Things I am looking for, but not limited to.

•    Gear: Clothes, utility tools, ATV’s…
•    Favorite weapons: guns, bows, sticks, stones…
•    Best Duck Blind or Hide…
•    You, family or friends dressed for the hunt…
•    Where you hunt

All I need is a digital picture in any PC compatible format and a description of the picture.  You can make the description as long or short as you would like.  If there is a story behind the picture we would love to hear about it.

Send Pictures to:

Todd Krater
U.S. Hunting Today
Managing Editor
todd@ushuntingtoday.com

Note: If you want a picture posted and do not have a digital copy I would be willing to scan it for you.  Please contact me for details.

US Hunting Today reserves the right to refuse any picture for any reason as well as edit it where appropriate.

By Blaine Cardilli

Plans for making this particular hunting trip had been on the table for three months and although we knew from the website what the basic lodge was going to look like, nothing could have prepared us for what we actually saw when we pulled up. Stepping from the truck, dusty from many miles up long and winding dirt roads, we rounded the front corner of Duplissey Lodge where we were graciously met by Steve and Dan Barbour, our hosts and the owners of Northwoods Outdoor Adventures. My partner, Orrin Parker, and I were on a working hunt for a national outdoor tv show at the time, and were anxious to see what Steve and Dan had to offer us in the way of turkeys.

After shaking hands and accepting a cold drink, we stepped out onto the lodges’ front deck and were taken completely aback by the majestic spring beauty of the Green Mountains of north central Vermont. We had driven up through the foothills but now found ourselves staring at the awesome ridges squarely in the face some 2,200 feet above sea level. I must have murmured something because Steve chuckled and said, “We get that a lot here”.

It was true, no photograph or video could ever do justice to what we found ourselves in the midst of. The view was reminiscent of a big mid-western ranch, as the meadows before us rolled lazily down, some 400+ yards, to a lush, grassy plateau where a broad but quiet beaver pond rested, right at the base of Duplissey Ridge. The mountains picked up from there and rose solidly into a crystal blue sky, the foliage just beginning to burst out in bright green and white-flowering hues. From the front porch we could see the transition zone on the ridge as the red pines, thick as wall to wall carpeting, contrasted sharply at the half-way point, into a wide open expanse of hardwoods. Steve even claimed that those higher elevations housed hundreds of wild apple trees as well.

After unpacking and taking a short rest, we met our guides on the porch and chatted about the upcoming hunt and what we could expect. Steve and Dan took turns explaining in unison the differences and complexities of hunting high up in the mountains as opposed to hunting in the lower regions of the state. Here, for example, we would discover that the oxygen levels were different this high up and that walking even the shortest distances uphill might tire us more than usual.

An Abundance of Game, Guides & Great Food!

As to game species in the region, we were told there was an abundance of whitetail deer, moose and bear, as well as turkeys, ruffed grouse, woodcock, and even ducks and geese. The deer, we were told, were of good age and size in the mountains, as were the bear and moose, since the land was extremely remote and privately owned. The property, covering some 8,000 total acres over four separate parcels, boasts the Duplissey Lodge. It can comfortably sleep 14 to 16 people. “Judy’s Kitchen”, which is a separate facility where all meals are prepared for the guests, two remote log cabins, and two “yurts”, make up the remainder of the facilities. The “yurts” are 20-foot round, insulated, canvas-style mountain “tents”, for lack of a better comparison. All yurts are completely outfitted with propane cook stoves, wood stove heat, and multiple bunks, as well as outhouses, while the remote cabins and lodge have all the modern conveniences except television and phones. The cabins are reachable by pick-up but the yurts can only be accessed by means of 4-wheel drive vehicles or horses.

Steve and Dan are the main operators of the lodge but they also have several guides available to help get hunters on game. And the packages they are offering as a newly opening service to the public are downright affordable, almost to the point of being ridiculous for the level of one-on-one service they provide for their clientèle. We were definitely taken care of on our stay with them. In fact, they even offer deals on hunts that are priced to include more than one year, (at a discounted rate), if you wish to reserve packages ahead.

Judy, Steve’s wife, takes care of all meals and let me tell you, everything is made from scratch and there’s no fear of ever going hungry during your stay. The first evening before our hunt, she prepared her own recipe for baked stuffed chicken, seasoned with secret ingredients and topped off with a creamy layer of cheese melted over the breast meat. Side dishes of vegetables, a green bean salad and rolls were more than enough for us but Dan kept insisting we eat more. When we were finally done and bursting at the seams, he brought out a freshly made strawberry shortcake, lathered up with a rich whipped real dairy topping. Hunters today crave an experience that also includes a great spread of vittles and at Northwoods, Judy offers it.

An Exciting, Fast Paced Turkey Hunt

After settling in and getting to know our hosts, we headed out about 3:30 pm to set up our ground blind in an area Steve and Dan had already scouted on a remote part of the property. The turkeys had been roosting on a wooded shelf just below a grown-over apple orchard, some 100-120 yards below a flat, and both guides felt sure the birds could be coaxed up to where we were set up – that was our plan for the morning.

Though the species we were hunting were Eastern’s, Steve told us these “mountain birds” were a bit different in several respects than what we might be used to. For instance, many might be slightly less stocky than the birds we were used to in Maine, due to a difference in food sources, climate, and geographical terrain. Our birds were basically living on flat ground and eating well from the many agricultural food sources found in such an extensively farmed community, while theirs were struggling to survive brutal mountain winters, steep, hilly terrain, and a much wilder food base. Jakes would be abundant but we were assured we would see many mature gobblers in our travels as well, (20 lbs and up), if we were willing to spend some time afield.

3:00 am came quickly as I heard the stirrings of our hosts as they entered the lodge to rouse us. Orrin and I got up, got dressed, and met them in the kitchen where we sorted out the morning plan over cold orange juice and hot coffee. It took about 20 minutes to drive to one of the remote cabins but once there, Dan and Steve settled in, where they planned to listen for any gobbling that might rise up from the valleys and ridges below while we hunted about 200 yards away.

Unfortunately, as is the case with hunting turkeys from time to time, the birds hadn’t read the script and as we unzipped the blind to climb inside at a dark 4:15 am, the noise caused two gobblers to sound off not 30 yards behind and above us, as they spooked from the roost. We managed to remain there for two hours anyway, calling to two separate groups, but none came in so we headed back to the cabin. While sipping a quick cup of coffee, Steve said he had pinpointed a group of birds in the neighboring valley and Dan had himself watched a huge solitary tom walking an open ridge some 600+ yards away, so we decide to pack up and run-and-gun for awhile, with Steve leading the way.

It took time to go down one side of the mountain and climb the opposite ridge but once there we stopped and I did some locating. We eventually got two separate bird groups gobbling but none would move so we decided to sneak in between them and try calling. It was working until we were surprised by a single tom not 50 yards from us, over a knoll to our right. His gobble was in response to one of my calls and we were left with mere seconds to dive into the only clump of small spruce available, to avoid being seen. We were barely inside when he broke the hill and began gobbling non-stop, clearly expecting to see a hen that wasn’t there. Poor Steve was hunched up against bristling, spiny branches trying not to move while Orrin was on bended knee with no way to turn and raise his gun. I, on the other hand, had dropped to my knees and was trying to get the tom on film through a small opening.

The seconds turned to minutes as the big bird, (Steve later guessed him to be 21-22 lbs with a 9″+ beard), lingered not 15 yards from us, but he was too close for Orrin to move on and when he finally got a shot opportunity, I had to say no because of a poor camera angle, much to his disgust. Old Tom ended up suspecting something and busted us, flying straight off the ridge. After that encounter we regrouped and started stalking the first bunch we had heard.

Two Hunts, Two Doubles!

Over the next hour and a half and several miles of walking and climbing, we got within 125 yards of a group of birds feeding at the bottom of a wooded swamp. Neither of us could see the other, and though they gobbled at my calls they appeared not to be coming, so we set up and decided to get really aggressive on the slate. After another 20 minutes they began climbing the ridge, but as they approached, they veered left, altering our set up drastically, and unknown to us at the time.

At one point I lost track of them, so I set the camera down and grabbed the slate again. Orrin and I were side by side, and since they had somehow skirted around us, we were left in the wide open with absolutely no cover between us and them at all. All we had was our backs against a very large downed tree and when I made one more attempt to call and locate them, they appeared instantly, heads popping up at 45 yards all at once. They surveyed the open woods ahead of them but thanks to our new Realtree AP shirts and mismatched hardwood bottoms, (to break up our forms better), they didn’t see a thing. I managed to get the camera slowly back up and once they broke 30 yards I told Orrin to try and line up two heads. He did, and with one loud shot, two out four birds hit the ground in a classic double take-down.

They had worked us extremely hard and this was a special hunt for us for several reasons. Orrin had just taken his first turkey with a shotgun, (he had only bow hunted turkeys up to that point), it was his first on-camera appearance, and it was a classic double, caught on video! All of us were elated and spent the rest of the morning breasting and prepping the birds for the trip home. When we got back to the remote cabin, we enjoyed a break, thanks to Steve and Dan’s foresight in bringing along a large carafe of hot coffee and some of Judy’s famous blueberry muffins and home made cinnamon rolls. After much congratulating, we made the transfer of camera and gun and it was my turn to focus on getting a bird.

The next morning we tried the blind again. Once daylight broke and legal shooting light hit, I grabbed the box call for some soft raspy calling but got nada. Several more attempts produced nothing, so I got aggressive and a bit louder. Instantly, three distinct gobbles erupted not 75 yards below and behind us and we heard them fly down. It didn’t take long before they were five steps from the blind but they got cautious and crossed the tote road, heading to the other side of the orchard. Another call from me got their attention and they spotted the decoys and headed right in.

I could hear Orrin’s breath coming quicker as he waited for them to come into frame. Three big birds came in and gobbled so well, and put on such a great show for the cameras I got ready quickly. When they reached 15 yards he said I could shoot, so I raised and fired, taking the center one. He dropped like a rock and the other two jumped and started to run but one hesitated at 30 yards and I instantly decided to take him, too, even though it was a jake. I had never taken a double either and since Vermont allows two birds and Maine doesn’t, now was my time, especially since this was the last morning of the hunt.

The shot echoed throughout the ridge and as the smoke cleared, I had two birds down and we were tagged out after only two mornings and a total of five hours hunting. Steve and Dan couldn’t have been more pleased. Both Orrin and I would have loved to have waited for all mature birds, (Northwoods definitely has them), but our schedule that particular weekend was just too constricted to fully enjoy such a demanding hunt. Not to worry, though. We plan to return annually for both turkeys and deer.

Gracious Hosts

If you want to try some really remote hunting in an absolutely gorgeous mountain setting, you have to give Dan and Steve a call at Northwoods Outdoor Adventures. They’re located in Washington, near the town of West Topsham, Vermont, and their professionalism and dedication to the client is second to none. From the moment you arrive they make sure you want for nothing and will give you an incredible hunting experience to remember. Steve took me on a tour through some of the mountain trails and showed me moose hookings and buck rubs from last season, fresh bear tracks from that very day, as well as tree stands, ladder stands and ground blinds all set up for deer, moose, coyote and bear, along the open ridges and in the swamps.

And when it comes to bear, Steve is the man to put you on the big boys. Vermont does not allow baiting so the hunt is much harder but much more rewarding also, since you have to sit on stand or spot and stalk. Steve has taken bears himself, ten years running by doing so, and put Dan on his first successful hunt two years ago as well. They know their business.

They provide all transportation to and from stands, bring you lunch, and will completely care for your animal the moment it’s down. They provide a mountain-top base camp in the more remote regions for hunters, and also outfit you with hand-held radios for safety and convenience. Check out their website at www.northwoodsoutdooradventures.com to view their accommodations and pricing plans. The spring of 2008 has us already scheduled to head back there, and this time we’re filming for “Northwoods Adventures TV”, seen weekly on The Sportsmans Channel. Check the boys out at their website and book a hunt. And as always, as we say on “Northwoods TV”,,,,,,”We’ll see YOU…in the woods!”

