A New Year’s Trip

Yesterday I had work to do out at Deer Camp. I’d left it pretty well put to bed, but there were a few things I’d left undone that I figured could wait. Nobody else wanted to go– it being New Year’s Eve and all. It was just me. I packed light, but I packed enough that I could spend a couple of days. I did not know quite what was in my mind when I left. The dogs had a split decision too. Jay, the collie, wanted to stay home. Lily, the beagle, could not wait and crawled into the back seat a good hour before I left.

When I got there, the temperature was close to 60 F on the outside and down around 40F on the inside. The snow that had kept us away for nearly a month was all gone. As soon as I arrived I threw open both doors and got the place warmed up pretty quickly. I did not turn on the water, because I did not want to commit to staying yet.

My first job was to go out to Moose’s stand at Virginia and take down the camo skirt from the shooting rail. Moose still had a tag left going into December. He’d said he wanted to come back out and hunt late Muzzleloader, but he got tied up with his girlfriend and . . . you know how it is. The wind was blowing rather heavily in my face as I set out. Rain was due sometime after dark, but for now it was all bright and blue and there was hardly a cloud out.

Virginia is one of the closer stand sites to camp. There is a little turn-off on the main track going to the back of the property. You think it’s nothing special, but soon you realize you are on a long finger ridge that runs all the way back with a steep ravine to either side. We call it Virginia, because we never hunted it for the first 7 years. When Moose came of age and could hunt on his own, I sort of gave it to him. About halfway out the ridge, I built him a stand that serendipitously was just the point where the deer like to cross from one side of the ridge to the other. It generally produces deer for him, but so far nothing big.

I’ve been thinking of putting another stand back at the root of the ridge for Angus to overlook the beginning of the hollow. Now that the leaves are down, you can best gauge where a stand will have the best view. I tested out a couple of ideas before moving on. Either I’ll put a stand overlooking things from the West or go across the hollow and put up a ground blind that sees everything from the East. Either way, it will do a good job of covering the exit from the stand of cedars that the deer use at the top of the hollow for a bedding area.

Lily followed me on my journey back to Moose’s stand. It was just as he’d left it. However, things were really torn up all around it. A big buck had moved in and been leaving sign all over the place. There was a good sized scrape about fifty yards before the stand, that I would have loved to see when the snow was still on the ground. There was lots of scat. There were a couple of nice rubs. I was admiring all this when all of a sudden a ruckus started about 20 yards to the right of the stand, over on the Garbage Pit Hollow side.

As best as I can tell, Lily had gone around one of the fallen cedars and come up on the buck as he was napping. When I first looked up, I saw Lilly backing away nervously, and the buck pulling himself up to full height. The funny part is that the buck, a good thick-chested 8 pointer, really didn’t know what to do. Neither did Lily. Lily and I had caught him napping, coming up on his leeward side. I took it the two must have been staring at each other for a bit before the buck made his move. After he got up he got a good look at me and decided the dog was the least of his worries. In a slow-motion tentative sort of way, he took a couple of bounds, stood a moment to regard us, and then punched the throttle and took off down the hollow.

It was starting to cloud up a bit as I took off for OT’s place. OT is the old guy who works on my lawnmowers. He’s also one of the better turkey and grouse hunters in the neighborhood. One of my favorite stories about OT comes from early on in our relationship. We were jawing together outside his mower shop on the hill overlooking Browningsville when a truck pulled up outside. A fellow rolled down his window.

“Are you the old guy who fixes lawnmowers?” He asked.

“I am.” said OT. OT’s pushing eighty.

OT and I disagree on whether the fellow actually said “Thank you!” before waving, rolling up the window and driving off. OT never saw the guy again, but whenever I call OT, I always ask to speak to the old guy who fixes lawnmowers.

Depending on how OT’s feeling on any given day, his answers will be either, “That’s me!” “What’s left of him.” or “No, he died.”

OT’s little lawnmower shop gets a lot of traffic, despite being out on the far side of nowhere. OT said the other day a guy called up from well past Richmond looking for service on a Hoyt-Clagwell string trimmer. OT said he’d look at it. The guy, who sounded older than OT and not as steady said he was hopping in his truck right then and driving up. He never showed.

OT and his wife invited me in Friday to talk for a while. We mostly talked about local history. I’ve been collecting tidbits lately– a good number OT could neither deny or confirm. No. he had never heard of a silver mine , nor a big walk-in cave in the county, despite my finding references to both. I also got to ask him about the town of Rema. It had appeared on one map that showed it just down the road towards Milford. The map’s age was indeterminate, but it showed the rail line running south out of Brooksville as “PROPOSED.” We know that line went in prior to 1880. It did jog OT’s memory about an old storefront he’d seen down that way as a kid, and a cemetery that’s no longer there.

Along the way I found out the creek that forms my Eastern boundary is called Pity Creek, and not Willow Creek as I had thought. OT didn’t know how it got that name, but he remembered a story of a woman that had raised 14 children in a cabin, the ruins of which he’d seen on that creek when he was out grouse hunting before the war. I have a couple of homesteads on my property that are similar, but I had thought them all abandoned for better sites up on the ridge-tops by the 1850’s.

It was getting late when I got back to camp. Something told me I had done what I came for, and I was now facing the choice of a nice ride back to town with the windows down, or thunderstorms over night and driving home in a downpour in the morning, or perhaps snow if I stayed to Sunday. Lily was ready to go too. I threw a few things in the truck and took off. About the time I saw the skyline of Cincinnati was when the first rain drop hit. It’s now after Nine on new Years Day and I don’t think 2011 has had a dry minute.

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