The Frontier...and White Meat

 

Adversaries...not enemies.

The day I lost my mother, exactly one month after I had lost my sister to an inglorious battle against cancer, I started looking for a different but challenging hunt in the very near future. With all the COVID-19 restrictions in place the hunt had to be in a place that I could drive to.

 

After some internet searching, email’s exchanges, and a couple phone calls, I booked a seven-day mountain lion hunt with Great Plains Outfitters, to be carried out of what we found out to be a great lodge near Hyattville, Wyoming, in the first half of January 2021.

 

During the last three months of 2020 I hunted, mostly with friends, woodcock and grouse, pheasants, whitetail deer, mallards and geese, in our home state of Michigan, as well as South Dakota and the Nebraska/Wyoming border. Considering the time that I spent hunting, plus the amount of work that I could not avoiding doing, brought me to Christmas without having planned my trip, beyond the original decision to drive the fifteen hundred or so miles that separated us from my hunt.

 

During the holidays I either convinced or coerced my wife to come along, and started planning a good old fashioned road trip. In order to avoid the always chaotic Chicago transit we drove north from Traverse City and crossed the Mackinac Bridge under less than perfect weather before turning west on US-2. Due to the Michigan lockdown, we could not stop at one of my all-time favorite breakfast restaurants, Drifters in Escanaba. But in another hour or so we crossed into Wisconsin and stopped at the first restaurant we saw, La Cabaña.

 

Our next stop was a hotel in Albert Lea, Minnesota, another lockdown state, so for dinner we had a picnic at the hotel room from the contents of our cooler. Venison jerk, devilled eggs, cheeses and cold cuts, dark chocolate and of course some heavenly brown liquor. All things considered, not a bad meal.

 

Our stop in South Dakota was literally a breath of fresh air! No mask restrictions, restaurants open, and a wonderful sunset over Rapid City. The next day we visited Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park, where we saw bison, pronghorn antelope, whitetail and mule deer. When we came to Wind Cave National Park, we saw our first prairie dogs and eventually a lonely badger on its way to have a good time on a prairie dog town, depending on perspectives of course.

 

On the second Friday of the year, we drove over icy roads and under a heavy cloud cover to Devil’s Tower National Park. We braved the weather and hiked around the fantastic rock formation from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and took our fair share of sliding and falling on the ice-covered trails. The fresh snow allowed us to identify a multitude of tracks, deer, rabbit and squirrel, fox, coyote and maybe wolf, and a rather fresh black bear going straight into the boulders at the base of the tower. Eventually we came across a whitetail doe and a couple of yearlings, as tame as park deer will ever be.

 

From Devil’s Tower we made a quick refueling stop at the hamlet of Hulett and then proceeded in a mostly northwest route to Cody, where we spent the weekend at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and what a fantastic time that was. My initial motivation and goal was to visit the new Cody Firearms Museum, but the over five-thousand-gun exhibit was overshadowed by the beauty of the Draper Natural History Museum with its display of the high plains and Rocky Mountain wildlife, the deeply emotional Plains Indian Museum, the breath taking Whitney Western Art Museum and for someone that grew up watching cowboy movies, either fighting bad guys or not so bad Indians, the Buffalo Bill Museum.

 

Maria was deeply impacted by the somber tones and sad history that still plagues the Plain Indians, but I must confess that when I came across Theodore Roosevelt’s saddle from when he was a cattle rancher in Medora tears came to my eyes.

 

Eventually on Sunday afternoon we took to the road again towards Hyattville and the beginning of our hunt. We always elected to drive with daylight, so we could not only gorge our eyes with the beautiful western landscapes, but keep a sharp hunter’s eye (or in our case four) towards pronghorn, mule deer or whitetail, plus the eventual bald or golden eagles.

 

As the sun was setting we arrived at the lodge, where outfitter Dirk Jenkins greeted me with a most appropriate “I presume you are Rodrigo” and Nate Lopez, our guide to be, started unloading our gear with the same energy he would repeatedly demonstrate during the week long hunt. Shortly after we met Andrew Ward from North Carolina, also there to hunt mountain lion, and a gentleman from the very first moment.

 

Next morning, we started to get acquainted with the mountain lion hunting routine: wake up at four AM, get ready and grab the gear, have the breakfast and pack the lunch prepared by Jen, and get in the truck before five, with the hounds already eager for the chase.

 

The goal was to reach tracking snow, that was completely missing at the 4,500 feet elevation of the lodge, but once we gained a thousand feet or so there was plenty of snow, but little or no fresh powder that would show a track like words in a book. Most of the snow was hardened and crusted by the sun almost always present over the western deep blue sky. And then we are forced to remember that more than anything we hunt according to the weather, and there is really nothing anything that anyone can do about it.

