No the weather isn't to bad to shoot. In fact there has been very few days this winter when it was so w3indy or snow to thick to shoot.
Just trying to do some post that are not repetes of all the others.
The hunting partner
Isn"™t easy to find a good hunting partner. I guess I was lucky finding mine at an early age. We waded marshes hunting ducks and geese. Tramped soybean and cornfields for pheasants, Slashings and new growth for Partridge and deer.We waded creeks and rivers with fly rods, drug a pram thru the woods to a big beaver pond full of fish & ducksone fall. We used shotgun and rifle like a knife and fork at the dinner table. A fishing rod was like a spoon in a coffee cup for us. Many a sucker ended up on our spears on a cold dark spring night.
He got me in to reloading shotgun shells and I got him into to reloading rifle shells.He got me shooting trap, I got him into sporting clays.
He tied the flies and I made the lures, we both made our own rods.
We did much of our hunting & fishing at either my dad"™s farmor his brothers in laws property. The fishing together stuff went by the way side when our kids were young.
Then I bought the place in the UPPER. We were older then, still working, with wives and kids although the kids were grown and married for him and mine were in college. He still shared most of his vacation time with his wife traveling to see his married kids and grand children. We had the first week of Michigan"™s deer season off. That was our time together. His second shift job finished about 11:30 PM so he could get home and catch a few hours sleep before I got out of work normally 4:30 AM.
Just before I left work I would call him and say I would be there in an hour and a half.
I would have fresh hot coffee waiting for me when I got to his house. We would load his things in my truck and the plan was for him to drive and I get some sleep. We had not seen each other for 12 months most years so the sleep never came most years, We talked about our year. We had 14 years of great times up there. We shot our first UPPERbucks the same year the same day and almost the same time. He has the two biggest racks from up there, I have the two smallest and the strangest rack.
In 2003 he told me as we were dragging his buck to the trail that we would have to stop doingthis some day in the not to distance future.I told him that myDad had given me his rifle that spring, he was 88 and I planed to hunt as long or longer than that.My partnerhad just turned 65.
My dad passed in June 2005. My hunting partner came to the funeral. My mom called me about Sept and saidmy partnerhad a heart attack.
Seemed like we could read each other"™s minds. If wood needed cutting and I was pumping water he cut it. He cooked the breakfast and I cookedsupper and some times lunch but lunch was mostly a bowl of bean soup he had made and had simmering on the wood burner or chili that I made and had setting on the wood burner simmering, many times a sandwich.
I have hunted alone every year since. I know of no one I would trust with my life like I did him.
People ask me if I am afraid to be there all alone. I"™m not as I have had my time learning the area with him watching my back. We learned together that you took two compasses to the woods so when one said there was iron ore in the area we could look at the second one and say YUP. We learned together that the big bucks would cross the narrow spot in the cranberry bog and use the long finger to go from one cedar swamp to the next. Hunting the oaks was fruit less unless there was a acorn crop. Then the place to be was where they exited the cedar swamp to enter the oak ridges.
He taught me that root beer and good whisky go great together.
Lee was 65 when he passed just short of 66. I still think it is because I could never get him to stop smoking, I miss him a lot.
My grand son is 3 and has a deer rifle waiting for him. It was his grand dads, I shot my last buck with it in 2003. Dad had never shot a UP buck with it. Kare knows that if i am not home by Dec 2nd to send out the dogs to find the remains. If I die while up there I will die happy.
Al
The hunting partner