(Blaine Cardilli is a freelance outdoor writer & columnist from Maine. He is a member of the Hunters Specialties prostaff and a member of the Northwoods Adventures TV filming team.)

Scholl was to have met with Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s chief of staff on Wednesday to discuss the issue.

“First, we are asking the governor for a proclamation to help raise public awareness of the health risks,” said Dr. Scholl. “If every town wants the DEP to help, customized plans can be made [for reducing herd numbers]. Right now, people think hunting deer is a sport and many think it’s inappropriate. But if the information is put out in a way the public can understand, the DEP would be asked to help in getting the population down.”

Hunters would be asked to play an active role in this task.

The reduction could be effected by a number of methods. “They could be rounded up and euthanized,” Dr. Scholl said. “But,” (s)he (sic) added, “there are already as many hunters as there are deer. If each hunter could be encouraged to take just one more deer each year, the problem would be solved. Some towns use sharpshooters-it doesn’t have to be sports hunters.”

It’s not spelled out in this article or previous bits of information I have read in the past, but I can only assume at this point that efforts would have to be made to work very closely with the fish and game experts, including their biologists, to focus the efforts on herd reduction to areas in most need. A random event of simply asking hunters to take more deer may not achieve the goals sought in the worst effected areas.

Howard Kilpatrick, a Connecticut wildlife biologist, says efforts are already underway to reduce herds.

He said the DEP has already instituted initiatives to reduce the deer population in Fairfield County and the shoreline towns, including giving free replacement tags for “antlerless”-does and juveniles. “There is basically no limit on antlerless deer in those areas,” he said. “If you remove one doe each year that means she doesn’t have twins the next year and you have three less deer.”
The DEP is also allowing bait stations where “hunter success is much, much higher” and an “earn a buck program,” where hunters get an extra buck tag for every three antlerless deer taken.

This proposal by Dr. Scholl and others who have signed on to the idea, isn’t being readily agreed upon by everyone. Of course animal rights groups are saying there is no need to kill any animals and others opposed to hunting are lead to speak out against it.

But some, not so radical anti-hunting groups, are jumping on the bandwagon as they too see the threat of Lyme disease as a very serious public health issue.

Connecticut has been notorious over the last few years as a breeding ground of ticks that carry Lyme disease. Many people have been bitten by the ticks and have suffered greatly as a result. Anytime you achieve an imbalance in wildlife populations, as is the case here with the deer, there is always the threat of disease and starvation. The over browsing of deer can destroy the vegetation ultimately ruining the ecosystem rendering it non functional to many of the other species of wildlife.

Hunters are recognized nationwide as being the first conservationists in America working hard to protect all wildlife and the ecosystems that support them. Sometimes hunters are perceived or spoken of in a way that incorrectly depicts their intentions when it comes to game harvest. Hunters understand the importance of a healthy deer herd along with everything else.

The best way to preserve and promote the future of hunting as a way of managing wildlife, is to work to insure a healthy forest complete with healthy animals.

Tom Remington

Wright was hunting this area with two other buddies during a snowstorm. When Wright decided it was time to head back to the truck and meet up with his companions, a series of events caused him to spend three days and two nights in the woods.

The Bennington Banner has an article today recounting Wright’s adventures as was told by him. This is the first chance I have had to read accounts as told by the lost hunter himself. I had received all the press releases and updates being put out by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Prior to reading this article, I only had a couple of questions. After reading this, I have a bunch more.

Wright is described as being “an experienced hunter and outdoorsman”. According to the article, it began snowing there around 4 a.m. and by the time the hunters left camp, there were six inches of snow on the ground. Wright saw deer tracks crossing the woods road he was on and followed them. He says that about 300 yards from the road, he spotted the deer.

By his own account, he saw the deer again about an hour later and says he should have had the deer but didn’t and doesn’t give any explanation as to why. Once again according to the article, Wright continued to follow the deer “for some time, winding his way through the woods.” At some point he decided to call it a day and head back. This is where it gets interesting.

Wright said he knew where he was supposed to go by his instincts but decided he would refer to his GPS device to find out how far it was back to his truck. He claims the device was telling him to go in another direction.

Confused, he decided to take out his compass and by some strange coincidence, it too wasn’t working. He said he couldn’t get it to read the same way twice.

“I could not get my compass to read the same spot twice. I’ve never had a problem with it,” he said. “You get a little nervous when your compass is not working. That’s all right, I’ve got my GPS,” Wright said.

Apparently his GPS was telling him the truck was about a mile away and he didn’t believe that to be the correct information. So, according to Wright, when it was time to head out, his instincts were telling him where to go and his instincts didn’t agree with his GPS and his compass isn’t working. As a footnote here, after Wright was found, Maine authorities took the GPS and was able to determine the path Wright took until he turned the GPS off in a gravel pit.

Wright opted to follow what the GPS was telling him which he claims was leading him straight up Tumbledown Mountain.

This is where I begin to have several questions. First let me say that in this article, much of the information being told to the reporter is quite detailed. When someone gets lost, often with a certain degree of panic setting in, thinking becomes unclear and also you memory of what you did is sometimes non existent. Wright is described as being experienced. Reports that came from the MDIFW say that the hunter left his survival pack back at camp. Of course that was a mistake.

I’m trying to put myself in that situation which may or may not be the right thing to do. If I’m hunting an area like this, which sounds like he has been to before but doesn’t know real thoroughly, my thought processes are much different than if I’m in an area I know real well.

So, here I am hunting in snow. I’ve decided to head back. I’m confused at my GPS and my compass doesn’t work. What are the odds of both a compass and a GPS failing? Why not backtrack? I’m hunting on snow. I’m leaving tracks. Was it snowing so hard that his tracks could not be determined anymore?

Let’s say his GPS was working properly, which according to MDIFW it was until Wright shut if off. If the direction it was telling him to go was straight up Tumbledown Mountain, then isn’t it correct to conclude that he would have to have gone all the way around the back side of the mountain from where he began? Assuming of course that his GPS plotted course back to the truck was a straight line. If that were the case, then wouldn’t an experienced hunter and outdoorsman, who we should assume knew how to use his GPS, reconfigure his track so as not to have to go up and over the top of Tumbledown Mountain?

During his journey up Tumbledown Mountain, somewhere he fell into water – twice. During his interview he tells the reporter that if his truck was where his GPS was telling him it was, “they would have had to put it up there with a helicopter”.

Now wet and frozen, Wright makes his was back down the mountain, supposedly still following the directions on his GPS. He comes to a woods road. Here’s an interesting part of the story that I didn’t pick up on initially. Here’s how it reads:

Wright then made his way back down into a valley until he came to a logging road. He walked for several hours, watching the sun disappear, passing a gravel pit and a camper. He chose not to go inside, though.

Before I get into the camper part of the story, here’s what came to me. When he decided to head back to the truck, in this accounting he doesn’t say what time that was. Of course this could be important in trying to determine how far he had gone while tracking this deer. How much time had elapsed from the time he headed up Tumbledown, fallen in twice and gotten wet and now come upon a logging road? I don’t know but look what it says. It says that Wright “walked for several hours watching the sun disappear”. This makes no sense at all to me.

If he is watching the sun disappear, then he certainly knows where west is. How long has the sun been out? When did it stop snowing? Is using a GPS turning an “experienced” hunter into one that doesn’t know general directions before setting off into the woods?

The sun is disappearing, which means it’s getting dark and it is obvious that Wright doesn’t know where he is or how to get out. He claims that at the point where he fell into the water a second time, the GPS was still telling him the truck was only 300 yards away.

He passed a gravel pit and a camper.

“I was gonna go in it, but the door wouldn’t open,” he said. “I said, ‘well, I’m not going to break into this camper. It was my stupidity. Why? I’m gonna be out of here by daylight anyway.”

Even though Wright seems to be recalling what he did, I have to question whether or not he was thinking clearly at all. He fell in the water and says his GPS is telling him the truck is 300 yards away. He has walked for “hours”. Is this the point where he turns off his GPS? Wardens say he turned it off in the gravel pit. Then Wright says his thought process was that he would be out by daylight. How did he know that? What is telling him that he will be out by daylight. You either know where you are or you don’t. He admits his stupidity in not breaking into the camper.

An experienced hunter and outdoorsman would have stopped before dark, built a fire and shelter and planned to spend the night there. Wright can’t be thinking at all clearly. The first rule of thumb when you realize you’re lost is stay put. He didn’t do that. At some point of the interview and it appears near the end of the article, Wright says he was never lost.

Wright maintains that he was not lost. “I just trusted an instrument that put me in a situation and it snowballed from there,” Wright said. “Other than that I would have been back to the truck and home. None of this would have happened. A chain of events just kept me from doing what I needed to do.”

Wright says he walked through the night. Why didn’t he find shelter or build a fire. Here’s what he says.

“You think of all kinds of things like, ‘let me cut some pine boughs and make myself a little shelter,’ but you know, that’s fine to tell somebody,” he said. “I didn’t have the time or the energy to jerk around and spend an hour doing something.”

He didn’t have the time or energy to build a shelter but he walked on through the night. Another indication that either Wright was not thinking clearly or he wasn’t the experienced hunter and outdoorsman many thought he was.

The next day, Wright suffers from snow blindness. I’m getting even more confused. Let’s recap briefly. According to reports from the MDIFW, Wright reached the gravel pit around midnight. He claims he walked on through the night. How far did he go? The sun came out and at some point he became sun blind. He says he tried to continue on for about a half hour but couldn’t see.

“It wasn’t my glasses. I was finally going blind,” he said. “It was like half my eyes were looking through an iceberg. I walked for another half an hour and then everything got screwy on me. The roads were going in every direction. At this time I’m getting down to the point where I can’t even see my hand.”

He tried to turn back and get to the camper but couldn’t see. He said he walked back and forth on the logging road to keep moving for most of the day.

If Wright walked all night and if in fact he had been at the gravel pit at midnight, how far did he travel and in what direction was he walking? He is still on this one road. If the sun rose at around 5 a.m. then from the point of the gravel pit to the crack of dawn was approximately 5 hours. How long after the sun came up did he come down with sun blindness?

“Everything got screwy on him”, he said. Then the article says that Wright turned back trying to get to the camper. Are you kidding me? How many hours away is this? Isn’t he lost? Wright says he was never lost. Was he lost or wasn’t he lost?

While suffering from sun blindness, he hears a plane overhead.

“I could hear a plane go by my. I kind of put my arms out. I thought I heard it kill the engine a little bit but it just kept on going,” Wright said.

I think that if I had just spent the night in the woods and I had two hunting buddies expecting me to return that afternoon, I would assume, lost or not, that people were looking for me. But suppose I didn’t think that. I’m blind. I don’t know how long this will last. Do you think I’m going to “kind of put my arms out”.

From that point on, details in the article are sketchy. It says Wright spent the night in a ditch curled up in a ball. He had a difficult time getting out of the ditch in the morning but once he did, he said he was going to try to find his way back to the camper.

Wright says he was in a lot of pain and couldn’t walk very fast or far but he did manage to crawl down over an embankment to get a drink of water. This is when the snowmobile, driven by Donald Eisenhaur of Madrid, went by. Eisenhaur didn’t see Wright down in the brook.

Fortunately, a short time later Eisenhaur returned and brought Wright safely out.

This entire story is nuts. When incidents like this happen, we take them and try to learn from them. We can use real life accounts to educate others on what to do and not do when we’re lost in the woods. I, like everyone else, try to second guess and make some sense out of what happened.

I certainly hope that Mr. Eisenhaur has learned an awful lot from this episode but I have my doubts that he has learned perhaps the most valuable lesson of all. And for that proof, I’ll leave you with what he said once again.

Wright maintains that he was not lost. “I just trusted an instrument that put me in a situation and it snowballed from there,” Wright said. “Other than that I would have been back to the truck and home. None of this would have happened. A chain of events just kept me from doing what I needed to do.”

Evidently none of this was his fault.

I’m glad he’s home safe and sound with his wife and kids.