 

Morning after morning we would climb the Big Rocky National Forest trails as high as 7,500 feet. Nate’s eyes were constantly searching the snow for round tracks with four well defined toes without sign of claws or nails. From a distance mountain lion and moose tracks can be deceivingly similar, especially on a hard crust.

 

Not having seen fresh tracks up the mountain we would come down and drive by the lodge and through a sleepy Hyattville and scout a couple different canyons before reaching Ten Sleep. Tacking Highway 16 we would continue to look for tracks, and be thankful for the almost absent vehicles, with stops at the Wigwam Rearing Station and the Ten Sleep Fish Hatchery where we always found tracks of a pair of mountain lions in the process of getting engaged. Eventually we would head south to what became my favorite place, the South Fork of the Otter Creek range, with its snow covered plateau ranging from 5,500 to 6,000 feet in elevation, scared by ravines that could conceal a whole army, let alone a solitary mountain lion, leading to deep canyons where the pine and cedars disguised the broken terrain underneath them. Deer and pronghorn abounded, providing a potential banquet for the enterprising predator.

 

Houndsmen are a different breed. They live for their hounds and for the chase. What is important is the intricate detective work of finding a somewhat fresh trail, releasing the dogs and following every moment of the chase, and once in a while tree their prey, be it mountain lion, bear or whatever they set their mind upon. They love their hounds and those hounds, fit endurance runners, also live for the chase, maybe even more than their masters.

 

The chase can be dull or exciting, and there is always a dangerous undertone to it, coming from their prey, the wild terrain or the ever changing weather conditions. But despite the danger, or because of it, hounds and houndsmen are always entranced by the chase. And just like the bird hunter’s heart and hopes ride on the nose of a pointing dog, the houndsmen rejoice on the baying of their hounds.

 

At first it may be disheartening for the inexperienced hunter to hear the houndsmen talk about a track. This track is two days old, or four days old, or from a small lion or a female. What they know that we had not learned yet is that a lion may only move a half mile on a day, and what nobody knows is whether that same animal just killed a deer soon after making those tracks and may be gorging itself on the kill for several days. Or that a young female may come into heat and attract a male from another canyon that is out of reach of trucks and even of snow machines.

 

On Wednesday, Nate and Braden released six hounds on a four-day old track. Braden with his long slender legs, and the energy and drive of the young and dumb (as opposed to us, old and frail) followed the dogs, while Nate, Maria and I enjoyed the relative comfort of the truck cabin and verbally abused each other to different degrees of inappropriateness.

 

When Nate defined that a lion was treed he braved the deep snow with his truck to get us as close as possible to the tree. All hounds have GPS collars and if they are not moving, they have treed something, and the collars can sense if the hounds are barking, and they are properly trained to only bark at bay.

 

In order to hunt a mountain lion, which may be the quintessential American animal, present from Patagonia to Canada, I chose what I believe is the quintessential American rifle, a lever action in 30-30 WCF. Instead of a Winchester 94 I used a 1980’s vintage Marlin 336, and the reason was that the Marlin is much easier to scope than the Winchester. And at my age, a scope is the only responsible way to shoot a rifle. Fifty plus eyes don’t see small iron sights well under challenging light conditions.

 

But before I loaded my rifle I checked if my hiking boots were properly laced and if my snow gathers were secure. You can hunt mountain lions without a rifle, but not without boots and gaiters.

 

On the first half a mile we gained around two hundred feet in elevation, and on the last quarter mile we lost three or four hundred, walking sideways like a crab, and grabbing on branches, tree trunks or rocks to get to the edge of the deep canyon where the pack of hounds bayed at a young female lion crouched on the branches of a rather tall cedar. Nate and Braden were disappointed that we had treed a young female, but seeing our first wild cougar, panther or catamount, whichever way you decided to call a Puma concolor was a prize in itself.

 

It also was the perfect example of how selective hunting with hounds can be. First, it is all but impossible to hunt mountain lion without hounds. They are shy, secretive animals that not only enjoy but thrive in solitude, and unless there is really fresh snow I don’t know of a person that can effectively track one of them. Different than leopard, mountain lion won’t eat carrion or come to bait. They only eat what they kill, while it is fresh. So they kill about a deer per week, and spend two or three days on the repast and then sleep it away. They may or may not come to a game call, or you may just happen upon one when hunting another animal, but in either case the hunter will have little time to assess age and sex before taking a shot. That is not the case when the hounds have treed a cat.

