Winter won’t officially be here for another two days, but the weather’s got a head-start on the season.
It’s already snowed a few times since fall, and on two occasions it was enough to make the roads a mess for my early-morning ride to work. It’s cold, too. As I write this, the temperature has dipped into the teens, and it’s supposed to plummet to 2 degrees.
While I like going out in the snow, it seems I’m always busy when we have a storm. By the time I’ve got a couple hours of daylight to spare outdoors, we’ve traded in the snow for the bitter cold, and a hike is the furthest thing from my mind. So I’ll bide my time until the weather and my schedule line up, or I just can’t take being indoors any more.
Others, though, are a bit more dedicated. My friend and neighbor Devin Rowley has been spending plenty of time in the woods, and I’ve been living vicariously through him.
By luck of the draw, he got a doe permit this year, and has been out hunting with his muzzle-loader every chance he gets. I’ve never been a hunter myself, but I’ve got to respect someone who freezes their butt off in the woods for their supper. Half the time, my own dinner choices are made based on what would take the least effort.
He was almost sure he wouldn’t get a deer this year.
“It’s the curse of the doe permit,” he explained. “The year you get one, you won’t see a single doe or a buck.”
A nighttime text a couple weeks back informed me that he was tracking a wounded deer through the woods behind his grandmother’s off Green River Road in Greenfield. His brother had wounded it, but lost the trail, so he called Devin in for help.
They trudged through the snow from late afternoon until 10:30 p.m., and finally had to give up for the night.
Devin set out first thing the next morning, and tracked the young buck to a spot about two miles from where it was shot. By then, though, coyotes had gotten to it. Still, he cleaned the kill and brought it to the check-in station.
“The game warden said he wouldn’t feed it to his family, but I wanted to do the ethical thing and bring it to the station so they could record it,” he said.
Turns out it paid off. A few days later, I ran into him while coming home — he looked triumphant.
“I got my doe,” he beamed.
He’d been back in those same woods, when just before sunset, a doe came within site of his tree stand, and he drew a bead on it.
“I shot, and then right after, I heard a couple other shots in the distance,” he said.
His deer, wounded, ran straight up a hill, and before he’d had time to climb down, two more deer ran through the area, away from the other shots.
“If I had a pump shotgun, I could’ve gotten one of those, too,” he said.
He settled for the one deer, and tracked it about a mile through tough terrain, only to have to drag it back, fighting to keep himself from careening down the hill when gravity took hold. After dressing it and taking a couple quick cuts of meat, he took it to Adams Farm, where they told him it was about 160 pounds, dressed.
While there’s something appealing about the primal nature of tracking and hunting one’s food, it still seems like an awful lot of work to me.
David Rainville is a former reporter and editor for The Recorder, who now works as a machinist. He enjoys finding new ways to explore the outdoors. You can reach him at daverain82@gmail.com