Tom Remington

It was dry, dusty and warm for December in this part of the country. And the so-called weather experts were calling for a continuation of last summer’s dry spell and unseasonably, warm weather. Some even predicted that we might be in the clutches of the worst drought that the Lone Star state had seen in 20 years. So as we sat there watching the little dust devils dancing up and down the ranch road upon which our deer stand sat, my son and I began to wonder if we would see any of the monster deer that the south Texas brush country has become famous for. It was the day after Christmas 1999, which usually means cold, windy conditions and there should have been a lot more moisture in the air at this time of year.

For his fourteenth birthday, I wanted to take James on a hunt for his first whitetail buck. Now, don’t get me wrong, James has been hunting ever since he was 31 days old. (You can bet his mom hasn’t let me forget how I took him deer hunting instead of staying home and babysitting him like any “sane” man would have done. My argument that my box blind was a safe and secure place for a newborn hit bottom quicker than the Titanic!) Over the years he has taken his share of game animals, ranging from blackbuck antelope, axis does, sika does, rabbits, squirrels, exotic rams, doves, ducks, etc. But he had never had a chance to hunt a good whitetail buck. And like a true whitetail hunter it was beginning to rub him the wrong way.

During my previous visits to the south Texas area while feral hog hunting, I had been impressed with both the quantity and quality of the whitetails that we had seen. So I gave a friend in the area a call and explained that I was looking for a place to take James for his first whitetail hunt. The buck didn’t have to be a monster because I was more interested in James enjoying his trip so a good representative buck would meet our needs.

We made arrangements to hunt an area between Tilden and Cathulia, which offered not only free ranging whitetail, but also feral hogs and javelina. As part of the 20,000-acre ranch’s management plan, only 20 mature whitetail bucks are harvested each year, with a 150-class animal being on the low end of the scale. The results of this intensive management plan have produced an average mature buck harvest in the 170+ class.

The afternoon of Sunday, December 26th, found James and I on stand, as I mentioned above. Not only were we excited about being on the ranch, but our 4 mile drive in to the stand had been quite eventful as we spotted several herds of both feral hogs and javelina as well as numerous whitetail does and immature bucks. We had also had to stop several times as coveys of quail crossed the road in front of our truck. This ride also gave us an opportunity to become better acquainted with the operation of the ranch as Casey, the ranch foreman, also had the opportunity to explain that he wanted James to harvest an older buck that was on the decline, but still had a nice rack, or a younger 8-pointer. I agreed that this would be a good-sized buck with which to start James off on.

During the first evening of our three-day hunt we were not disappointed. Not only did we see 63 bucks come into the two feeder stations that Casey had set up for our stand, but we also saw more of the numerous feral hogs and javelinas. Just at dusk we saw a female coyote that James wanted to shoot. The only reason that he didn’t is that I convinced him to wait until we had our buck on the ground. We still had twenty minutes of shooting light left and I was hoping the right buck might make an appearance.

Sunrise the next morning found us back in the same stand as we vigilantly scanned each buck that made an appearance in the early morning fog, trying unsuccessfully to turn him into the kind of buck that we were after. Unfortunately, Mr. Right didn’t make an entrance. Instead we were treated to the forty-five bucks, fifty-eight does and numerous feral hogs that wove their way in and out of the ground hugging fog. One of the bucks was a bon-a-fide Boone And Crocket candidate. An experienced whitetail biologist who I showed his picture to later estimated that the sixteen point buck had a rack that was 24 inches wide with 6 ½ inch bases and was probably around 6 or 7 years old.

James had never seen such a big buck on the hoof and was begging me to let him shoot it. I tried to quietly explain why we couldn’t shoot the old sixteen pointer, but James was just too excited to listen to logic, “But dad, its just money after all. Mom will understand!” About this time a small herd of feral hogs made their entrance onto the ranch road and chased the big boy away. Man was I glad for their timing because I was starting to cave in and might have let him pull the trigger on that big old buck. One of the few times that I have been glad to see hogs at my deer feeder.

Later in the morning James was able to watch his first down in the dirt fight between two love-crazed whitetail bucks. A nice twelve pointer and a slightly smaller ten pointer were both vying for the attentions of a receptive doe. As we watched the two combatants battle it out a smaller forked horn buck slipped in and bred the doe. By the time the two fighters had concluded their jousting the doe had slipped off into the brush country and they were left standing with dumbfounded looks on their faces as they looked to and fro for the object of their attentions.

After a pleasant lunch, Casey told us that we were going to try something new. There was a section of the ranch that no one had hunted this year and he asked if we wanted to give it a try. Because there were no stands or feeders setup on this portion of the ranch we would tow a corn hopper behind his truck. This way we could corn a section of the road and then drive off about a hundred yards in order to maintain a vigil over the area as we watched for the wildlife that decided to make an appearance.

We spent the rest of the afternoon easing our way around this new section of the ranch. About every half-mile or so Casey would disperse corn on the road for about seventy-five yards. Then we would drive about a hundred yards further down the road before pulling off to the side, where we waited.

If I didn’t think that this ranch was under hunted before beginning our little ride, it didn’t take long to convince me. At each of our stops we silently watched as numerous deer, feral hogs, javelina, doves and other members of the brush country society made their appearances to partake of the feast provided. At one point so many deer were trying to make their way into the road that they were passing by our truck at less than ten feet. James and I were thrilled, we were used to hunting east Texas where the deer turn and run at the first hint that a human is in the forest.

At our last stop we corned the grassy meadow that bordered a small lake on the far western end of the ranch. It was at this beautifully scenic spot that we watched geese and ducks coming in to feed as the sand hill cranes played along the lakeshore in the background. Several does brought their fawns and yearling’s in for a last drink as a lone feral boar made his way to his favorite mud wallow at the far end of the lake.

As the sun started to set on the dusty horizon, Casey said that we would try again in the morning but that it was time to start making our way back as it was six and a half miles to the gate. In the end, it was Casey’s decision to leave before dark and to ease along scanning the areas that we had corned on the way in for any latecomers that saved the day.

We had traveled a little over a mile from the lake when, as we approached one of the corned areas, we noticed something unusual in the middle of the road. We were in position to just be able to peep over the top of a small rise in the road and it looked as though a bush had sprouted where none had been growing when we had passed this way earlier. James whispered, “horns!” as I threw up my binoculars for a closer look. Casey whispered, “James, that’s your buck on the right, can you take him from here?” And just as I had taught him, he responded, “No sir, all I can see is his head and I don’t want to chance a shot like that in this light.” “Okay, we are going to try and ease up a bit in order to get you a shot. Get ready,” Casey whispered.

Unfortunately, as Casey eased the truck up the little hill, the buck turned and disappeared into the thick brush beside the road. James and I just looked at each other and shook our heads in frustration. “We will start back out here in the morning” Casey said as the truck topped the small rise.

“Stop” I yelled. “James do you see him standing out there by the cactus?” There stood our buck broadside, at about eighty yards, in front of a huge cactus. I guess he thought that the brush in front of him hid him from our view. James replied, “Yes, dad I see him.” “Do you have a shot?” I asked as I continued to peer through my binoculars at the buck.

James’ Savage FP10 tactical rifle in .308 topped with a Burris Black Diamond scope answered for him. I was glad that I had not taken my eyes away from my binoculars because as the buck turned to run I saw him stumble in mid stride as he struggled to fight a battle that he had already lost.

My handloaded round of a 150-grain Ballistic Tip bullet, powered by Hodgdon’s Varget powder, had done the trick. James had placed his shot right behind the front shoulder and right through the buck’s heart. He barely took ten steps before loosing his steam.

In the failing light I stood on top of the cab of Casey’s truck as I guided James and him to the buck through the cactus and mesquite brush via flashlight beacon. When they got to the buck all I could hear was James yelling and then he disappeared from view. “Casey! What’s wrong!” I yelled, thinking that James must have hurt himself in the darkness.

Casey’s slow reply surprised me, “Denny, I screwed up. This buck is a lot bigger than what I thought. But that is my fault and I can’t charge you any extra for your guide’s screw up.” “What do you mean you screwed up?” I asked. “Just wait, you’ll see”, was Casey’s only answer.

James’ management buck, though not one of the monsters that the Cameron ranch is known for, was respectable nonetheless. The eleven pointer had enough head gear to net a Boone and Crockett score of 143 ½ inches of antler, a very good deer for a youngster to begin his hunting career with. In fact, he might be too good because it will be hard to beat his score in most of whitetail country today.

So I guess it all starts with that magic morning when you get up just a little bit earlier than usual and then hit the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife website to see the results of the Maine state moose lottery drawing.

Okay, so you’ve been applying and dutifully sending in your application fees for like twenty some odd years and haven’t been picked yet.
Don’t matter, this is THE YEAR ( or so you think ).

The shock!!!!! I’m going moose hunting. So there I was, heading for District 3, northeastern Aroostook County, September 25th with my Cow permit clutched tightly in my mitts.

Talk about being excited. Then the phone calls start from your hunting buddies, basically saying congratulations along with a healthy dose of “You SOB, how’d you get picked and not me?” In fact, some of them used slightly stronger terms than SOB. And then, in Maine at least, a bit of a dilemma sets in. “H’mmm, should I ask my subpermittee or my alternate hunter?” This ain’t good, this playing God stuff, so I took the high ground and just stuck with who I had picked for my subpermittee. As an aside, each year I’ve rotated my subpermittees from among four of my hunting friends. Every year up until now I was sure that the only reason I didn’t get picked was because of the bad luck of the person listed as subpermittee. “That friggin’ ( insert name here ), he’s got no frickin’ luck at all.” The bad news is now I’ve got three of my hunting buddies P. O.’ed at me.

One of the things that added to the sense of suspense about hunting in District 3 was that I wasn’t real familiar with the lay of the land there. I did run into a few folks that had hunted the same district recently and had some good luck bringing back the moose meat. And then, there is that inevitable someone you always meet that says, “Oh yeah, well I know ( so and so ) who was up there last year and never seen a ( bull/ cow – take your pick ) the whole week. Not what you want to hear and it definitely increases the “Pucker Factor” with apprehensions of coming home empty handed. Facts are, Maine moose are definitely becoming a little more hunter shy and a lot of the old easier moose hunting habitat ( clear cuts ) has gone by the wayside. The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife statistics for 2005 showed up that 77% of the eligible moose hunters were successful ( and 23% weren’t! ). I didn’t shoot off my mouth out loud any about how I was going to make out success wise, but I told myself silently to put in my best efforts and be as prepared as well as possible. And not be one of the 23%.

Maine having the Moose Lottery in June, with the first weeks hunt not until the end of September, would seem to give you endless amounts of time within which to plan and get ready. Not really so true. The first couple of months do seem to poke along but then that last month flies by pretty quick when you actually start to make some concrete plans and get stuff lined up and gear together.

The first thing that came to mind was what gun to use to hunt moose, being that the rifles we’ve been using for deer hunting might not be just the right tool for the job. I started by asking around as to what would be a good moose hunting gun. Between friends, relatives and what seemed like some pretty knowledgeable sources on the Web I got a fairly broad idea of what would do the trick.

My brother -in- law, Bob, volunteered a Weatherby 340 Mag which I think would probably knock over a moose about seven zip codes away. All I know about that gun was when we target shot it brought to mind the old saw about “kills from both ends”. Ungodly ballistics though. My friend Barry was kind enough to lend us a Remington 7mm Mag, which although didn’t have quite the wallop of the Weatherby, did manage to raise some truly psychedelic colored black and blues on my shoulder by the time we were done dialing it in on the shooting bench and getting confident shooting it freehand. Although we were probably over-gunned as far as the necessary “pop” to hunt moose, it felt good to know we could take a long shot if circumstances dictated it.