 

The image of that lite yet powerful animal against the blue sky will forever be with me. After a lot of pictures, we started back to the truck, and during the next half hour Wyoming gave us a little demonstration of how the humor of the great plains can change, from the already mentioned beautiful blue sky to a snow blizzard with sixty miles per hour wind and slit petering our faces. This is a tough country, and one must be always prepared to deal with the unexpected, or risk not making it.

 

Back at the lodge, Dirk thanked me for not shooting the young female, saying that it holds the future of the species in all the liters she may have in the future. Two days later, also in the Otter Creed range, we treed another female, larger than the first, again under blue skies, but in single digit temperatures. Will I continue to have the strength to be a selective hunter?

 

During the next two days everybody hunted with renewed energy, even Jen, Dirk’s wife and the lodge cook, would take a truck loaded with hounds and drive the most difficult mountain trails trying to cross fresh tracks. But the lack of fresh tracking snow put a damper on the efforts. We released the hounds on different tracks, but lions travel some of the most difficult country one can imagine, and even the most willing hound can only climb so much. Nate started waking up even earlier, so we would have a couple hours of scouting before our normal five AM departure.

 

Sunday would be our last day. There were new hunters scheduled to arrive on Monday, so extending the trip was out of question. As we had seen the freshest tracks around the fish hatchery we decided to start our day there, but as soon as Nate found tracks from the previous night it was obvious that the mountain lion had crossed Highway 16, possibly heading to Bureau of Land Management land. Nate wanted to release the hounds there and take the risk with the traffic, but I told him that although I really wanted a lion, I could not accept to endanger his dogs in that manner. So, we once again drove to the Otter Creek range.

 

It was another beautiful sunny day and the temperature quickly climbed to the mid-twenties. Once we waded Otter Creek we let the dogs out for their morning stretch, like we had been doing every day, and continue on the dirty roads that were becoming more and more familiar to us. We saw the same old tracks, complained that the pronghorn had moved away, ate our lunch in the truck, continue to pester each other and watched the clock move ahead, with every second conspiring against the odds of us ever getting a cat.

 

Around one PM we crossed Otter Creek for the last time, but instead of turning north towards Ten Sleep and the lodge, Nate took the opposite direction and not a quarter mile down the road we crossed the tracks of female with a kitten. We let the hounds out and they were soon gone, but hit a large bare spot were the sun had melted all the snow, and returned after losing the scent in less than half an hour. And the clock kept ticking.

 

During the week I was always amazed at the number of deer that we saw; whitetail in the draws, mule deer up high, antelope were they could see far away, and the whole time Nate would tease me for only looking out for deer and not having my eyes down on the road looking for tracks. Well, some miles than the road we see this beautiful whitetail buck, with a heavy tall rack, not very wide, a good eight-pointer, maybe a ten. He crossed the road right to left, and went into a ravine, and in another quarter mile or so recrossed the road once again and dove inside a bushy draw doing what big whitetails do best, bend our minds with false hopes before they vanish forever.

 

We kept on driving and I kept on the lookout for better deer, and Nate kept chastising me for not looking down for tracks, but a few minutes from the last sight of that big buck an apparition shocked me. A large tan body over the white snow. Not thirty yards from the passenger side of the truck a mountain lion stared straight into my soul!

 

Immediately I told Nate to stop the truck as the mountain lion was right there. He thought that was joking while the big cat sneaked under some lonely pines. Now the binoculars that had only seen deer and hounds on some bare canyon sides were scanning a large powerful predator immersed in the shadows.

 

I asked Maria for my rifle, but the lion started to make its “exit, stage right”, climbing over the ridge to get lost in one of the endless canyons that surrounded us. Although it was past way past 2 PM, the unofficial deadline to release hounds, the cat was too close and the trail too fresh and the hunt too far gone, so Nate promptly released Lilly, Lady and Zeek.

 

And the hounds treed that lion in a quarter mile, and then things started going really strange. While we were getting ready to move to the baying two of the collar signals disappeared. As I loaded my Marlin, Nate told Maria that although she had been with us for all the hunt, this time she would have to stay in the truck. What was going on?

 

I am not going to tire you with the details of how tired I became climbing several hundred feet with snow at times sometimes almost as deep as my gaiters, or asking myself what a Michigander that lives in a nice home at exactly 620 feet of elevation is doing crossing a ridge at almost six thousand?

 

When we got there, the mountain lion was on a cedar branch, hanging over a canyon with at least three hundred feet of emptiness under it, and only Lilly was any place to be seen, bravely keeping the cat at bay.

 

Nate asked me to keep an eye on the lion while he went looking for the other hounds. He came back empty handed and with a broken heart, but while he was gone I heard one of the hounds struggling into the bushes somewhere down the canyon steep walls.

