Slim Randles'  Home Country

A hunter's morning

[October 24, 2009]  The first one to come in was the flicker. Later, when the others showed up, I called him Flicker 1. He landed on a branch near me and never even looked my way. He scratched his face with a claw and looked around, then flew up to a nearby aspen tree.

I was invisible, you see. I had taken my alfalfa pills each day before the hunt, to destroy human odor, and then I dressed like a pile of leaves -- we hunters call it camo -- to finish the job.

Flickers 2 and 3 landed on dead aspen logs, which lay as starkly bleached bones of the forest, and then the birds playfully attacked each other.

Something at my feet drew my attention. About six feet from my boots, a mouse came out of a hole in a rotten stump and looked around. He stared at the quarreling woodpeckers, then looked to the sky for hawks or owls, or maybe just to check the weather. I was a Brobdingnagian giant many hundreds of times his size and weight, but he didn't see me or even look my way.

He began whisking then. He'd whisk to the right and look for stuff. Then he'd whisk to the left, and this time he found a tiny seed and decided soup was on. To my amazement, he sat on his haunches and ate this seed less than a foot from my left boot. Two seeds later, he ducked back down his hole to check on the kids, while I sat saturated in the golden anticipation of the hunt.

I swiveled my neck again to see if any suicidal elk had stopped by my hiddens ground blind.

Nope.

Back at the Mule Barn for lunch, Doc asked if I'd seen any elk.

"Not this morning," I said, grinning to myself. "Nice weather, though."

Hey, there's more to bowhunting than just shooting arrows.

[Text from file received from Slim Randles]

Brought to you by Slim's Alaska thriller, "Raven's Prey." Order it at www.slimrandles.com.