All right, now for some time up in The County.
Looking at the District 3 Map I knew we had a big area to choose from. I took a Pre-Scouting scouting trip for three days a couple of weeks before the season opened. From Delormes Maine Atlas I had spotted a wilderness campsite near Limestone that seemed like a good spot to pitch my canvas cabin. Sadly, when I arrived there that site had been closed, but a fellow who worked nearby mentioned that the Town of Limestone had a camping ground at Trafton Lake. Although it was closed for the season, when I stopped in at the Limestone town office to ask about it, they were nice enough to let me stay there anyway. I think it might have helped when I promised to leave the campsite cleaner when I left than when I came. Then again, also it may have helped that the fellow that told me about the campground happened to be the Town Managers husband. Thanks Ulyess. I should also add that I was a little discombobulated by having my first choice of campsites unavailable but when I mentioned what had happened to a few people I had just met, I was greeted with their saying, ” Don’t worry about it, if you can’t find a campsite you can just pitch your tent down in the back of my field.” Pretty doggone nice of them to have offered, especially to someone they hadn’t known for more than about five minutes. I think that says something about people being generous and the friendliness of folks in Aroostook in general. Maybe it’s also a case of hunters looking to help out another hunter. Anyway Trafton Lake Campground was a really pretty spot and during the eight days I camped there never had anybody else staying in the campground. My company was a family of fairly well behaved skunks ( seeing as I never got sprayed ), some day visitors to the lake, a daily cruise-by from the Limestone Parks and Rec folks and about 10,000 Canadian geese taking a break on their migration South.

Once I got my campsite semi-established and wasn’t a homeless hunter anymore ( my real home is about 350 miles south of Limestone in Shapleigh, Maine ) my plan was to go cruising through the District, talk to some folks and try to get a nose for where some good Moose hunting territory might lay. It seemed a mite odd that so much good moose sighting/ hunting area was on paved roads and in many cases so close to homes and outbuildings but the first few days of scouting proved that to be true. I had heard a lot about how the broccoli fields were real beacons to moose so I checked them out early in my scouting. Oddly enough I never ended up seeing any moose at all in those fields. HOWEVER, there were moose aplenty most everywhere else. WOW!, I was convinced after two days that I was in the moose capitol of Maine.

One of the tips that I had picked up was to be out in the area to be scouted about a half hour before legal shooting time. The first two days it seemed like there was no end to the moose to be seen ( note: it was good and chilly, but dry both those mornings ). I also scouted the late afternoons and while I did spot moose then, the frequency of sightings was a bit less than those of the early mornings. Midday wasn’t nearly so productive with the sightings and so I began to skip that.

I tried to talk with as many different people that were familiar with the District as I could, ranging from the Regional Biologist over at the IF&W station in Ashland, to an Immigration Officer in Limestone, to the folks at the local corner stores and gun shops. What began to become apparent was that EVERYBODY had a moose story to tell and everybody “had one in my back yard just last week”. The best story was how the week before a moose had walked into the front door of the Limestone school bus barn, meandered around a bit and then kept on walking right out the back door.

What also was starting to become apparent was that if I listened to everybody and tried to check out all the various locations that were being brought up I’d pretty quickly become the moose scout equivalent of a Jack of all trades but Master of none. It began to dawn on me that it might be smarter to narrow down my scouting areas and try to become a lot more knowledgeable about one in particular. With that in mind I started paying particular attention to the Caribou/Limestone/Connor areas.

These areas had a good mix of agricultural fields and woodsy areas. The deeper woods that I had been checking, like Cyr Plantation up in Hamlin and Caswell and also the Sullivan Road over above Madawaska Lake showed plenty of moose sign but a bit tougher shooting sight line opportunities. Speaking of Cyr Plantation, there’s some interesting woods roads up there, including some where no Dodge truck should ever go ( Don’t ask how I know this. ).

One area that stood out, not for it’s moose hunting possibilities, but for other reasons was the former Loring Air Force Base. It’s hard to describe the vastness of the place, it’s really huge in size. It’s also incredibly under utilized at present. The facility could ( and did I’m sure ) support much much more than is going on there at present. My hat’s off to the Loring Redevelopment Authority for their efforts to bring some industry back to their location. That said, the vast emptiness of the place is saddening and a bit eerie. Seems like a lot of ghosts are still lingering. And a pile of somebody’s money ( care to guess who’s? ) is being spent on upkeep of a property that is very very forlorn. It gave me a lot of pause for thought. If you haven’t seen it you should. The other thing that crosses your mind is what the impact of the Base closure must have done to the surrounding towns.

Anyway, after having been driving around the District for about four days, from Fort Kent, to Van Buren, to Limestone to Caribou, I began to narrow my prospective area. My first scouting trip kind of concentrated on the Limestone area. The first two mornings of scouting yielded seeing seven moose in forty-five minutes and then four moose in thirty minutes just off Rt 1A. “Wow, I thought to myself, this is slick, they’re everywhere.” What was weird was seeing them so close to people’s houses and outbuildings and from paved roads at that. I had heard that the State was concerned about the number of car/moose collisions in this area but these moose were so close I couldn’t help but wondering about the number of moose/riding lawnmower collisions. I did notice though that many of the moose were a goodly distance off in the fields, likely a 250-300 yard shot. Also I noticed that if you stopped your vehicle or got out to look at them they did get a bit antsy after about thirty seconds or so and would start back towards the woods, not exactly at a flat out gallop but they were nervous. Nonetheless, heading back home to Shapleigh I was pretty stoked about the number of moose I had seen in that short time. It also occurred to me that Leon and I had better put in some more time on some long distance shooting skills practice.

The next week went by way too quick what with gathering up the various moose hunting paraphernalia, trailer to get prepped, winches and rope and cable, chains, come-a-longs, snatch blocks, hunting gear, guns, ammo, chow, etc. My second scouting trip began Monday, September 18th, a week before the hunt began and again found me setting up camp at Trafton Lake. So there I was, out early on Tuesday morning in the predawn, ready to spot the endless procession of moose that I was sure were right around the next bend in the road. SKUNKED!!!!!! All the spots where I had seen moose the week before were EMPTY! The “Confidence Index” took a severe shellacking that day needless to say. One difference from the week before was that it was now a lot warmer weather wise, Hmmm?

OK, no need to get nervous just yet I told myself. Just wait ’til tomorrow. Thankfully the next day yielded two sightings, not great but better than the dreaded “S” word. The next day the weather cooled off a bit and the good times began to roll again, – moose morning and night. One conclusion that I started to make after the couple of sparse sighting days was that, as the saying goes, “Choosers are Losers and Pickers ain’t Getters”. I kind of began thinking that the first cow Leon and I saw was the one we were going to try for. Next, to try to talk him into that, as both of us are partial to a full freezer. The rest of the week the sightings kept getting better and better. Having narrowed down my area to target it seemed like I was better able to pattern where the moose would likely show themselves and when. One of the facets of the moose feeding behavior that stuck out after a bit was that they were way fond of sticking their faces down into the clover that many farmers had planted in their hay fields. Another facet was that they were in the way of staying nearby to some watersource, whether for drinking purposes or for hiding in the thick bushes nearby middays, or maybe both.

“FINDING THE FIELD”

All right, here’s where thing start to get interesting.

Wednesday by midmorning about 10:30 found me checking out one last field/woods area up above the Town of Connor ( it was getting late for what I reckoned was morning scouting ). There was no particular abundance of moose sign in that field, at least from the road, nor did I see any as I had driven up through it. I was starting to get hungry for a real camp-style breakfast cooked over the Coleman and wasn’t paying too much attention to what was around me. Time to head back to Camp and start frying up those potatoes and onions I was thinking of. I had made it a habit of lugging along a notebook to write down where I had been and what I had seen ( or not seen ) each day of scouting. So I stopped my truck in the middle of the fields road and sat there for a few minutes, engine running, while I made a few notes about the mornings efforts. When I finished with my notes a couple of minutes later and looked up, sure enough, there was the biggest Cow I had seen to date standing towards the far end of the field just going about her business of chowing down on all the clover she could wish for. I checked her out with the binocs and sat for a few more minutes. She surely knew I was there but wasn’t confronted about it in the least. Thinking that this was a good time to leave her to her chow without getting her too riled up, I slowly headed out. The only problem was that she, like a lot of the moose I had been seeing, appeared to be about 275 yards away. You can bet that this field was going to get checked out early and often for the next few days.

As you might begin to guess, Yup, there she was again the next morning too, a bit earlier now, about 7:30am. All right, now I’m getting excited over the prospects of taking a great big “Kinga” of a cow. The next morning, Friday, I decide to check this field first and no more just driving up through it in the truck. I’m not about to be taking a chance of spooking this moose, no sir. So, I park a good distance away about forty-five minutes before legal hunting time and begin to walk up the field road in my best whitetail deer sneaking up on technique ( as if I had one ). It was pretty dark, with no moon, but I knew where I was going and figured I could sneak right up there without a peep. Maybe I was a little too quiet. I had gone maybe 75 yards out of the quarter mile that I had intended when all of a sudden a cow walked across the field road in front of me and gave a loud call or two. BUSTED!!!! I reckoned her to be about 40 yards away. She was standing uphill of me, just beginning to be silhouetted by the lightening sky as the sunrise started to make its way in the East. Couldn’t have been a much prettier image, but I was riled up that my attempt at sneaking up there had been sniffed out (or heard out, – there wasn’t a lick of wind ) so easily. Next began the part that just about had me heading back to camp for a fresh change of BVD’s. Unbeknownst to me, she was traveling with a bull. Also unbeknownst to me, he was standing along side the road about ten yards from me and a little behind from where I had just walked up. He let loose with a couple of snorts in answer to her calls and then began doing a bit of thrashing about in the bushes where he was standing. “Great”, I thought, “I’m between a bull and his cow and might it just be possible that he’s not too thrilled to see me?” ” What to do next??? Hmmmm, why don’t I try just turning around and walking back the way I came just as softly as can be?” Seemed like a good idea, so that’s what I did.

But there was one more step to be done as far as checking out “THE FIELD” that needed doing but I wanted to leave that off until Sunday.

Being as it seemed to me that these moose had been having more than their usual share of human companionship, I decided to leave The Field, as I had begun to call it, alone for a bit. There were beginning to be more moose hunters starting to do their own scouting for the past few days and it was fun to stop every now and to swap some stories. Friday was my last night at Trafton Lake staying in my tent. Although I’d taken a few PTA baths during the week I was starting to hanker at the thought of stepping into a good hot shower. I really like camping out and take a bit of pride at being able to set up a good comfortable camp to deal with most any of the elements, but it was starting to feel like time to go. My hunting partner, Leon, was coming up tomorrow along with three of his sons, Adrian, Isiah and Eli. They were up at 3 am and on the road by 5am for the 6 hour drive. His boys are all pretty hardcore about hunting and they were as happy to see their Pop finally getting a chance to moose hunt as if it were themselves. We had found a camp to rent at Madawaska Lake that was of a good enough size for all of us to fit in comfortably and were looking forward to turning it in to the Jay&LeonMooseapaloozaTour headquarters for a week. Just like most hunting camps, that means eating a good deal of the stuff that your wife won’t let you eat at home and eating it in quantities such that you probably will need two digestive tracts ( especially the rear section) to take care of it all. Naturally a certain quantity of malt beverages figures into the mix also. The words, potatoes, onions, bacon, eggs, beans and pickled eggs figured prominently into the menu planning anytime day or night. We left the windows open a lot.

In addition to bringing his trailer and his son Eli’s ATV, Leon brought along a chest freezer, full of bags of ice he had acquired over the summer. When he first mentioned bringing it I was thinking that maybe it was a little bit of overkill, but later on it turned out to be a pretty smart idea. They got settled in, we had a bite of chow and then headed out for a bit of Saturday afternoon scouting in a new area up off the Sullivan Rd. that came pretty well recommended but that I hadn’t had the time to check out. Sure enough, moose back in the thick woods too, but some of the shots would have been a little sketchy. Saturday night everybody stayed up later than we should have burning off some of the first night in hunting camp energy, but I talked Leon into a bit of early morning scouting about while the young guys were still in the rack. We did spot eight that morning but we were outnumbered about five to one by other hunters out scouting. I was glad that I had gotten my scouting pretty well in hand earlier in the week. When we got back about lunch time his boys were making noises about, “Why didn’t you wake us up too?” but I think they were glad to get caught up from their 3am morning the previous day, especially since I had told them that we were all getting up at two AM on opening day. A little later in the afternoon Leon and I took our rifles out for one last bit of target practice to make sure the scopes had survived the 350 mile trip.