 

Enough was enough! Nate just said that as the lion had killed his hounds I had to kill that lion, but that if I just killed it on the branch it also would fall down the canyon and he didn’t think that he would be able to retrieve it. I had to shoot the cat on the back of the lungs, so after jumping forward we would be able to tree it again, with brave Miss Lilly doing the hard work all by herself.

 

And so I did, and like a whirlwind the cat was gone with Lilly literally at its tail. And it treed again, one hundred seventy-five yards as the crow flies, and one hundred and fifty feet down another canyon. Do you know how long an overweight middle aged sedentary hunter takes to make that distance in Wyoming?

 

Eventually we got to the tree with Lilly looking around, but no sign of the lion. We looked and looked at the cedars, and over my right shoulder, not ten feet away, the cat was hidden among the endless branches. Nate told me that there was a small four-inch square gap right on the lion’s chest, and told me that a confident rifleman could make the shot. I already had another 30-30 in the chamber and the Leupold scope at the 1X setting, and shot when the center dot was on that square.

 

Initially there was no immediate reaction, but suddenly everything became blurry. As I worked the lever to reload the rifle the lion jumped over me, not attacking, but trying to make an escape. Being the bird hunter that I am, I just swung the Marlin like a shotgun, and shot it like a woodcock that departs the wrong way. In the process I slip over a rock, lost my balance and landed on my back, while the lion landed maybe three feet from my head.

 

Memory and emotion can fool us at times like that. Maybe the cat and I locked eyes, maybe not. But it continued to try to escape to the right, going around a little spruce, while I regained my footing, chambered another round and went the other way. When the lion saw me around the tree it reversed direction and shot it one last time. I had one cartridge left, but it didn’t matter, the mountain lion was dead twenty yards away.

There was no rejoicing over the taking of what ended being a very large lioness. The loss of Lady and Zeek weighted too heavy on us, but especially on Nate (Zeek was found alive on the next day, but we didn’t know that at the time), the lioness had been too valiant and noble.

 

We dragged the lioness body out of the canyon and then Nate packed it down to the truck, while a most beautiful sunset marked the end of what may have been my greatest hunt ever.

 

We met the whole crew, Dirk and Jen and Braden and Andrew, at the Sleepy Coyote in Ten Sleep, but the evening had somber tones as there is no celebration for a pyrrhic victory.

Feathers in February

Judd, the Author and Lynden: tired, but happy

February can be a challenging month, especially living in northern Michigan. Snow and low temperatures tend to make outdoors activities besides ice fishing and snow sports improbable, if not impossible. But a road trip may completely change the landscape...literary!

On Sunday, 17th, we start early in the morning with my truck navigation systems strongly disagreeing from my sense of direction. The only positive thing is that in the first hour of the trip, between Mesick and Cadillac, we saw a beautiful male coyote in full winter fur almost at  the side of the road. A beautiful view of an accomplished predator!

I will not bother you with details, but at one point I also turned my phone navigation app on, and since it took us to our destination well ahead of the truck system we decide to follow that one. I kept both systems on just to follow the disagreements. What a fight! (Anything for entertainment on a ten hours plus trip.)

Eventually we arrived at Upland Addiction (www.kentuckywingshooting.com) fine lodge, in Marion, western Kentucky, late in the afternoon. Dinner was MacDonald's since restaurants in the Bible Belt don't open on Sundays, as explained by Judd, young entrepreneur and our guide for the next two days.

Before I forget I should mention that Lynden and I bought this hunting trip on the Traverse City Ruffed Grouse Society banquet last September, and we scheduled it around a trade show that we had to attend in Indianapolis. The good news was that the logistics were perfect, the not so good ones was that we might have run away from snow to drenched in rain: Kentucky was having some of the worst floods in the past decade!

But the forecast for Monday was dry, overcast and cool with several days of rain to follow, so Judd asked if we would mind cramming two hunts in one day. Better that then spending an afternoon reading and no more birds the next day. In the end, Tuesday morning was fair weather and we packed more bird hunting there.

What I have to tell you is that Judd knows his business. Due to the flooding we concentrate our hunting to his family farm, moving from different meadows that we divided by wooded hedges and always ended in water, at least during the floods. Judd ran three different pointing dogs for the three half-day hunts. 

First was the thirteen years old setter Bonnie, and she was a class act. I wish to have the drive she has when I am that age (in dog years!) What a sweet old lady! After Bonnie we had Queen, a strong willed German shorthair, as if any other shorthairs were not. Queen ranged a bit farther than Bonnie, and behaved differently, but produced just as well. On the Tuesday hunt we had old Jack, and English Pointer. Bigger ranging, working the wind, and suddenly freezing, holding birds for as long as we would take to be there, or maybe until hell freezes over. Jack reminds me why English Pointers are in the world: to hunt birds, period!

