“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” - Dale Carnegie
“The pessimist complains about the wind: the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” - William Arthur Ward
There was an old saying in the family: ‘You can’t get much accomplished when you’re sitting on your fat butt watching TV.’
Over the years that old wise-crack turned into; ‘You’re not going to fill the freezer watching football all day.’
Most of us hunt when we can. Abandon the chore list, divest from the honey-do’s at your own risk. While this abject dereliction of duty is fraught with all manner of peril, sometimes you just have to hunt when you can.
Even if you have to invent new and wild excuses, which no one other than yourself can actually believe. You must persevere and simply drive yourself to hunt when you can. Especially this time of year.
Walking up the dark side of the mountain, it became clear that this particular morning hike and hunt was to be accompanied by winds where you imagined the highest of mid-western, sand hill winds. Winds that were so strong they were spinning tall windmill turbines in Nebraska or Kansas to speeds that dangerously red-lined the so called Eco-friendly machines, and shredded small migrating birds into little puffs of bloody feathers.
The tree that was selected for scaling was swaying like the mast of some ancient tall ship making way, at maximum speed, under heavy and high heaving seas. Leaves clattered left to right one minute, and in short order, pine needles and more leaves blew right to left. This was a cyclonic meteorological morning. The tall tree never stopped swaying as you recite the old mantra out loud; ‘You hunt when you can!’
Nothing erodes confidence in a hunt for deer like swaying in a tree and not being able to hear much of anything other than your inner thoughts. Negative abounding thoughts about how this is going to be one of those mornings where you might have been better off staying in bed, contemplating avoiding the days’ old chore list.
The wind was so intense that even the squirrels and birds were hunkered down. Leaves were flying, limbs were breaking, dead trees were crashing and you couldn’t have heard a stampede of cattle thundering by, much less the tiptoeing of a cautious buck.
You find yourself looking at nearby dead trees and contemplating the statistical data associated with the total number of trees on planet earth. Then, you find yourself trying to mentally calculate the probability of having that one big dead pine, being held up by that one big dead oak drop on your head. Both dead trees, which happen to be next to your swaying tree, worry you so much that you begin to try to determine the odds of these two dead trees suddenly landing in your lap. It’s hard to concentrate on killing deer when you find yourself contemplating your own demise by being crushed by a dead tree.
Confidence drains like the sands in the hour glass in a wind whipped, severely swaying tree.
There’s no really good way to escape the decaying of confidence. Confidence leaches away faster than you can fight it when the wind howls. Draining, leaching confidence, results in a mild state of what some older deer hunters often refer to as hallucinations.
“Did something just move down there? Does that sound like something shuffling through the leaves over there? See that thing over there that looks like a horn? What is that? Did you hear that?”
Well, this kind of dangerous mental crap goes on for quite sometime as the wind howls. I’m never sure exactly how long these rather vivid, but brief hallucinations last, but after a while they too, slowly fade with the total and explicit loss of all confidence. Mentally you just tend to write the whole early morning off as another loss. A big wind driven loss of a zero sum hunt.
While swaying in circles in a tree can be considered somewhat more entertaining than the old chore list, a leisurely scarfed, lazy sausage biscuit and hot coffee, it’s still a rather sad thing when all your confidence drains away while you’re riding a bucking tree. Even the squirrels and birds are once again proven smarter than you!
One knob over, where your hunting partner is riding his tree, suddenly you’re shaken by a single ‘Woomp’ of the muzzleloader!
Out of nowhere, with one single wind whipped, black powdered report, confidence miraculously rebounds. Confidence suddenly climbs your tree like some fourth quarter, last second ‘Hail Marry’ in the SEC Championship.
How can this be? What is going on here? Maybe that knob is somehow less wind whipped? Maybe whatever is being shot at is headed this way? Confidence surges. Wake the $%^& up! All hands on deck! Red Alert! Get back in the game!
After all that fades quickly with the wind, it’s time to get on the technology and get the most probing question of the day answered!
In the old days, you had to just sit and wonder what was going over on that next knob. That took a tremendous mount of patience, or a slow walk back to the jeep. Then came the new technology in the form of something called ‘walkie-talkies’. Back in those days, these little battery eaters, may or may not, have helped answer the most burning question of the morning. You just never knew how, or if, these questionable little pieces of frustrating technology were going to perform.
Thankfully walkie-talkies have been relegated to technical obsolescence with the help of NASA and the modern day space race.
Now you get out the text machine and hope the old spy satellites are hovering overhead and are smiling down on your swaying trees.
It went something like this;
“Send Pic.”
“I may have missed. Didn’t hear a crash.”
“Any blood?”
“Not yet. It’s weird.”
“You need help?”
“If I do I’ll come get you. I’m going to give him some time.”
“I found good blood.”
Now It’s time to be done with the texting. I pull up the phone and it goes something like this;
“How close was the shot?”
“Thirty to forty yards.”
“Tail up or down?”
“Tail down, but he never looked like he was hit. He ran down hill and I lost sight of him.”
“Was he big?”
“I tried not to look at all of his head. He was pretty big.”
“Wait! I hear thrashing in the brush.”
“I’m headed that way.”
The phone is stowed away and the dis-mount from the badly bucking tree is gladly over. Then, I get another text showing the recovered buck, and he’s a dandy, by this mountains’ standards!
Confidence loss is a funny thing in the woods. Confidence quickly recovered is just as funny a thing. It’s also a funny thing how a morning in the windy woods can be considered one of the better mornings you’ve ever had, when you help drag a trophy out for your successful buddy.
Maybe that’s one of the better reasons we do this? Hunt when you can!
“Blow up your TV.
Move to the country.
Build yourself a home.
Plant a little garden.
Eat a lot of peaches.
Try to find Jesus on your own.” - John Prine
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