ELI LANDS ON THE POOP LIST ( FOR AWHILE )

Back to the unfinished business over at “THE FIELD”. The one thing that I wasn’t 100% positive about when I had been spotting that walloping big cow was how far exactly was she back at the rear of the field from the field road that I was thinking of shooting from, 200 yds., 300yds, 400yds? The field was so big I didn’t really trust my sense of perspective so I reckoned it would be smart to pace off the distance during the middle of the day when the moose wouldn’t likely be around. Now Eli, having fifteen year old legs, seemed like the smart choice to me and his Dad to do the hiking part of this process, while we both lazed around by the truck observing his process and conserving our energies for Opening Day. Eli was agreeable, and after some schooling up on remembering to count his strides and writing it down at the far end of the field, and then repeating the whole process coming back up to the truck, we were pretty near ready to send him off on his excursion. “No, wait. One last thing, Don’t go all the way to the wood line. Stay back about seventy-five yards so you don’t leave any scent trail right up close to where the moose have been coming out.” “OK”, says he and off he strides. Bye and bye he begins to become more and more of a speck on the horizon and then finally he stops. And then he goes just a little further. And then goes just a little further again. And again. Suddenly we see him duck down and disappear from our view. A few moments later, up he jumps and begins hoofing it back across the field. I began to have a premonition of what was going to come out of his mouth when he finally got back. ” I just jumped a big moose!” says Eli. “She scared the crap out of me. She was bedded down right in the field.” We badgered him a bit about not stopping before the field edge but he explained, “I saw some tracks, then I came across a few beds. I just wanted to see where they went.”. Who could blame him? For awhile I was ticked off at him for what I was sure had ended up spooking the big cow I had spotted away for eternity. Then I thought about it for a bit and couldn’t blame him for letting the excitement of all things hunting lead him on as they did. Where there’s one moose, they’ll be more, I thought to myself. But, just a little, he was still on my Poop List.

That night the excitement of knowing the Opening Day was just hours away caused more than one of us to do some considerable tossing and turning instead of the usual sleeping like a log after a good day in the out of doors. Although the alarm clocks were set for two A.M. I don’t think anyone really needed them. We slurped up a bit of breakfast and then packed up some mid-day sandwiches and snacks including a goodly chunk of extra sharp cheddar for everyone and were out the door a little before three A.M. The drive the the Field was only about thirty-five minutes but we were wanting to be there plenty early to allow lots of time to hike into our hunting area nice and quietly and also maybe before lots of other hunters showed up. Although I had only seen one other hunter pre-scouting this particular field I was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly a “secret spot”. I was hoping that if other folks did come along they might respect that there was already someone in that location. As it turned out, that was the case. Leon and I set out pussyfooting our way up into the field road about 3:45 A.M. The young fellows were going to stay in their truck and laze out for a bit longer then begin walking in just before first light. Leon and I knew that we would have to change our plans a little because the wind, which had previously been in our favor, was now blowing from behind our backs over towards where we were guessing we’d hopefully first see some moose. So began the long, slow hike around the perimeter of the field in the very deep dark. Did I happen to mention that it was a walloping big field? Slowly we began to make some progress getting towards where we figured to set up. This journey was punctuated with a pile of missteps into road ruts, a bunch of “Shhhhs’s” and not a few pre-hunt jitters questions like, “Leon, did you remember to bring your bullets?”. Fortunately we hadn’t, to our knowledge, spooked any moose on the way in, at leastwise not in any drastic fashion.

Finally we were pretty much to the point along side the back edge of the field where we figured we’d have a good vantage point in a couple of directions. We had discovered in our hike that the back edge of the field wasn’t as straight across like as it had appeared from the road, but had a bunch of coves and points. We also discovered that the cultivated portion of it ( hay, which had been cut, and clover ) didn’t extend all the way to the woods line, instead stopping about seventy-five yards short. We picked our lucky spot ( we hoped ) and hunkered down, probably about an hour before legal shooting that day, which was 5:56 A.M.

Anybody who’s sat on a stand for awhile knows the feeling of what happens next. Will daylight ever come? Is this a good spot? Maybe we should move over there a little? Finally legal shooting time arrived. Guess what? Not a moose in sight. But we’re not discouraged yet, No Sir. All right, now it’s 7:30 A.M. and we’re starting to have some second ( and third ) thoughts as well as some sore butts from sitting so long. Leon’s sons had hiked in pretty stealthily and we had finally noticed them sitting motionlessly like three statues in a good spotting location way across the field. About that time Leons cell phone rang (vibrated) and it was Francis, a fellow moose hunter from Caribou, who I had made a point to visit with during my scouting trips. He held a Bull permit and was sitting over a broccoli field on Opening morning. “How are you guys making out?” “Not so good. Nothing. How about you?” Same story. He said he was done sitting and was now going to do some road cruising in hopes of better opportunities. With him being a local and also being a pretty much of a fanatical hunter, we were getting pretty tempted to do the same. We whispered goodbye and then talked it over. “What the Hell, lets give it anther half an hour”, we decided.

About then Leon’s phone vibrated again. “Great”, I was thinking, “Francis must have driven around the first bend in the road and whacked one” But instead, it was Adrian, Leon’s oldest son. “Pop, a nice bull just came out in the field over to your right”. Believe you me, that ratcheted up our excitement level just a tad. The part of the field where the bull had come out was out of our line of sight, obscured by a small point of trees and brush about seventy-five yards away. “Let’s sneak over there and maybe we’ll get lucky and he might have a cow with him” we both decided. Sure and by golly, before we had even gotten that far, we began to hear some rustling back in the woods behind us. The beginnings of a smile began to cross our faces and then that realization that this stood a chance to be our lucky day began to rise. A few moments later we could start to see some brown. Then a bit more. Sure enough, we got a brief glimpse of the head as it reached up to eat some leaves off from an poplar tree back in the thick woods about thirty yards away – a Cow!!! Now the fact that it was a Cow had us considerable enthused but the bad part was that she didn’t seem the least bit interested in coming any further out of the thickly wooded area she was feeding in. She was real content to stand back in the woods with her head going up and down, stripping leaves and then lowering her head out of our view to chaw and swallow. After a few minutes of alternatively raising our guns and trying to get her sighted in for a head shot and then lowering them down again I began to think we weren’t going to get off a good shot right then and there.

Time for some moose calling, I thought, and so I tried a few grunts. Nothing doing!!! It was like it was Dinner time and she wasn’t about to be bothered. Finally, she must have gotten filled up for the time being and so she ambled, still back in the woods a bit, over towards the bull that was still out in field to our East, maybe 150 yards away around the point in the woods. I guess I may have mentioned that, yup, the woods were a bit thick right along there. From where Leon was standing, just a few yards to my right, she was still pretty much obscured by the brush and tree growth but as she ambled to our left she stepped into a small semi-clear area in front of me so I drew a bead and touched off the 7mm. Alright, maybe it wasn’t my best shot! She never even flinched. “What the hell is this?”, I was thinking seventy-five feet away and I miss?” “Miss a moose?” ” OK, calm down, let’s try that again”. Meanwhile she didn’t seem to even know where the shot had come from and had just walked a bit further along. And then she came to another small semi-clear spot. And went to moose heaven shortly thereafter. My second shot caught her in the neck and severed her backbone, sending her to the ground with a thud. A third shot behind her ear pretty much made sure she wasn’t going to feel any more pain.

No question, there’s a certain amount of jubilation that comes at that moment. But also, it is very much a time to show respect for the animal and for the Creator for furnishing one of His creatures for our use. I hope each of us who happens to read these words can take part of that moment to share this tribute.

They say that now the hard work has just begun, but we got lucky. Where the moose dropped was at the edge of the field, maybe seventy -five feet back in the woods. Leon’s sons hoofed it on over to where she dropped and after a bunch of grinning and congratulations were passed around we got her rolled over on her back and tied down. Leon’s boys said their Pop always complains about having to be the one that always dresses out the deer, but that the facts are that he knows he can do it better than anyone else there. It’s true. He generally just works with a single edge razor blade and the job is usually over before most other people are even begun. With a moose it took a little longer and was a bit more of a group effort, but the whole process was pretty short and sweet. He had thought to bring along a battery powered sawzall so the job of cutting through the pelvic and breastbones was accomplished quickly. We were able to drive our trucks down another of the field roads to within about 150 yards of where she dropped. Eli redeemed himself considerably by hooking the moose up to his 4wheeler and tugged her out to our trailer like a streamer fly across Rangeley Lake. From there we used an electric winch to pull her onto the trailer and the ( not all that ) hard work was over.

We tagged her in at the station in New Sweden where we found out that she weighed in at 518 lbs, not the heaviest cow but not the smallest either. I found it really difficult to judge her weight/size in the woods. We took her to camp for a quick wash and wipe and then packed the living daylights out of her inner cavity with the ice that Leon had thought to bring, covered her with a tarp and headed for Herring Brothers Butcher Shop in Dover-Foxcroft. Although it was a far piece from Madawaska Lake, we had both heard so many good things about the quality of their butchering work that was where we had decided on before the season to take her. Talk about a crazy scene that we found when we got there. There were moose aplenty waiting to get delivered and amongst the checking out of all the moose and hearing all the hunting stories, we could have hung around there for a few more hours easily. The butchering crew was going at full tilt and had everyone’s moose in the walk-in in short order though. By the next Saturday it was all cut, wrapped and frozen in vacuum packaging and ready to pick up. All except for the tenderloins. You can guess what was for supper that night.

Thanks for taking the time to read through my windy version of how our moose hunt went. I’ve enjoyed your stories here and think I have learned a bit more about hunting from them. Hopefully there was something here for you to take away likewise.

After our moose was down and I had had a chance to reflect on it a bit I remember the thought crossing my mind, “Is that all there is?” Getting picked in the Lottery and the opportunity to go moose hunting had loomed pretty large in my thoughts since June. And now it was over in an hour and a half. But then I began to think that there was really a heck of a lot more to it than just that 1 1/2 hour. That’s kind of why I decided to write this story. Leon and I had talked about the hunt a fair amount before heading north and one point that we had both come to was that, if we get a moose we’re going to have a great time. And if we don’t get a moose, we’re still going to have a great time. It turned out to be a great time, just like we thought.

Maine Firearms Deer Season 2004
11/15/04

The morning started out where we had six of us wanting to hunt together, but due to Maine’s laws on party size we decided to split up into two groups of three. Being the first day out for most of us, we were really just trying to locate some good spots to hunt. My dad, brother and our friend Randy decided to check out a block of woods near “4-corners”. My friend Aime, Kris and I decided to still hunt through a section of woods we call “the Blue Line”. The Blue Line had been cut a while back and it has grown up into a thick forest of Beeches on the east side of the ridge and turning to a nice cedar swamp on the west side. The Beech trees were so thick I was sweated up in no time at all and very discouraged: any deer would hear me a mile away. Kris called on the radio to say he had jumped a big doe and that it was headed my way; of course I never saw or heard that deer.

We came out and regrouped on a logging trail. Kris had a dentist’s appointment at noon so he planned on heading out of the woods by 10 at the latest. We decided that with such little time, we would all take stands in a patch of woods we call “Greenhorn Corner”, north of where we had just still-hunted through and most likely the place the doe had gone. When it was time for Kris to leave, he’d pick his way through the cover with the hopes of jumping the deer or at least getting the doe to move past us. Aime and I took stands about 300 yards apart along a brook that ran along the north and east corners of the block of woods.

I had an excellent place to sit. The brook ran along a deep gulley where I was. I was about 30 yards off the brook sitting on a fallen tree; across the brook the hill rose steeply and I had a good view of the entire hillside. To my right, the brook curved and the bankings were still steep; I could shoot in every direction except directly downstream and I’d have a good safe backstop. I hate to sit, preferring to still-hunt but I was in a great spot and I knew I’d only have to wait an hour or so before Kris was going to leave and at that point we’d check a new spot out. Aime and I both had antler-less deer permits, but I really wanted a buck. I put Aime in a spot where the year before we had jumped a big buck leaving this corner of woods; Randy ended up getting him while hunting with my brother. I knew Aime wanted meat and I figured that doe was the only deer in this little corner of woods and I really didn’t want to be tempted to fill my tag on a doe this early in the hunt.