Besides each of the pointers Judd ran little Lady. An English Spaniel with a heart and desire to hunt bigger than her tiny body; she was the flusher and a fantastic retriever. When she didn't make to a bird before the long legged pointers, she would gently snatch the birds from the larger dogs' mouth! In the water she might believe that she was a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Once Judd could give her the bearings, she was out in the water and never failed to bring a bird back.

It is very hard to describe all the action that comes from a single quail cove rising, with birds buzzing front, right, left or towards you, let alone tell the limitless rises that we had. Let's just say that it started well, as in the first cove a dropped one bird from with the bottom barrel of my Beretta 28 gauge shotgun, and immediately after that another bird fell to the top barrel.

At the end of the third hunt we had a number of birds that was almost obscene, except for the fact that quail tastes so good!

With heavy legs and light hearts we bid farewell to Judd and his father with hopes of coming back next season We drove then to Indianapolis for a trade show and on the Friday I continued to Portage, Michigan, in order to make peace with my grandson. From the lodge I had called Sylas and told him that I was "bird hunting" and his only reply was "But without me!"

In order to remediate the diplomatic incident I called Rolling Hills Hunting Preserve in Marcellus, Michigan, about a half an hour from my daughters home, and scheduled a pheasant hunt for Saturday afternoon. Around 11:30 AM our friends Mike and Jordan met Sylas and I at my daughter's home and we departed to Rolling Hills.

When we got to the club house we were asked if we would be three hunters, and Sylas immediately corrected Bob saying that we were FOUR HUNTERS!

Let's just say that we had a well timed hunt: Mike shot the first bird, Jordan the second and then it was Sylas and my turn. We kept rotating the points and I backed up a couple flushes, but not many. At one point the birds became heavy and we went back to the truck to drop them and take a rest. Sylas wanted to warn up as well. Of we went again and we shot the last bird just before the rain started. It would turn into drenching rain by midnight and a full day high wind storm.

The pheasant became a good stroganoff served with white rice and helped down by a couple good bottles of Italian wine. And diplomatic relations were fully restored!

The Gang: Jordan, Mike, the proud grandfather and Sylas

Things You Can Do In Paradise

Things you can do in paradise!

I am absolutely in love with our home country in lower northern Michigan. Within one hour or so of Traverse City there is fantastic fishing and bird hunting (at least most years), very good deer hunting, water-fowling, predator hunting that I have not done yet, marvelous landscapes and pristine waters, not to mention great people.

But sometimes I must go further north, especially around the third week of September, when small game season opens in Ontario, so that besides hunting bear and fishing I can also shoot grouse and at least try my luck on the most elusive of creatures, the true and only king of the northern latitudes - the timber wolf.

While sunrises over old clearcuts are breathtaking, I almost never have the pleasure of watching sunsets since that is the most critical time to be waiting for bear at a bait site, the shadows taking over the shapes, trees growing darker and closer together and silence engulfing everything. Although I've shot bear at early hours, the hunter that leaves the wood before full darkness is handicapping his chances.

Grouse are plentiful, both spruce and ruffed, but tamer then the ones around us and must be motivated to go airborne. With the local wolf population being what it is, it is just not practical (or safe) to use bird dogs, so we count on friends or acquaintances to flush the grouse. It can be quite sporting in its own way, especially with a small bore shotgun.

The waters reflect the skies, at day or night, and the mirror like surface is only shattered by the fight of a walleye or the strike of a northern pike. Sometimes it is only disrupted by the wake of a swimming beaver or otter.

When driving, blacktop or logging roads, we are always scanning ahead; moose may appear from anywhere, and they are BIG, even the smaller ones. Nowadays tags are almost impossible to obtain, or at least very, very difficult; and while I can't pursue them, the natives can, either the four or two legged types.

And during a cold cloudless night, a warm and friendly fire makes the stars glow brighter, and if you really let Ontario into your soul you will be able to see yourself among the stars, Orion pursuing Ursa Major!

Final Comments On The Modern Sporting Rifle

A small 10-point fell to the “modern 30-30”

Earlier this year I started a little personal project aimed to proof the worse of the so called Modern Sporting Rifle, which is generally an incarnation in one disguise or another of the AR-15 platform, as a legitimate deer hunting rifle. I won’t repeat all the points discussed in the previous blog, but I would like to report on the completed experiment.

