Grouse season 2017.
The Lab pup is starting to get the hang of it.
Birds are few and far between right now due to some unseasonably warm weather.
The routine is to hunt a familiar place where we know birds have been found before and then in the afternoon explore a little bit going down new roads, walking trails and promising patches of woods.
The other day was a good day, what day huntin’ isn’t? We had followed the routine and had four sporadic flushes in the morning.
So it was on to a new lane in the afternoon.
On the drive up to the woods I was talking to God about Teddy Roosevelt, how it’s hard to find a pure adventure any more now-a- days and how I would like to have one some time.
Careful what ya wish for.
We had covered quite a bit of ground in the morning and I had noticed, so did Gibson the Australian Shepherd, all the bear scat piles along all the paths we were on.
He likes to drop a shoulder and roll in the piles, don’t know why, but he does.
It was very evident that a bear was in the vicinity and was nearby as indicated by the age of the sign it was leaving in the woods.
I like to hike a ways into the woods and then hunt my way out, and the afternoon road was on the way out.
We entered what I have named, ‘Bear Lane’, and started a leisurely walk down it, just to get the lay of the land.
We were not very far in when the bear sign appeared again and I commented to myself, “that’s a lot of activity, I wonder where the bear hunters are?”
As we ventured further down the lane we ran into a wet and muddy, rutted up stretch going for about twenty feet. Muddy enough for the Lab pup to thoroughly enjoy herself. As she always does.
As we neared the ten foot mark in the muddy stretch, I could see a bear track in the mud on the center rut, clear as a bell and as I went for my phone camera the puppy happily tromped through it and messed it all up.
“Oh well.”
I looked ahead and around as that track was very, very fresh and moving forward and quartering across the trail ahead of us.
I checked my back trail for a little bit, just to be sure, and as I turned back to continue on my dog Gibson was acting a bit funny and I told him, “Yea, I know, he’s in there. Don’t be dumb.”
I wasn’t really hunting that lane hard, I just wanted to see where it went.
We came to a small rise in the road and just ahead on the trail the lane dipped down and the grass had grown up real tall and the tag alders and raspberries were leaning over the trail creating a small choke point in the lane that you could not see around.
I stopped.
That is when the feeling hit me.
I could feel that bear some where out there and the woods was, “vairywe, vairywe, quiet.”
No birds, chipmunks, blue jays, nothin’.
I kept looking into that choke point and a small hill just before it off to the right of it and said, “If I was a bear that’s where I’d be waiting.”
So I chose the better part of valor and retired from the field for the day. Worried mostly for my dog’s and that was as close to ‘adventure’ as I was willing to get.
Although I have been closer to a bear before, a couple times, but those are different stories and this feeling was different.
The next weekend in the morning we heard the bear hounds running. It is a very cool sound but I get nervous for my dogs if the chase would get too close.
I’ve heard them there before in that area and in the past the chase wound around in a very large circle, out and away from where I was bird hunting.
We were on a trail about a mile past ‘Bear Lane’ and I heard the dogs making their loop down along a lake in the area and figured they were heading in their circle. We were not very far in and had seen a grouse go into the lane we were on but I heard the dogs make an abrupt turn, like a ‘J’ hook in the woods which would bring them right in front of us very shortly.
You never know how a bear or the hounds will react to you so I leashed my dogs, turned around and headed out.
The hound dogs were hot on his trail and the chase was heading directly for the section of woods that ‘Bear Lane’ wound it’s way into.
I heard from another grouse hunter that the bear hunters had treed the bear very near ‘Bear Lane’ and a young hunter in their group, all of twelve years old, had a bear tag. After having treed the bear and getting a good look at him the young hunter made the decision not to shoot as the bear was on the small side.
I didn’t mind other times I ran into bears but I was alone then.
I have a tendency to be very brave when I’m by myself and no one is around to see, but when I’m with another person or worrying about my hunting dogs I seem to want to protect them, even if I end up looking like a coward.
What was it, that the Great and powerful Oz, told the cowardly lion about running away?????????
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