Fun Was Still Had

Now that it is Tuesday, and I have had a couple nights to sleep on the happenings of Saturday morning, I have calmed down a bit. I thought about the weekend as a whole and not just about losing the deer and I realized I still had a really good time. After a brief sit in my stand Sunday morning Tim came and picked me up in the truck and suggested we load up the Big Red and go check out an area he calls the flooded timber.

I had been in the flooded timber before but to a point he says is just the beginning. This was where I had one of my first bird hunting experiences though I was wielding a golden retriever on a leash instead of a shotgun. My memory of this place is a special one for it was there that I saw more birds than I have ever seen at one time in my life. That day, Tim fired his three shots into a flock and all hell broke loose. The black cloud rose up from the depths of the swamp in a massive spiraling cyclone like nothing I can describe. Angus, the golden retriever, nearly ripped both my arms off in his excitement. There were all varieties of ducks and geese that day. There was no way to count them. Tim ended up with five blue winged teal from his three shots. Not bad at all.

Blue Grass Sod Farm - Apparently some of this grass went to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Getting back to this Sunday, we loaded up the trike and drove out to the Blue Grass Sod Farms where we have permission to park and use the entrance trail to the flooded timber. It was really wet and muddy and the old three wheeler with both of us on it was getting bogged down. We decided to try the other side of the ancient man made channel in hopes that there might be a shallow point where we could cross. We soon discovered that this was not going to happen unless we felt like going for a dip in the icy, rushing water. Not happening. We decided to just follow the side of the channel we were already on and go for an adventure to see what we could find.

The first thing we found was a giant ant hill that materialized under one of the rear wheels of the trike sending Tim into a face plant in the thistles and myself into an acrobatic tumble trying to keep my bow from smashing to the ground with us. I was a little ticked at first that we had tipped the trike but the image of Tim diving face first into the ground had me rolling on the ground in a fit of laughter. We were unharmed in the fall which is why it became funny after wards and I could not, for the life of me, control my giggling for the rest of the trip.

After our tumble we continued on our merry little way trying to find old trails that Tim recalled from ten years ago or more. Apparently no one else had attempted these 'trails' in probably the same amount of time because we were doing some major bushwhacking. I discovered that all of my hunting clothing was designed to attract burrs. We veered off the 'trail' and decided to try crossing an old sod field that had been left to grow over. This was better. Deer trails and beds galore. We found another 'road' that Tim said used to be under water. There was another man made channel beside this road which explained why this part of the forest was no longer submerged. This was fine with me, as I prefer dry land over swampy mush and unknown underwater 'things' any day. We rode down this road flanking the channel for a while, scaring up a lone blue phased snow goose(which I had never seen before), until Tim spotted something else up ahead. There was a large, dark figure moving along the tree line way up at the end of the road. I saw it too until it vanished back into the trees. We figured it must have been a moose, or the biggest bear that ever existed. We continued up to the point where we had seen the shadowy figure and discovered yet another waterway. This one was a natural creek that joined the channel and continued down it's natural path further into the woods. This is a spot where I would just die to have a trail camera. The tracks we found were unbelievable. There were deer highways packed in the mud at the water's edge. We did find some moose tracks that looked fresh in the wet mud that we figured belonged to a calf. This was most likely what we had seen. There was also a set of huge, wide deer tracks with talons behind that we thought must belong to a pretty decent buck. This spot was really beautiful and caused dreams of hunting moose to waft through my mind.

Moose Trail?

There was a fresh looking quad trail veering off from this point at the end of the channel. We went down there a little ways but the ground was getting spongy and we were bogging down in the mud. We parked by what appeared to be a moose trail crossing through the brush and Tim walked ahead to scope out the rest of the trail. I stayed by the trike since I only had my hikers on and he had rubber boots. By the time he got back all the black flies in the area had started an attempt to feast on my head so I wasn't terribly disappointed to hear that the trail was too wet to proceed any further. We turned around and made our rather uneventful journey back to the truck.

Our last excitement of the adventure was one of the boards of our trike ramp breaking and Tim almost getting crushed by old Big Red. Again, this only became funny after it was established that he was fine other than a skinned knuckle. I was lost in yet another fit of giggles the entire drive back to the cottage wishing I had Tim's face plant on film. I'm sorry I know you are going to read this Tim but that was just way too funny. Thank you for a fantastic day.

Cheers all, and have fun hunting even if you don't get anything!