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Being very determined in hunting leads to fullfillment
  
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By Jay Anglin
Outdoors Columnist
Sure, you can learn from others, but no hunter or fisherman will ever achieve elite status without spending many years, even decades, in the field or on the water.
I have quite a bit of experience with assisting others in achieving their piscatorial goals, but ultimately it comes down to the other individual’s ability to listen, focus and execute. Nobody can set the hook or pull the trigger for them.
Last Wednesday, my wife expressed interest in deer hunting on the opening day of the Indiana firearm season. She reminded me that she only missed one question on her hunter safety test a couple years ago. Initially, I shrugged it off to be perfectly honest.
One major problem with her plan was that she’s a righty, and that shoulder was injured in a car accident last winter. Though her surgery was nearly eight months ago, I knew it was still tender. Even though this semi-auto rifle has about the lightest recoil imaginable, I knew that it was probably going to hurt. I also knew that until she tried it, I wasn’t going to hear the end of it.
The first chance we had to hit the target range was late Friday morning. I started her out with a semi-auto .22, which went well. The next step was a few shots with some super light recoil hand loaded .44 trainer loads a friend had given me to let the boys use up.
Now it was time for “real” bullets. After a few choice expletives (another reason I married her), she set the gun down on the bench. I saw her eyes well up and I was confident this was not going to be Angie’s first deer season. I started to pack things up, “Maybe next year,” I said.
She stood there like a kid that just got the “you’re not having ice cream before dinner” lecture as that damn van rolls past the house with the creepy music blaring. I sent her on her bitter way, grabbed my bow and headed for a tree to see if I could tag a doe before the Pumpkin Army messed everything up Saturday morning.
A couple hours later, I called her to… I’m embarrassed to say… ask what was for dinner? She quickly told me I was on my own. She went on to explain that she had called all the shops in the La Porte area and nobody had a recoil pad that she could wear over her shoulder. She sounded stressed out and frazzled. She was working her way west with the five kids riding along to find one of these mythical devices.
At this point, I figured that I may have to duck tape a throw pillow to her shoulder because this girl was going huntin’ in the morning and nobody was gonna stop her.
They all rolled in around nine. The boys tore the stuff out of the bag. My wife had herself some new hunting garb and a fancy padded shoulder harness. I was briefly speechless, but knew I had my work cut out for me.
After a lengthy lecture on how serious the act of killing an animal was and how it must be done ethically, we looked at deer vital charts online and I explained where the optimal hits were. Frankly, even after my best hunting mentor act was exhausted, I hardly expected my wife to be able to go through with it. I figured she’d lower her gun and say “I can’t do it,” which would’ve been just fine with me.
So there we sat side by side 16 feet up, watching a spectacular sunrise. Her “slight” fear of heights revealed to me about halfway up the ladder. You’d think after 18 years I’d have heard something about that.
Around 7:15, I told her that the next 45 minutes were when the bucks would cruise. I explained that once the does bed down for the day, unless a buck is breeding a doe and stays with her, he’d go check his scrapes and search for a lady friend. What I didn’t tell her was the hot scrapes were right in front of us.
At 7:40, I looked up and saw a handsome buck walk out of the woods next to us. “Good buck honey, over at the edge of the field, get ready.”
She couldn’t see the buck because a large branch was blocking her view, but I was too busy to point him out. He had turned away from us and I knew I had to call him back. I grunted to him with a call I had hanging around my neck, but he ignored me. I knew that it was a “go for broke” situation so I really let him have it with a loud grunt that shattered the otherwise quiet setting.
To my amazement, he turned around and came directly towards us. At one point, he stopped briefly, so I hit him again with another grunt call and he continued his march. It simply does not get any better.
He got to the fence and crawled under it without breaking stride. I remember thinking of how he reminded me of The Grinch when he squeezed under the bottom wire. Amazing.
I realized Angie had been tracking him since he had stopped halfway in. She had him lined up perfectly. She looked determined, a good gun mount and head position. I was proud. I told her that I was going to stop him and to concentrate on her shot, focus and hold the gun steady. At 50 feet, I bleated to him, but he didn’t hear me, so I said, “Hey” in a firm voice. He stopped and stood broadside in the open. “Shoot him Angie,” I whispered. The rifle barked, and for the second time in as many days I was utterly speechless.
A while later, when I was field dressing the deer with her assistance, I removed the heart and showed my wife where she had hit the animal. It was as perfect a shot that has ever been made on a deer; lethal and humane.
Through dogged determination and will, what started out as a lofty goal became a reality in only a couple of days. I couldn’t be more proud.
Jay Anglin writes a weekly outdoors column for The Herald-Argus. Write to him at jay@anglinoutdoors.com.
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| The following is criteria editors will follow in deeming comments suitable for posting. The newspaper reserves the right to not publish any comment for any reason and is not responsible for the content of any comment that posts. If you have a question as to why your comment was not posted, please e-mail newsroom@heraldargus.com |
