BIG SIGN

  I apologize to my readers for going blank. It being the first week of gun season, I've been busy. Since it's pouring rain this morning, I slept in. Here's the update:

   The metal finally went on the shul roof on Saturday and was finished on Wed. What a relief. Call me a drama queen, but you try letting a roofer rip off half the shingles on an old roof, then not show up or call for days on end, and see how dramatic you become. No matter how badly a roof is leaking, it can always get worse. If it gets bad enough it can collapse. Having a good roofer on your team is invaluable. After calling my ex-roofer on his racist tendencies, he refused to work for me anymore. When the new guys left the tarp flapping in the breeze, with rain coming, and no word, I was more than willing to overlook a little racism. But some things you can't change. My advice: never talk race politics with any sub-contractors. But back to deer season.

   I'm hunting two big deer in two different areas, and haven't seen either. What I have seen is sign. Last year, near the end of the season, I noticed rubs (gouges and rips of tree bark by deer antlers) on GNJohn's mountain, so high on the tree they had to be made by a big deer. This year the rub line is back. The same deer, now a year older and bigger is running the same ridge. I moved my stand all the way up the mountain. Opening morning found me climbing that hill in the dark, trying to avoid tripping over branches and rocks. I stumbled around a black rock and it moved..... a porcupine. Phew! Wouldn't want to grab on that in the dark. Finally making it into the stand by 6:15 am, I settled in for the day.
   A doe bedded down in front of me, then moved right under my stand, to munch on hemlock branches I had trimmed by 7 am. Two more does and one big bodied deer, I couldn't make out, completed my 11 hour sit on a postage stamp- not much action for a long opening day. My ass was killing me. Opening day night dinner at Mupp and Ginger's saw us all gathered swapping stories. Among the hunters- Mupp, Savage, Waders and myself, nobody had the safety off.
   The rest of the week has been more of the same- high wind and low deer numbers. Milawyer showed up from West Virginia and the two of us have been hunting, eating and drinking hard all week. Neither of us have seen anything worth shooting. Then, as I got down from my stand at Majestic, I almost stepped in a giant pile of bear shit- more sign. Moving to "the bowl" I snuggled behind a deadfall and finished out the afternoon. It was here I saw something I hadn't seen in years. A green, two inch diameter sapling was scrapped raw, and snapped in half. The one other time I had witnessed this, I also saw the deer that did the damage, down at Mupp's. It was easily the biggest deer I'd ever seen in my life. My heart beat faster. I'd already had intelligence from Buddy Budde that a big deer was on the farm. Here was the proof. When I showed Buddy a pic of the big seven I shot in Oct., he reacted nonplussed. "That's the little one." he informed me in his classic whine. Two big deer and a bear are roaming my hunting grounds. I've seen the sign. Now all I need is a shot.