After a mostly unfruitful archery season, that is if you measure success exclusively by the weight of your game bag, Opening Day happened upon us. For the glorious Fifteenth I took my Winchester 71 in 348 Winchester to my blind, but must confess that I struggled with taking a “longer” shot using the aperture sights which, although precise, provide no magnification or light gathering capability. Being of middle age clarity of the target is achieved through optics, not effort or good intentions.

So, on the sixteenth I listened to the voice of reason and brought my WW-15 (an AR-15 with different letters) in 7,62x39 and topped with an excellent Leupold VX-R with a 30mm tube which helps with light gathering, especially for early and late hours when deer are most active.

I can tell you that this was an enlightening experience. The short overall length, even with the stock fully extended, makes it very handy in the confines of a blind. The detachable magazine and positive bolt hold open makes it convenient to load, and especially unload, the rifle making it safe and secure while climbing ladders, entering or exiting blinds or vehicles, etc., and to handle it in the blind and pointing the barrel out of the windows with minimal muzzle movement.

Well, I passed several does, fawns and illegal spikes and fork horns during the sixteenth, and after working at the gun shop on Saturday morning I went back to my vigil in the early afternoon. After reading a couple more chapters from Robert Ruark’s “The Old Man and the Boy” I heard munching on the bait pile, still legal until January 1st, 2019. A little button buck was delighting himself with carrots and I delighted myself in watching him through my binoculars for almost half an hour. The wind was on my face and he never suspected anything. I can only hope that he will get smarter and eventually become a trophy buck.

Around 4:00 PM a shape came out of the woods and into the logging road straight ahead of my blind. I saw it had antlers, but small. Would him be a legal buck? Around my neck of the woods there is the occasional trophy buck, but I measure my trophies by their epicurean qualities, and a young deer is juicy and tender. I used my binoculars to assess the antlers and counted at least five to a side, a lot of points for a very compact rack.

As the young buck came straight at me I exchanged the binoculars for the little rifle, rested it on the blind window and for the first time in the season set my cross hairs on a deer. At about 50 yards, the buck started to consider his options, veered to the left and then to the right and presented a clear broadside shot. And when I touched the trigger I heard the worst sound in the world: CLICK!

Now, I had put several boxes of ammo through the little AR without a single hick-up, and now, at the moment of truth I have just a CLICK!

As the deer went into the trees, as to circle the bait pile, I worked the bolt, ejected the round in the chamber and fed another one. I positioned the crosshair in the place the deer was likely to emerge from the bush, and an eternity of seconds later, there he was, broadside again. I can't remember if he was heading east or west, put little 125 grain bullet hit the mark just behind the shoulder, and the soon to be venison took of running in the direction he came from. As he passed the logging road at a dead run I connected again, with a second shot and just as I lost sight of him I heard him crash.

I unloaded the rifle, first the magazine was out and then the chamber was emptied, locked the bolt open, pocketed only the items I needed to tag the buck, shouldered the rifle and climbed down from my blind. Reloading was done in a second: magazine in, bolt released, safety engaged. Then I walked the logging road until I cut fresh tracks and found the blood spoor. Tracking blood in fresh snow is easy and in no time I came upon the deer.

I took some pictures, tagged it and went back to my blind to wait for dark when my friend Del that was hunting at another part of the property to come and help me. Why drag a deer alone and risk injury and physical exertion when it is so much easier to do that with help?

The final question is: could I have not just used a lever action 30-30 instead of the AR? The simple answer is yes, but the more complex one is that overall the AR is a more convenient rifle. It is safer by being easier to load and unload, having a bolt open device and positive safety, it is generally easier to scope than most lever action rifles, definitely it has a better trigger (which for me is very important) and great ergonomics (including a stock that allows for different lengths of pull, which is important for smaller framed hunters or shooters), and the semiautomatic action allows for a precise quick follow-up shot. Also, the 7,62x39 ammo proved to be more than adequate for deer in the relative close ranges of the north woods.

My conclusion from this not too scientific experiment (a single date point does not constitute a proper experiment) is that there is definitively a place for the Modern Sporting Rifle in hunting. This doesn't mean that you will not see me going back to more classical firearms like a little double 7x57R stalking rifle that I am eyeing, but it just shows that even a conservative hunter like me must accept that firearms design continues to evolve.

Fighting "Saudade"

A new knife and a good book...

According to Google SAUDADE (noun) is a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. If you look SAUDADE at Wikipedia they go over a very long page trying to explain the inexplicable, but Nascimento and Meandro cite Duarte Nunes Leão's for what may be a proper definition of SAUDADE: "Memory of something with a desire for it."

Anyhow, my wife has been in Brazil for the last five or six weeks and yesterday I had a particularly strong case of saudade. So, I left work earlier than usual, stopped downtown Traverse City for a couple errands, started filling hungry and decided to treat myself to a proper dinner.

