Hunting Season

This is a WARNING!!! This post is not for the squeamish.


Fall means football, baseball (yes, Matt), lacrosse, and.......
Hunting Season.


I become a Hunting Widow as Kevin and now Kalin and Colton go hunting for anything they can shoot. The official start begins on Labor Day when the boys head to Montecello to go Dove hunting. I am not sure why Montecello is the place of choice, but it has been a tradition for a few years.

Next comes the Muzzleloader Deer Hunt.
For the past two years, Kevin has had a landowner tag to hunt by Vernon. This is the deer he shot this year. It is not as big as last year's deer but it has a nice cheater (small horn) on one side that is unique. If his children were not involved in so many sports, Kevin might have hunted longer, but he had to get back.





Kalin also shot a nice 4x5 deer on the muzzleloader.

Here are some quotes from the story he wrote about his hunt:
"This year we decided to hunt the last few days of the hunt because there would be less people around.Tyler, Connor, and Kaulin left a day early to take their trailer up and get it all ready to go. They left their Yamaha Rhino with my family so we could bring it with us because they had their trailer. The night before we were supposed to head up, my dad and I decided to get the Rhinos put on the trailer. We had two Rhinos, ours and Johnson’s, and a four-wheeler. We figured we could put the two Rhinos on our trailer and the four-wheeler in the back of the truck. That is when we ran into a big problem. Two Rhinos will not fit on a 16 foot trailer! So we pushed and we pulled and tried to somehow situate the Rhinos to fit on the trailer, but nothing would work. My dad remembered hearing somewhere that people had been able to fit a Rhino in the bed of their trucks. We decided that this was the only option. This was when we ran into some more problems. One, the only ramps we had were skinny four-wheeler ramps and two, my dad’s truck has almost a 2 foot lift on it. With these small ramps it was going to be quite an incline and have a high possibility of the ramps breaking. After a couple of tries of making sure the Rhino was perfectly straight my dad started to drive it up the ramps into the truck. They started to bend, so he drove back down. He decided to try it one more time and push the ramps to their limit. It worked; our Rhino was now in the back of my dad’s truck. We put the four-wheeler and the other Rhino on the trailer and went inside to get a good night’s rest.
The next morning we woke up and headed up the mountain. We finally arrived after what seemed like days of driving. When we pulled up Connor was the first to see us. As soon as he saw the Rhino in the back of the truck he yelled to his dad that he had to come see this. As soon as Kaulin rounded the corner he laughed so hard he almost cried."
"We woke up later than usual on the last morning and headed up to where we had seen the bucks the day before. Sure enough there they were. Connor and I went the same way we had before while Tyler followed my dad’s path. Kaulin sat across the canyon and watched the bucks. Connor and I passed by a little spike still in the velvet and made our way to where we were supposed to sit and look for the bucks. We saw one two point run below us into the trees but couldn’t see the other two so we decided to get a little closer. Finally we saw one of them running around with a bunch of does. We thought he was a three point. When he got within shooting range I tried to give the gun to Connor and make him take the shot, but he refused. I pulled up and he started to trot through the trees to my right. Finally he paused and I had a half an inch opening in my scope to shoot him. I pulled the trigger and then saw nothing because of all the smoke. I turned around and asked Connor where he had gone? He had no clue at all. We decided to hike up and see if we could find any blood. When we got with 50 yards of the spot where he was stand we saw him. He was lying dead not 10 feet from where he had been standing. We called up Kaulin and Tyler on the radio and they hurried to us. After a long drag and a quick ride back to camp to meet my dad we scored my buck. He was an OK 5x4 with a cheater on his left side and scored around 122. On his right ear it looked like he had a bullet hole through it. As soon as my dad saw the hole he started claiming that this buck had been the buck he shot at and missed the day before. It had been a successful deer hunt with many ups and downs."

Then there is the elk hunts, (which we missed this year due to Lacrosse and Football), the pheasant hunt, and the duck hunt. The duck hunt goes on continually until January or February. So on any given day, you can find Kalin and his friends at various bodies of water trying to find ducks. And Colton and his friends can be found wherever their parents will take them. So far this season, we have not had too many ducks brought home. Thank goodness.

But you cannot forget the varmint hunting such as: potguts, coyotes, rabbits and squirrels

If anybody wants some deer jerky, come on over and we will share. It is the ONLY thing to do with deer meat, I think.