The brook bubbled along lulling me into a calm state. A little more than an hour had past so I was starting to think I’d better move soon or I’d fall asleep! I looked across the brook as I caught some movement. It was Kris heading out to the road. He was quite a ways away but he saw me as well and nodded to me. I figured I’d wait another twenty minutes or so before calling Aime on the radio to move to another location.
Kris had just faded from my view when I heard a crash on top of the ridge directly across the brook from me. It was a deer running just below the ridge parallel to the brook heading in the direction that Kris had just come from! A doe! Wait, another deer behind it; a buck! A big buck! I picked up my rifle and immediately began tracking the deer trying to get a shot. (Holy cow he’s moving! Where did all those trees come from?) I had thought that I had some pretty clear shooting, but that buck was moving so fast all I could see in the scope was a brown blur and trees. Suddenly, the doe cut down towards the brook; she flashed through an opening in the trees… (That buck is going to follow her, get on the opening and fire when he goes through) I pulled ahead to the opening and luckily the buck followed; he flashed through and I fired, BOOM! (He’s still going, did I miss?)

The buck slowed for a second when he hit the brook; I got on him again. BOOM!

The buck jumped the brook and started climbing up the bank like nothing had happened. BOOM!

I ran up the bank and caught him in the scope again as he reached the crest of the hill. BOOM!

He turned and ran broadside to me about 30 yards away; BOOM! That was it; I was empty!

At this point I was more shook up than ever. I put the spare clip into my rifle and looked for blood. I found a few drops, but that was it. The deer crossed a logging road and by the time I hit it Kris had backtracked and caught up to me.
“Did you get her?” he asked.
“Him” I corrected,” It’s a big buck”.
“No kidding, you got blood?”
“Right where you’re standing” I said.
Kris looked down, “All right, you got this deer!”
I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t believe he didn’t drop. I felt that several of my shots felt good, why didn’t he drop?

Kris walked over to me and we talked for a few minutes so I’d calm down. We found where he crossed the road and headed into a small block of woods. At this point we saw Aime down the road. The woods where the deer went were between two woods roads. We decided to have Kris go down one, Aime on the other and I’d follow the blood. I just went up over the banking when I looked down on the other side and there he was! I called the guys on the radio to let them know he was down. I walked down and stopped about twenty feet from him and let out a whoop! Kris got to the deer first; it was as if I just couldn’t bring myself to touch him yet, like it might all be a dream. Kris started counting points and I couldn’t believe it when he got to “14”!

We got a hold of my Dad, and Rudy on the radio and they showed up a few minutes later with our friend Randy who had a camera in his truck. We took a bunch of photos right there in the woods. Being close to the road made for a simple drag. Looking at the buck laying there I knew he was a good one, but I really didn’t believe he’d go 200 lbs., the “magic” number to gain entry in the Biggest Bucks of Maine club; he just looked short to me.

We got him down to Kris’s house and hoisted him out of the truck and I took the heart, liver, and lungs out. Satisfied that he was cleaned out thoroughly, we loaded him back up and headed to town. When I got the paperwork filled out we had him officially weighed and he pulled the pin to 201! My first entry in the Big Bucks of Maine Club!

What about all the shooting I did? Well, all I can say is my Dad always told me to keep putting the lead to them until they dropped; you never know if what you think was a good shot was actually deflected by something. I had hit him 3 out of the 5 shots, one was right behind the front shoulder through the ribs, but he took those shots as if nothing had happened. All the shots I took were safe; I had good backstops and I was (believe it or not) taking aim, picking a spot; I wasn’t just spraying shots at the deer. In any event, the shots I hit him with were enough. It was a very exciting day and I didn’t get any sleep that night; just too full of adrenalin I guess.

A. Sayward Lamb is an outdoor writer and published author. He writes for U.S. Hunting Today and Maine Fishing Today.

When I think of spring I think of smelting, because it is a ritual that I have participated in since I was a boy. I cannot remember when I did not go smelting, so I must have started at a very young age. Smelts are a small, anadromous fish, which travel in schools, and are found in both fresh and salt water. The spawning runs for salt-water smelts generally occur during the late winter along the coastal bays and tidal rivers. Fresh water smelts generally begin to make their spawning runs about the time the ice breaks away from the shorelines of inland waters, and can last from a few days in small bodies of water, to as long as two weeks or more in large inland lakes.

When I think of spring I think of smelting, because it is a ritual that I have participated in since I was a boy. I cannot remember when I did not go smelting, so I must have started at a very young age. Smelts are a small, anadromous fish, which travel in schools, and are found in both fresh and salt water. The spawning runs for salt-water smelts generally occur during the late winter along the coastal bays and tidal rivers. Fresh water smelts generally begin to make their spawning runs about the time the ice breaks away from the shorelines of inland waters, and can last from a few days in small bodies of water, to as long as two weeks or more in large inland lakes.

Smelting has been a family tradition of mine for many years. I have heard my father and uncle tell me that when they were young men in high school they would hitch up their father’s work horse to a two wheeled dump cart and then go down to smelt in Rangeley Lake, not too far from where they lived. Often times others would help them fill the small cart body with smelts. The following day they would drive all over town giving smelts to anyone that wanted them. Of course in those days, (during World War I) they told me they did not recall that there were any bag limits on smelts, so they always took what they wanted, but they were taught not to waste them. That is why they always went around town giving them away. When I first started smelting the bag limit was four quarts per person, per day. Now it is two quarts, per person, per day. As far as I can find out, there is no bag limit on taking salt water smelts on hand lines while fishing through the ice on tidal waters. I believe the limit on saltwater smelts is two quarts when fishing tidal waters during open water season.

Smelting can mean going fishing from late afternoon until well into the wee hours of the morning. How long the night will be depends upon several factors. Smelts run upstream from ponds and lakes, into inlet rivers and streams, in search of sandy or gravely bottoms that will serve as suitable spawning areas for the females to deposit their eggs, while the males fertilize them with milt. Smelting also means you have to play the “waiting game”, because smelts often do not run until after dark. Most smelters plan to arrive early enough to select a good spot, especially if it is a place where large crowds gather, and most prefer to use dip nets or swing nets to make their catches. Sometimes, in shallows, where smelts move upstream over rapids and gather in small pockets, using your hands can be productive if you can stand the cold water. If the crowds are orderly, most people will wait until the smelts have run upstream in sufficient numbers so that everyone will have an opportunity to get enough smelts for a meal, and better yet, get their two quart limit.

Many changes have been made in both regulations and methods, since I was a youngster. Back in my earlier years, the limit of smelts was four quarts per person per day. Lights were seldom used, other than an occasional use of flashlights to check to see if the smelts were running. At that time, most people felt the beam from flashlights would make the smelts stop running, which was often the case. So, when people waited for the smelts to run, they frequently stood in the darkness until smelts moved upstream in sufficient numbers and then it was time to start dipping them with their nets. Most streams run very high in the spring with icy cold waters from melting snow. A lot of people fish from shore, while others dress their feet with warm stockings and use hip boots or chest waders, in order to stand out in the cold water. Dipping was done by swinging the nets “with the flow”, starting upstream and moving the net rapidly downstream, near bottom, in order to catch the smelts. Often times they would make a swing with their nets and immediately repeat the process. This would continue until each person had enough smelts in the net to make it worthwhile. Some used small pails or some other convenient container to hold the fish. Some even kept their pails on shore and would swing their nets to a fellow fisherman waiting to empty the smelts into the containers. I always found it handier to have a gallon pail held around my waist with a rope or belt. That way I didn’t have to take the time to chase my pail or take a chance of losing my chosen spot while going ashore to remove my smelts from the net.

I can remember when it was dangerous to even carry a propane lantern close to the water and allow it to shine into the water. There was always someone who would holler “Put out the light!” and if the person who had the lantern did not comply, threats of throwing him or her into the water would come forth, or even worse, rocks would start flying. Can you imagine how dangerous that was, especially in the dark? Fortunately, this did not happen very often and most of those along the streams got along very well and had a good time catching their smelts.

Eventually people discovered that the lights from a Coleman or propane lantern, would “call” the smelts. They used aluminum foil or metal to makes shields to go around the globes in order to control the amount of light they felt would bring the smelts in close enough to dip their large nets. Instead of smelting in the streams the smelters began to hang their lanterns just above the water on some type of holder, such as a metal rod, a short distance offshore. The dip nets, that can be as much as three or four feet in diameter with have very long handles, are generally placed in less than three feet of water. The light from the lantern is adjusted to provide light enough so the fishermen can see the smelts passing over their nets as they swim along the shoreline. The number of smelts that pass over their nets depends on location, and interference from other fishermen, who set up their lights nearby. Most smelters hope the schools will be so big that they cannot see the nets when they get ready to pick it up out of the water but more often this is not the case. In my own experience, I have seen as few as one or two smelts to as many as one or two quarts—it all depends!

Of course, people still smelt in the streams but with all the lanterns and dip nets set up along the shoreline, the smelts are seldom able to make their way to the streams in large numbers. The lanterns are so effective that fishermen can set up considerable distances from the inlet streams and still attract the smelts to their nets. This does serve the purpose of dispersing the crowds over a much larger area. I have seen times when I would decide the crowds were too much of a hassle and go in search of smelts after the crowds thinned out.

In recent years several bodies of water, as well as inlet streams, have been closed to smelting. Several years ago I was instrumental in getting Lake Christopher, in Woodstock and Greenwood, re-opened to the taking of smelts, by getting a petition signed by residents of those two towns, favoring the opening. One of the provisions agreed upon at a hearing with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife was to close Bowker Brook and Stone Cottage Brook. Not only were the two brooks closed, but also the perimeter around the mouth of the brooks, for a distance of two hundred feet. Doing this insured the propagation of enough smelts to provide adequate forage for the cold water species of fish in the lake, {i.e. trout and salmon}. Each body of water closed to smelting puts more pressure on those places that remain open. Once a body of water is closed to smelting, it is seldom ever re-opened to smelting. Supposedly, smelts are more valuable for food for cold water species of fish, than for human consumption. I never personally felt closing the waters to smelting resulted in any great improvement in the fishing of those particular bodies of water. Rangeley Lake was closed to smelting and in a few years the lake experienced a severe die off and thousands of dead smelts were seen floating on the surface of the water.

Another cause for closing some of the waters was due to the littering and vandalism caused by smelters. They would leave all kinds of bottles, cans and other trash alongside the streams and much of this was on private property. Smelters have been known to destroy private property and to start fires beside the streams. This sort of behavior is very detrimental to good public relations. Consequently, only the smelters themselves are to blame for some of the closures. Still, I have many fond memories of various smelting trips and I hope I convey a true meaning of what smelting is all about in the following stories.

We were fortunate to live in southwestern Maine where there are several lakes and ponds that contain smelts. I lived in West Paris when I was growing up and it was there that I first went smelting. I did not have any means of transportation but there were always friends who would invite me to go smelting with them. One of my earliest recollections was going with my brother, Newton, to Overset Pond, in Greenwood, which was about seven miles from home. The first five miles were on public roads but the remaining two miles were over logging roads owned by a local mill. A pick-up truck was the first choice for traveling into the pond but the older automobiles were built high up off from the ground, so if necessary we would ride in as far as we could safely go with a car, then walk in the rest of the way. The smelts ran at the northern end of the small pond but the road stopped on the south end. This meant a difficult walk over some very rocky terrain along the easterly side. The rocks were a result of fallen crag from a sheer cliff at least two hundred feet high immediately adjacent to the shoreline of the pond.

The small trickle that we intended to fish from was much too small to be called a brook. It was generally filled with leaves and other debris, so we always planned on the first trip in to take a spade and dig it out for a distance of fifty to sixty feet, so the smelts could run up it. No nets were necessary, because picking them up by hand was the only practical way to catch the smelts. We usually went up early in the day, in order to dig out the trickle. All the digging upset the soil, so we had to allow time enough for the silt to settle and clear the water before it was time for the smelts to run, because they do not like roiled water. While the water was clearing, we would spend our time fishing for trout in the pond. If our timing was right, the smelts would begin to run soon after dark and we generally caught enough smelts for a good feed or two and got home at a respectable hour.