I stopped at Maxbauer Meat Market and bought a beautiful T-Bone steak for main course and a kielbasa and a weisswurst for appetizer. Before I reached the cash register I added four small young potatoes to my plans.

As I arrived home the small USPS box on my mail box greeted me with news that a new toy I was anxiously waiting for had arrived, but I controlled my urge to open the package in order to first start the fire on my Big Green Egg.

Once the fire was burning, and the potatoes and sausages were on the grill, and some oldies were playing on the radio, I turned my attention back to the small USPS box. From its guts came the most beautiful and well made friction folder one can conceive. The Michael Morris knife was made from an old file and the comfortable handle is made of micarta. A nice design feature is that the tang doubles as a bottle opener. I didn't even feel like having a beer, but felt compelled to try the built-in bottle opener! My expert opinion is that it works better than most bottle openers I've used to date.

While the Green Egg imparted its magic to the sausages I went on reading a couple chapter of Jim Harrison's Just Before Dark. The celebrated Grayling, MI, native discusses why "Small portions are for small and inactive people" along with observations along the natural order of really important things: first eat, then love! Considering I always told people that my stomach is the most important part of my anatomy, I can relate to Mr. Harrison's passion for food, that lesser souls could consider gluttony.

By this time the sausages were perfectly grilled and while they rested to allow the juices to incorporate with the meat I salted the T-Bone steak and placed it on the grill, taking time to assure the potatoes would not burn. I finished the beer while savoring the appetizer, and really building a bigger appetite.

A couple more pages and the steak was ready.

...and a great meal helps one to feel better!

In order to complement the magic that lump wood charcoal imparts to food I split the potatoes and seasoned with table salt, butter and olive oil. The texture and flavor was just out of this world. The simple dinner was washed down by a small (or maybe not so small) amount of a special edition Jameson Irish Whiskey.

Desert was just one Sonho de Valsa, the popular Brazilian bonbon made of chocolate and cashew nuts filling, and unchanged since 1938.

All this happened just before dark what is the time that saudade strikes most powerfully, but the new knife, good reading and great food helped keep it at bay.

The Modern Sporting Rifle Is Not So Modern After All

Windham WW-15, Remington 7400 and Remington Model 81

Once again we see a lot of heated discussions and all kinds of opinions regarding the so called “Modern Sporting Rifles” and weather the average citizen or legal resident of the United States of America should continue to have the right to own and use such firearms.

Depending on who you ask, the Modern Sporting Rifles are seen under many different color shades, from evil tools generally referred to as “Assault Rifles”, to nothing more than another step in the evolution of the (detachable) magazine semiautomatic rifle, which in the most popular form are civilian variations of the ArmaLite Rifle-15 or AR-15 designed by Eugene Stoner in 1956. The design was sold to Colt in 1959 and adopted by the United States Air Force in 1960. Sometime later, in 1964 the United States Army adopted a slightly modified design as the Rifle, Caliber 5,56mm, M-16.

But the story of the Modern Sporting Rifle is much older. Right at the turn of the Twentieth Century it came to light by the genius of no other than John Moses Browning, the most prolific firearms designer in history. In 1900 John Browning patented the design of a long-recoil, magazine fed, high power, semiautomatic rifle, and in 1905 it became available to American sportsmen as the Remington Autoloading Rifle. In 1911 the name was changed to Model 8, and with minor cosmetic modifications it became the Model 81 Woodsmaster in 1936.

And the Remington Model 8 was not the only magazine fed, semiautomatic rifles available in the early years of the Twentieth Century. My copy of the Arms of World – 1911: The Fabulous ALFA Catalogue of Arms and the Outdoors shows no less than a dozen different semiautomatic carbines in rifles, in as many different calibers!

The Remington Model 8 was available in four dedicated calibers: 25 Remington, 30 Remington, 32 Remington and 35 Remington, and later the 300 Savage was added to the Model 81 to provide 30-06 level power, or almost. When you consider that the main competition was Winchester lever action rifles, the Remington calibers provided similar ballistics to the Winchester 25-35, 30-30, 32 Special and 38-55. The 300 Savage is the parent cartridge to the 308 Winchester and have almost the same ballistics.

Both the Model 8 and 81 had colorful stories, and a lot of that didn’t come from the big woods where over one hundred thirty-five thousand high power magazine fed semiautomatic rifles brought deer, bear and other animals to the table of the early Twentieth Century Sportsmen. During the Great War, the French Aéronautique Militaire Used the Model 8 in 35 Remington in small quantities and later during the Great Depression a certain Texas Ranger Captain named Frank Hamer used a modified Model 8, also in 35 Remington (the most popular caliber in the model) to put an end to the criminal careers of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Frank Hamer’s rifle was modified to take a “high capacity” detachable twenty round magazines by the Peace Officers Equipment Company of St. Joseph, Missouri.

