It’s great being an outdoor Writer…..until a week into deer season and you still don’t have your buck tag punched!
What do I do? Ride around and find one that has been hit and have the game warden let me tag it?
It’d be hard to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes if in the picture it had the grill off of a Mazda stuck permanently on his rack.
Or a Toyota emblem imprinted on his side where he’d gotten freight trained by a Toyota Tacoma pick-up.
Or maybe I could find someone else in the woods that just shot a deer and see if they’d let me pose with their buck for a picture.
Despite not filling an elk or deer tag as of yet, it was great to get up camping and hiking in God’s great outdoors.
But it’d be my luck that it’d be the new publisher at one of my publications that I hadn’t met yet and he’d see my article and throw the flag and expose me.
Then no one would ever want to sponsor me again. I’d be a liability. I’d be disgraced. Doomed.
None of my grandkids are old enough yet to take hunting, so I can’t say that I was mentoring them and wail on all of the opportunities that they had squandered.
Maybe I could go on the internet and buy an old mount and say it was my buck.
But everyone knows that the average wait time to get a mount back from the taxidermist is somewhere around 32 years. So that story wouldn’t hold water.
Oh, I could blame my daughter! She just had a little girl last week. I could say that I hadn’t gotten to get out yet because I’ve been helping her.
You know, cooking meals and delivering them, babysitting while she goes out and gets pedicures etc. etc. to give her a break. The only problem, as I was headed down today,
I saw my buddy Shawn Lee and all of his crew as they were headed up. I can promise you that his kids and grandkids would smaster Facebook with comments about how I was lying. They had nonchalantly peered over into the bed of my pickup and commented on how it was empty 8-days into the season.
Oh, what if I tell everyone that I’m biting my lip and being the good little husband and hanging around the house helping the little wifey?
No, that wouldn’t fly. All she’d want me to help with is taking care of her beloved Lhasa Apso puppies. Oh no! That’d be the kiss of death if it ever got out that I was babysitting Lhasa Apso’s? That would totally kill my Mountain Man image that I need to project to be a cutting-edge outdoor Writer.
Hmmm, maybe I could say that I just got called into work for a 30 straight day crisis and couldn’t get loose to get back up deer hunting.
That’s it! No, wait. I just quit my consulting business and am full-time writing again. I guess that I can’t blame my old cruel, oppressive boss man.
I’m getting down to the wire. I’m running out of options. Ok, ok, think back to when you were having your first kid. What’d they teach me in Lamaze? Gee, that’s been 34 years ago. What was it? Oh yeah, look at your focal point. Breathe in a bag. Get control Junior.
Ok, I’ve got it. I hate wolves. They’ve decimated the elk, deer and moose herds in Idaho but like in all wars, suddenly I have to draw up a truce with my old enemies and us fight this common enemy together. That’s it.
I’ll use the wolves. They’re better hunters than me anyway. Plus, they go on binge killings and don’t eat half of the animals they kill anyway.
That’s it! Whew, I’m borderline genius. I’ll go find one of the 5,000,000 packs of ravenous wolves roaming the mountains and follow them. When they make a kill, I’ll run in and take it. So, what if it is a spike?
I don’t want to be mean and insensitive but right now it is every man for himself.
I’ve got a cold, calculated plan. So, what if the wolves just caught and killed a spike buck? I see a lot of not so pretty girls go into the mall and come out with what is advertised as a “Photo Enhanced Shot” and come out with photos looking like a beauty queen.
Surely if they can tweak things to elevate some of these girls to the beauty queen status, then they can make my wolf stolen spike look like the “King of the Forest”.
Whew! My career as an outdoor Writer that momentarily looked like it was on the brink is back in the saddle. Thanks to my good buddies, the wolves.
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.