Smelts generally run earlier in those ponds located in the southerly part of the state and as the season progresses, the smelt runs progressively move northward. This has the advantage of giving several weeks of smelting season, if you want to drive a few more miles. A few times each year I have traveled more than seventy-five miles, (one way), to go to the Rangeley Lakes area, or to other lakes and ponds in the Aziscohos area. Of course that is a long way to travel for only two quarts of smelts, but the enjoyment of watching all the wildlife while driving each way, makes it all worth while. When we go up north to smelt, we generally leave about four or five in the afternoon, so we get to see deer, partridges, moose, rabbits, foxes and on some rare occasions, even bobcats. On one trip up to Aziscohos Lake, I remember seeing eighteen deer and twenty-nine moose, as well as several smaller animals. This made for an interesting trip. One thing for sure, a driver has to be very careful after dark, especially late at night, when the moose are often standing beside or in the road. Their eyes do not reflect the light the same as deer and whoever is driving must be prepared to stop in a hurry to avoid a collision with those huge animals, which stand as much as seven feet high at the shoulders, and can weigh over a thousand pounds.

A couple of years ago, I was riding with Robert “Bob” Keniston, of Bethel, and we were returning home from a smelting trip to the Aziscohos area. It was nearly midnight when we came upon a bull and cow moose standing in the road. Bob saw them in time to slow down and stop. The bull left the highway while the cow moose continued to stand in the road blocking it. I suggested to Bob that he blow the horn as we approached very close to her. He blew the horn and this startled the cow moose so much that she lost her footing and fell down in the road. Of course this was not what we expected to happen. Luckily, she apparently was not hurt, and got right back up onto her feet and moved out of the way. That certainly taught me a lesson. I am sure if that ever happens again we will be more patient and not scare them. There are always several fatalities, as well as other injuries, caused each year with moose/auto collisions in the State of Maine, and we certainly do not want to become any part of those statistics.

Seldom have I come home from a smelting trip up into that North Country without any smelts. Most of the time I have managed to get my limit of smelts, without too much work. One thing I learned very early was to avoid the big crowds, so I usually do not plan to go smelting on Friday and Saturday nights. I find it much easier to get smelts by going during off-hours, such as very late at night, early morning, or during the week. Sometimes things can go wrong and that can spoil all the fun. One year, my friends Ivan & Edith Morey, of Greenwood and Harold and Alice Lothrop, of Gouldsboro, along with my wife Cynthia, all took our pick-up campers and headed for Aziscohos Lake to go smelting. The brook we planned to smelt on was fourteen miles off the main highway over paper company roads. We were about half way in on the gravel road when my truck stopped running. I had no idea what happened and when I tried to re-start the engine the starter would not work. Harold managed to get past my truck with his pick-up and towed me a short distance ahead to a place where I could back down a slight incline and get it turned around. Then he towed me back out the seven miles to the main highway and another three miles to an area beside Route 16, near Aziscohos Dam, where all three of us couples camped overnight in our respective campers. The next morning Harold towed me the rest of the way back to a garage in Errol, New Hampshire where I had the starter repaired. Needless to say, we got no smelts that night.

There are times when the smelts come easy. I remember several years ago when Eino and Waina Heikkinen and myself went smelting up to Mill Brook, located on the northerly end of Upper Richardson Lake. We arrived quite early, so we had the opportunity to find a good place to dip our smelts. While we were waiting for it to get dark, I got restless and told the other fellows that I was going to go across to the other side of the brook to see if any smelts were showing up over there. I left my net with Eino and Waina, then walked upstream a short distance and crossed over an old logging bridge to reach the other side of the brook. It was beginning to get dark but not dark enough to need a flashlight to see where I was walking. Once I left the bridge, I moved downstream along the bank of the brook to look for any smelts that might be straggling upstream. I had only gone a short distance when I could not believe my eyes. There was a line of smelts, at least a foot wide and twenty-five feet long, that had moved out of the rapids and were laying in shallow water very close to the banking of the brook. Everyone else on that side of the brook was some distance below that spot. I casually moved away from the brook and went back over to where Eino and Waina were waiting. I quietly told them to bring their nets and come with me. They asked why, but I did not want to let anyone else hear about the smelts, so I said, “You’ll see.” It was getting quite dusk by the time we got back to where the smelts were located and no one else had discovered them. We took our smelt nets and walked upstream at a fast pace, scooping up the line of smelts. By the time we reached the upper end our nets were overflowing, so we laid them on shore and filled the buckets with our limit and returned the rest of the smelts into the brook. Then we headed for home before anyone else had even started dipping smelts. We sure lucked out that night.

One year Ivan & Edith Morey, and my wife, Cynthia, and I, took our pick-up trucks and our truck campers up to Mill Brook, to try to get some smelts. We planned to dip our smelts, then camp out somewhere in the area overnight and come back home the following day. We sat around in our campers and occasionally checked the brook for smelts. I might have dipped a half dozen smelts by ten P.M., so it was apparent the smelts were not going to run hardly any that night. We finally gave up and went back to the campers. We decided to go to Sturtevant Pond, a few miles away, to see if any smelts were running there. We arrived a little before eleven p.m. and walked down a small brook almost all the way to the pond. We saw quite a few smelts in the brook so I said to Ivan, “Let’s go back and get our nets”. It may have taken us less than ten minutes to go back to the campers and get our smelt nets and pails, then return to where we had seen the smelts. We were very surprised when we arrived to find four people dipping smelts like crazy. They got their limit shortly after we arrived and then left the brook. It was very apparent they were standing in the dark when we looked in the brook and when they heard me say we should go get the nets they decided it was time for them to get to work. We did get our smelts that night on that brook but we had to wait until after midnight before enough smelts ran upstream for us to dip them. It was about two a.m. when we went back to our campers. We were sure glad to have our campers with us that night so we didn’t have a long drive home in the wee hours of the morning.

I believe my favorite place to go smelting has been up to Aziscohos Lake; mainly because I have always had good luck getting smelts around that lake. I also believe the smelts from those waters are the best tasting smelts that I have ever eaten. There are so many streams available to smelt on the lake that generally some brooks can be found where the smelts are running. For the past few years, the tributaries on the west side of the lake have been closed to taking of smelts. Prior to that, access to the west side was over paper company roads. The entrance to the logging road on that side of the lake was gated and a fellow whom I only knew as “Tom”, ran a roadside eatery at the entrance to the logging road, where you could get a cup of coffee and a hamburger, etc. Tom also tended the gate located in Wilson’s Mills. During smelting season, the gate was opened in late afternoon to allow smelters access to those streams on the west side of the lake. Sometimes, when the frost was just going out, the graveled road would have some very muddy places that seemed like bottomless pits. I have seen times when we would cut branches off evergreen trees to make a layer of boughs to help support the wheels of our vehicles, as we drove over the mud holes. The trick in making it through to terra firma was to “give her hell” and not let the wheels sink too deep in the mud. Most of the time the mud holes would not be more than the length of the vehicle, so it was imperative to keep moving when you drove over the soft spots. We never worried too much about getting stuck, because sooner or later, another vehicle would be coming along and help pull you out of a mud hole. We always considered those as a minor inconvenience and I don’t remember of anyone ever turning around and going home, rather than attempt to drive through the muddy places. I would say that the large percentage of vehicles that went over those roads were four wheel drive pick-ups and for a good reason. In recent years the tributaries on the westerly side of Aziscohos Lake have been closed to smelting, so now we have to do our smelting on the easterly side of the lake.

We were getting plenty of April showers the day that Milton Inman and I, his son Gary, and my son Ron, all went smelting up to Aziscohos Lake. We left West Paris, late in the afternoon, with threatening skies, and encountered several hard showers along the way. By the time we got to the brook it was nearly dark but surprisingly, on this week day night, there were no other smelters there.

We parked our car only a short distance from the brook and it didn’t take long before we had our hip boots and waders on. We untied our nets from the top of the station wagon and walked down to the brook to take a look. Milt and the boys had swing nets, so they planned to smelt in the brook. I had my large dip net and my propane lantern, which I intended to set up along the shoreline a short distance from the mouth of the brook We felt the smelts would be coming soon because several were beginning to straggle up stream into the rapids.

I went down and chose a spot along the shoreline, then set up my lantern on a metal stake so that it hung about a foot above the water. It was dark enough now so I lit the lantern, then adjusted the light and placed my dip net in position. I had hardly gotten myself settled into position when a large school of smelts passed over the net. I lifted it out of the water and must have had well over a pint of smelts with that one dip. I knew if this continued I wouldn’t be long getting my limit. It was misting a little bit but still very comfortable, so I continued to fill my pail with smelts. I didn’t have quite my limit when Milt appeared and said he and the boys all had their limits of smelts. I couldn’t believe it because we had not been there for even a half hour. I told him I would have my limit in another dip or two, so I might as well stay where I was and finish getting my smelts out of the lake. Milt said the brook was black with smelts when they finished getting theirs. I had my limit in only a few minutes, so I took my net, the lantern, and my smelts, and walked back up to our vehicle. I couldn’t believe there was still no one else after smelts. Maybe all the rainy weather was keeping them away.

I told Milt that I had my 35mm Minolta camera with me and would like to take some pictures of the smelts in the brook. I took my propane lantern and the camera, while Milt took his net and we went back down to the brook. This was the perfect time to see just how effective the propane light was on smelts. I placed the lantern so the light only shone a little bit on one side of the brook. Soon all the smelts in the brook worked themselves to that side of the banking. In a few minutes, I waded across the brook and placed the lantern so the light shone on the opposite side. Again, the smelts moved across the brook towards the light from the propane lantern. Not only that, but they built up in considerable numbers around the spot where the light was shining into the water. I took several photos and then I asked Milt to take one dip with his swing net. I wanted him to hold it up so that I could take a picture of the catch he had in his net. I knew then that he had well over a limit in his net. I took a picture of the smelts in his net and then Milt dumped them all back into the brook.

We went back to the station wagon and had sandwiches before we got ready to head for home. Shortly before we were ready to leave, a fellow drove down and parked nearby. When he got out of his vehicle he asked if the smelts were running. We told him he would need to take only one dip to get his limit. I think the man thought we were filling him full of “you know what”. He went down to the brook and was gone only a short time before he came back and said, “You guys were right. The brook is still black with smelts.” We had finished our lunches and got the nets tied back on to the top of our vehicle, so we headed home without even having to work up a sweat.

A few years ago a good friend, Harlan Abbott, and myself, rode up to Aziscohos Lake to go smelting. We arrived during early evening before anyone else was there. We walked a short distance downstream from where we parked our vehicle. Not long after we arrived at the shore of the lake, we decided to walk upstream and look around for a good place to wait for the smelts to run. Harlan was a short distance ahead of me when he hollered to me, “Sayward, bring the nets. This hole is full of smelts!” I had a big dip net, while Harlan had brought a smaller swing net. In this manner, we figured we had the right equipment for whatever type of smelting we would need to do to get our limits.

As soon as I arrived upstream to where Harlan was standing, we laid our plans to get our limit of smelts from that one pool which was absolutely black with smelts. I placed my dip net in the brook at the lower end of the pool, while Harlan used his swing net to dip smelts out of the pool. Of course, once he started dipping, the smelts scattered as best they could in all directions. Harlan scooped up his limit with only a couple of passes of his net. All I had to do was wait for the smelts do drift down into my net, which was blocking off the downstream end of the pool. It didn’t take long before we had our limit of smelts in our pails and were headed back to our vehicle just as it was beginning to get dark. Incidentally, we did not meet any other people coming down towards the stream until we were almost back to where our vehicle was parked. By that time, it was getting dark enough so the others could not see into our pails, so we doubted if they ever realized we already had our smelts and were headed home.

