Rubbing Shoulders

As I get older, I seem to like hunting closer to the house as opposed to driving for a half an hour to get to a good spot. If I'm planning to be out all day, I don't mind the drive. But just for a few hours, well I'm just fine with driving up or down the road a couple miles from the house and spending that extra half an hour hiking in the dark and watching the sky go from black to a dim light on the horizon and then turning all of those different and beautiful colors. I'm not sure why I do this, especially when I know that I could be more successful if I drove just a little further, even if it means hunting a little less. It can't be laziness, because the places that I hunt around our home are downright rugged and tough. It keeps me in shape. I keep telling myself that I'm going to keep hunting these tough and mountainous spots for as long as I can and then when my knees get to hurting too bad, I’ll switch to some flatter terrain. But until then, there's something about hunting in these mountains close to my house that I really love, so I guess I will keep doing that.

On occasion I'll be talking to my friends and hear about their successes and I will shift tactics and start getting serious about what I need to do to get in on the action. Generally that means getting in the truck and driving a little further than I like, closer to farmland where the different edges of forest and fields and swamps all connive to make great habitat for deer and turkeys. And that means getting up a little earlier to leave the house and leaving the woods sooner so that I can get home to do whatever it is that I have planned for the day. Basically it all adds up to spending more time in the truck and less in the woods.

Today was one of those days when I really wanted to get some things done. Today was my blog day and on top of that I was also dying to turkey hunt. I don't like being on my phone when I'm hunting, but sometimes it's better than not hunting. In fact, a lot of my writing happens in the woods. So I drove up the road to one of the prettiest places in the world. The only problem with this place is that it is public land and it gets hunted so hard. My idea was to take my little hunting chair and to cluck a couple of times and just sit there and write my blog. As much pressure as the turkeys have had lately, I wasn't expecting them to gooble, but it's still a great place to be. The fact that my daughter Aiyana had called in a longbeard to this very spot the week before made it appealing. Other than a couple of clucks, it hadn't made a sound. Just because they don't gobble, doesn't mean that they aren't there.

I sat in my little chair and watched it get daylight. It was a cloudy and foggy morning but I was high enough up in elevation that it was amazingly beautiful, with the cloudlike fog laying in the ravines and hollows below. I took it all in. So beautiful and so many birds singing. But no gobbles. After soaking in the moment, I thought I had better get a start on my blog. That's when I discovered that my phone wasn't in its usual pocket. In fact it wasn't in any of my pockets. I checked and double checked. My vest seems to have thousands of pockets, maybe it was in one of them. But it wasn't. I must have left it at home.

I decided I would sit there for a a bit before heading back to the truck. I clucked a couple of times on my box call and heard a hen clucking behind me, but she didn't show her face. She didn't seem happy about having another hen in town. Whether or not she had a boyfriend with her I'll never know. But if she did, he didn't gobble, and she headed up the bank and on out the ridge.

After waiting a little longer, I decided I better head to the truck if I wanted to get anything done for the day. And so I did. When I got back to the truck I heard a notification ding. My phone was in the bottom of my pack. I usually take my pack with me, and I usually don't take a chair. My pack holds a first aid kit, snacks, and an extra jacket and hat and makes a decent seat so that your butt doesn't get wet. It's not as comfortable as a turkey hunting chair, but it's a lot easier to move with a pack then it is a chair. Since I like to move a lot I rarely take a chair. But today I took the chair. 

So it goes!  I figured I wasted enough time walking and drove home. I took my chair, and my phone, and my calls, and gun. I double checked on the phone and went and sat behind the house. I didn't hear a turkey but it was a nice place to write. A squirrel came over and scoped me out. There's always so much life in these woods. It's why I like being out here so much.

My thoughts went back to yesterday, to what I originally intended to write my blog about. Blake was playing on the worship band and so I had taken him to church so he could get some early practice in before the service. One of my older and wiser friends was there setting up chairs. He's an avid fly fisherman and so the subject went straight from “good morning” to trout fishing, which was fine by me.  He hasn't been catching the trout like he usually does. They just don't seem to be as big this year. These are stocked fish and so those things will vary over the years, but still, it would be nice to catch some bigger fish. His friends are telling him that he needs to go to Bear Creek. That seems to be the spot this year. But he just loves fishing the stream close to his shop. In the time that it takes him to drive to Bear Creek, he could probably catch a couple of fish. They might only be eight or nine inches long but they're still fun to catch. 

I told him about my favorite hunting spots, that they seemed similar to his fishing spots this year. Maybe not the best, but something about them makes me love being there.

He agreed with “we are so lucky to live where we live”!

I replied with something down the lines of how rubbing shoulders with other people makes us think we need to find a better place to be.

He replied with, “That's it Dwight! When we're out there, we're rubbing shoulders with the Almighty! That's who we're really rubbing shoulders with and that's why we like to be out there! And that's why I keep fishing behind my shop”.

As I thought about my phone, about the “what if I'd stayed at my first spot, would I have been able to fill my tag?”  

As I was thinking about everything and what Lynn had said the day before, filling my tag really wasn't a big deal. I went home with an empty tag, but I had a full heart.

I'm pretty sure that it had everything to do with who I was rubbing shoulders with! Hope you're enjoying your favorite spots too!