Another
skid road takes me up through skinny young maples. A lone coyote had taken the
same path. Off to the left an enormous shattered fir tree lays on the ground,
broken by a recent wind. Either side of the whippy maples the forest looks
eerily dark beneath dense fir trees.
Deer
tracks.
Big
ones. They go down the slope into softwood trees not far from our home. How old
are they? The edges looked sharp and no snow was in the imprints. The deer must
have crossed the valley. How I could have missed them? I must have crossed them
on the other side.
Darkness
and the end of shooting time was only a half hour away. I waited in the shadows
of the softwoods, timing fifteen minutes on my watch, then slipped uphill to a
woods road that would take me back to our field.
Coyote
tracks littered that road and yellow snow showed where they had marked. The
neighborhood seemed to be overrun with those hoodlums. Next to a rotten stump,
bobcat tracks went in under the low branches of a fir tree to sit in the
shelter of its branches.
It
was time to call it a day.
At
three in the morning I woke, realizing that the reason I hadn’t seen the deer
tracks anywhere else on my circular hunt was because the deer hadn’t crossed to
the other side of my circle. Could that snapping twig and chattering squirrel
been caused by that deer?
Yesterday
the ravens were circling a cluster of softwoods at the edge to our snow-buried
lawn. Late in afternoon I put on snowshoes to investigate. Ravens and crows
protested and a coyote ran off as I approached. Little remained of what had
been a healthy deer, a doe in her prime. She lay less than two hundred feet
from our home. She would produce no fawn this year.