In 1933, in response to the Kansas City Massacre the Federal Bureau of Investigation bought a number of Model 81’s both in 30 Remington and 35 Remington.

Of course Winchester Repeating Arms Company would not allow Remington to play alone in the autoloading rifle market, and they introduced the Model 1907 in 351 WSL and later the Model 1910 in 401 WSL (Winchester Self-Loading), and just like the Remington Model 8, the French, now the Army, pressed the Model 1907 into military service during the Great War. From 1935 on Winchester offered a special “Police Rifle” variant, with among other features, a high capacity detachable magazine.

So what we see is that both military and police organizations adopted a rifle that was create for hunters to feel their needs, but limitations on power, range, durability and cost, aligned with the typical conservative mindset of the military decision makers, prevented these designs from becoming standard infantry rifles.

Also, we should remember that the bolt-action rifle was not popular in this country until the doughboys returned home from World War I and wanted to hunt and shoot with the same or similar rifles that they used in the trenches of Europe, the 1903 Springfield and Enfield Model 1917.

In a similar way we would see semiautomatic rifles become more popular after World War II, with Remington replacing the Model 81 in 1955 with the Model 740 (which was available n the popular 30-06 and 270 Winchester calibers), Winchester introduced the Model 100 (in 308 Winchester) in 1961 and Browning BAR Sporting Version in 1967, which was the first semiautomatic rifle to be able to handle magnum calibers, like the 7mm Remington Magnum and 300 Winchester Magnum. And just as a reminder, there are “high capacity” detachable magazines avail for the Remington 740 and its successors.

So, why is there so much passion about the current Modern Sporting Rifle? Maybe it is a question of aesthetics. All magazine fed semiautomatic rifles prior to the AR-15 pattern rifles looked somewhat like a conventional bolt-action rifle, having the same overall profile and wooden stocks.

But should we judge an object by its appearance or by its intrinsic functionality? While the ArmaLite Rifle based designs may look aggressive, out of place in the Great Outdoors, threatening to some, or just plain ugly, their functionality is no different than that of rifles that have been with us, and used by many of our great grandparents, grandparents and parents for the last one hundred and thirteen years. Actually, except for caliber, they are not that different from the ever-popular Ruger 10/22 or many other detachable magazine semi-automatic twenty-two rifles. And just like any other firearms, AR style rifles are tools, as good or as bad as the people using them.

Although I tend to be a very conservative sportsman, preferring side-by-side shotguns and even double rifles for most of my hunting, because of all the discussion going on, I decided to try an ArmaLite based Modern Sporting Rifle as my next deer rifle.

I elected to have a light, compact rifle built in a caliber with proven ballistics for deer sized animals, and what center fire rifle has killed more deer than almost all others put together than the 30-30 Winchester? The only problem was that there are no AR’s in that caliber, but there are certain calibers that are readily available in the AR platform with similar ballistics, and among them I selected the 7,62x39mm (which is the intermediate cartridge that is used in the famous or infamous AK-47 rifle and SKS carbine.)

The reason for my choice is that 7,62x39mm ammunition is plentiful and economically priced, having slightly better ballistic performance than the relatively new 300 Blackout.

My rifle started as a Windham Weaponry WW-15, and then the furniture was replaced by Timber Creek Outdoors parts, and a Patriot Ordnance Trigger System replaced the original trigger. An excellent Leupold VX-R 2-7 scope 30mm tube with an illuminated reticle topped everything.

In a recent test, the rifle performed flawlessly and the recoil is minimal. And since the stock can be easily adjusted for different lengths of pull and virtually ambidextrous design, this rifle is almost the ideal tool to introduce new people to shooting. Besides deer hunting, semiautomatic rifles are ideal for hog hunting, where very often the hunter has the opportunity to shoot multiple animals.

It is important that we all keep in our minds that we are privileged on having the choices and opportunities that we have. We can hunt with bow and arrow, a flintlock musket that was the same gun as the Continental Army carried, or we can elect to use the so called Modern Sporting Rifle, with a designed similar, but not the same, as the current primary infantry rifle of the United Stated Armed Forces. And if we allow that choice to be taken away from us, what else could we lose?

Browning BAR, Ruger Mini-14 and Ruger 10/22

Note: This article was first published in MICHIGAN'S HOOKS & BULLETS MAGAZINE, May/June 2018 issue. Visit them at www.hooksandbullets.com