Smelting can also be a winter sport, both in fresh and salt water. I have friends Leon and Jim Baker. Their sister Marjorie and husband Francis Mailloux, live in Richmond. Francis always set up an ice-fishing shanty on the Pleasant River in Dresden. Occasionally, I would go down with one of the Baker brothers and go smelting for salt-water smelts. This was usually in the middle of February or early March. Salt water fishing for smelts was different because of the tides that effected the times when you could smelt. We would plan to be ready to fish when the ebb tide turned and began rising. We could fish until full tide. The smelt houses all had raceways cut through the ice the full length of the shanty. There was room for two men to sit comfortably and tend the twenty or so lines that were attached to a narrow board suspended over the raceway and supported by springs on each end. The fisherman could jig all the lines at once by simply taking hold of a line and pulling it down and letting the spring bring the lines back up. Each line was baited with a piece of bloodworm or a small piece of cut up smelt. Sometimes even a smelt eye on the hook, would catch smelts. Each respective fish line had a piece of white foam, about the size of a nickel, placed around the line, so it would float on the surface of the water. When the smelts bit the hook, the white foam made it a lot easier to detect the strikes. With the least bit of movement, the smelter had to give the line a quick jerk, and if the smelt was hooked the line was pulled in. Sometimes the action would be so fast that it was almost like playing the strings of a harp, only the smelts would be flopping all around your feet. There was hardly time to get the lines baited and back into the water. It was always a lot of fun when the action was that fast. I think the most I can ever remember two of us catching on one tide were a five-gallon pail full of saltwater smelts.

I also used to go down to fish in the saltwater bay near Brunswick, at a place we called the “Wrinkles”. I only went there a few times with J. Albert Jackson, of West Paris. It was a different kind of saltwater smelting because instead of fishing in water less then eight feet deep, we would be fishing by sitting outside on a bucket, with two holes chopped through the ice, that were about two to three feet apart. We used multiple lines by building a contraption out of coat hangers. We soldered five eyes made of wire, to the coat hanger, then we tied on five individual pieces of monofilament. These were about six or eight inches long. We tied our small smelt hooks to them. This made it possible to make multiple catches of the smelts on any of the five hooks that were tied on the hanger; then attached to the single line that was held with each hand. We fished in about twenty feet of water and it was easier to haul up several smelts at a time rather then one at a time.

On a couple of occasions I went with my Uncle Fred Jackson, and caught saltwater smelts by hand as they ran up some very small tributaries in the saltwater bays. I remember vividly how it felt; like grabbing onto a piece of sandpaper when we got hold of a male smelt. There was no danger of them slipping out of your hand.

It was always a lot easier to go fishing for fresh water smelts because of the close proximity of the lakes in the area where I lived. My two sons, Jim and Ron, and I, built ourselves an ice fishing house that was constructed with two by two framing, covered with aluminum sheeting, to keep it light. We also built it on skids so we could pull it on the frozen snow and ice on the lakes or pond. Our fish house had a small wood stove in one corner to help keep us warm in cold and windy weather. We would set it up on Lake Christopher in Woodstock and fish for smelts. Sometimes we would take it to South Pond where we could fish for smelts and also fish through the ice for Lake Trout , as well as Whitefish. The fresh water smelts are generally smaller than salt water smelts, so we had to use very small hooks and usually baited them with very tiny pieces of angleworms.

My son Ronald, had a commercial bait fishing license for a few years and went ice fishing for smelts in his ice fishing house on Lake Wassookeag, in Dexter, Maine. Milt Inman and I visited him one day to see what it was like. He fished in very shallow water, only six or eight feet deep and the water was very clear so we could watch the smelts that milled about in the water under his fish house. Occasionally, he would say to us, “Here comes a togue!” I asked Ron how he could tell, and he said, “By watching the smelts. They begin to move out of the way when they see the togue coming.” He went on to explain the togue do not try to catch individual smelts, but go charging through a school of smelts with tremendous speed and then return to eat the smelts that were stunned during their charge. I watched togue do this several times during the time I spent at his fishing shanty and I couldn’t believe how fast togue can swim. The smelts also did a pretty good job of moving out of the way because I did not see any stunned fish within the vision of the perimeter of the ice-fishing hole.

Smelting can be a year ‘round sport, because there are places where it is possible to jig for smelts from a boat anchored over a smelt hole during the open-water fishing season. This can be from soon after ice out until late fall. I recall one year when my sister, Elaine, was visiting over the Fourth of July holidays. One of the old Maine traditions is to have fresh garden peas and landlocked salmon for the holiday feast. We had the fresh peas and my sister remarked how nice it would be to have a salmon to go with them. I told her I would go up to Lake Christopher and see if I could catch a salmon. I went up and anchored my boat over a smelt hole and threw out a hand line weighted with a small sinker and below that was a small smelt hook baited with a small piece of angleworm. I jigged the line up and down while holding my arm over the side of the boat and before long I felt a bite on the line. I hooked the smelt and had it almost ready to bring into the boat when a salmon tore by the bait at a furious pace. It must have missed the smelt because it came jumping right out of the water. I pulled in the rest of the line and the smelt as quickly as I could and then tossed the smelt, still hooked to the line, as far as I could in the direction where the salmon had surfaced. I let the smelt sink for a couple of minutes and then started hauling in the line, hand over hand. I had only taken in a few feet of line when the salmon slammed the smelt with such force that it almost pulled the line out of my hand. I had quite a tug-of-war with the salmon, and found it quite difficult to keep the line taut while trying to play the salmon by using only my hands. How I wished the line was attached to a fishing pole. After a few minutes the salmon tired and eventually I was able to boat it. It was a pretty fish and weighed almost three pounds. I was happy to go home and tell my sister that we would be having fresh peas and salmon for our Fourth of July feed. She found it hard to believe how I had caught it, but the proof was in the eating and we certainly did enjoy our holiday meal.

I have fished for smelts on Aziscohos Lake in the summer and on a few occasions have brought back enough smelts for a good feed. Mostly though I have kept them for sewing bait for togue fishing, because they are large smelts and have good action when used for trolling. Some people who go up there smelting in the summer, take their fish poles and as soon as they catch smelts, they put one on a hook and throw the baited fish lines over the side of their boats and let them sink to the bottom the lake. Often they will catch trout or salmon, which pick up the smelts off from the bottom. I have never gone there very often to do this type of summer smelt fishing, mainly because I guess I am too busy doing other things and doing other types of fishing in lakes and ponds that are nearer to my home.

As I write this another smelting season is fast approaching and with good luck I hope to enjoy the experiences of another year of smelting. I am over seventy-six years old right now and have no idea how old I will be before I hang up my smelt nets. One thing for sure, a feed of smelts, fried up to a crispy golden brown, along with some dandelion greens, and a few french-fries, sure make a wonderful springtime meal.

By A. Sayward Lamb

Keith Sutton
15601 Mountain Drive
Alexander, AR 72002
501-847-9643
catfishdude@sbcglobal.net

10 Reasons I Love Dove Hunting
By Keith “Catfish” Sutton

Headline: The author, an experienced upland hunter, tells why mourning doves are, for him, the most favored of all game animals.

“Behind you! Look behind you!”

The muffled shout came from our hunting companion Lewis Peeler. My son Zach and I looked around just in time to see a low-flying mourning dove streaking into the field of cut sunflowers.

“Get him, Zach!” I said.

Zach swung his single-shot 20 gauge behind the bird, pulled the trigger and grinned a big grin when the dove tumbled in a puff of feathers.

“Nice shot, Zach,” Lew called out.

Seconds later, we found three more doves nearly on top of us, dodging and dipping like bantam kamikazes. As they passed us, we shouldered our shotguns and fired. Zach bagged his bird, but by some strange quirk, I missed mine.

It was my turn to play retriever, but before I could reach the bird, Zach called “Here come some more, Dad.” I dropped to a squat as a tight group of five or six doves winged by out of range. Lewis was ready and downed two as the cluster broke up. Gray streaks skedaddled for safer air space in all directions.

Two of the streaks veered my way. I shot twice and missed. Zach lowered the boom on one dove; the other hugged the ground as it rocketed across the field.

When I returned to our hiding spot at the edge of the field, I realized I was down to my last three shotshells. I had started with three boxes.

“How many shells you got left, Zach?” I asked.

“I still have a whole box,” he replied.

“How many doves have you killed?” I asked.

“Eleven,” he shot back. “How many have you killed?”

“That’s not important, son,” I replied. “What’s important is, we’re having fun.”

Chances are, I’ll never live down the fact that 13-year-old Zach, on his first dove hunt, managed to bag almost three times as many doves as his dad using half as many shells. When I tell my friends that this clearly illustrates the fact that I am such a good shooting instructor, they cover their mouths and make funny chuckling sounds.

Zach and I certainly did have fun on that opening day hunt, however, and I’m here to tell you this is one youngster who’s now thoroughly hooked on hunting. We’ve hunted many types of game since Zach was big enough to safely carry a gun, but he’s never shown the enthusiasm I saw that day when our hunt was over.

“When can we go again, Dad?” he asked. “This is FUN!”

I started hunting doves when I was about Zach’s age, and I suppose in many ways, the fine wingshooting I enjoyed back then is responsible for my lifelong love of hunting. Dove hunting was then, and still is, my favorite type of hunting. Here’s why.

Reason 1: Lots of shooting going on. What I like most about dove hunting is the shooting. An exceptional wingshot might pop off no more than 15 rounds and have a limit of doves. As you’ve already discovered, however, I’m below average in the marksmanship department, totally missing 90 percent of the doves that fly by. As a consequence, I shoot more than most folks—an average of 75-100 shells per outing. I love shooting, and a good dove hunt lets me bang away until my shoulder’s totally black and blue.

Reason 2: Hunting season begins. By the time opening day of dove season arrives, several “huntless” months have passed and I’m eager to go afield. Dove hunting is a way to celebrate the end of the long hunting drought.

Reason 3: Camaraderie abounds. Some hunting sports are, in their execution, solo sports. Not so dove hunting. It’s not unusual for 20 or more hunters to gather for a shoot in a sunflower or milo field, and often as not, before and after the hunt everyone has a chance to visit and enjoy a good meal. Dove hunts are social events, and being the socialite I am, I thoroughly enjoy these get-togethers.

Reason 4: Silence is not a prerequisite for success. Folks who know me will tell you I never was much good at being quiet. A bull in a china shop exhibits more stealth than Senor Catfish. When I’m dove hunting, however, I don’t have to worry about sneaking up on the game or waiting quietly for an animal to appear. I can talk incessantly if my partners will put up with it, and there’s even occasion to do a little shouting when my buddies don’t see birds winging their way. A blabbermouth like me feels right at home.

Reason 5: Dove hunting is a sedentary sport. In other words, I don’t have to climb mountains or trees, trek through swamps or walk miles into the backcountry to enjoy good hunting. I drive right up beside the field, walk a short distance, sit my fat, lazy butt on a bucket and enjoy all the shooting I can stand.

Reason 6: No need to be an early bird. Yes, dove hunting probably is a bit better at dawn. But experience shows an 8 a.m. start time can be almost as productive, and afternoon shooting can be pretty good, too. I can get some much-needed beauty rest and still not miss the action.

Reason 7: Even cheapskates can be dove hunters. You don’t need a boat, 4×4 pickup, decoys, dogs, expensive firearms or fancy accessories for dove hunting. Even the shotshells are cheap. For a low-income hack like me, this is good news.

Reason 8: It’s warm outside. Dove season gets started long before winter weather turns sour. This means the mosquitoes may be bad at times, but I won’t be suffering from frozen toes or frostbitten ears. Wimps, rejoice!

Reason 9: Dove breasts are gourmet fixings. Granted, they’re small. But dove breasts wrapped in bacon and slow-cooked over charcoal are to die for.

Reason 10: Family fun is guaranteed. There’s no better way to enjoy a day with a beginning hunter than sitting in a dove field together, laughing, talking and shooting for hours on end. Take your kids. Take your wife. Take your friends and relatives. There’s no better way to get someone hooked on hunting.

So there you have it—some of the “pros” of dove hunting.

And the cons? Well, for the moment, I can only think of one. My 13-year-old son has been out shooting me by a substantial margin, and I’ll never hear the end of it.

Come to think of it, though, that’s one of the pros. A well-earned smile on Zach’s face makes every dove hunt unforgettable, and that, too, gives me reason to love this sport.