Day two found us spreading out to try and locate
fresh track of a wild pig. My brother
and his friend Jerry were working the north east section of the 2800 acre
ranch, while I was stalking the southern hillsides.
July 1st was warm and dry. The hills were hard, the grass was brown, and
the accumulated dust sifted out of the scrub pine and oak whenever a gust of
breeze played across the hillside.
I had been working up a ridgeline when I spotted a
cow elk some 250 yards off on the opposite side of a deep cut. She was busy quietly browsing with a glance
now and then downhill to her left. She
caught my movement and so I stood as still as possible while she considered the
situation.
I don’t know if she decided that I was too far away
to be dangerous, or if she never really identified me, but after a bit, she
went back to grazing. I decided that
this was a good chance to watch and learn, so I slowly settled down into the 18”
high grass, slipped out of my hunt pack and pulled out my binoculars.
As she grazed, she continues to glance to her left
now and again. With the magnification of
the binoculars I watched how she moved, and counted time. I noted how long her head would stay down,
how long it would stay up, how often she moved, and how often she glanced
around. After some 15 minutes or so, I
realized that there was some movement off to her left. Focusing in that area, I soon spotted a
small calf browsing around in the edges of the brush and trees. After a bit the calf danced out on twiggy
legs into the field and approached the cow in order to nurse.
Completely caught up in the cow and calf, I was
slow to realize that something was coming up out of the draw on my left hand
side. Turning to the noise, I was just
in time saw a pair of ears stick up over the downward edge. A doe slipped up out of the cut and onto the
same meadow I was sitting down in the middle of.
I was in full camouflage, and had a camouflage hunt
pack leaned up against my side masking my shape I suppose. She looked around carefully then walked out
into the field and started grazing, beginning about 50 feet from me. A second doe crested the rise directly behind
her and as she was stepping forward, apparently heard something down in the cut
below as she froze and peered intently downward.
The first doe continued to graze and work closer to
me until her path lead her downwind of me about 35 feet away. She froze on scenting me and spent a good two
minutes searching the area, trying to find exactly where I was. Apparently uncomfortable, but unable to
definitively identify me, she turned and carefully stepped away, sliding into
the brush some 60 feet off. The second
doe followed her.
I was curious as to what had caught the second doe’s
attention, so I stood up and slung my pack and headed over to the crest to see
what I could find. When I got close to
the edge, and worked a little higher up the cut, I could hear a pig down in the
brush, rooting around a bit. The brush
was dense and so, though I picked up some motion now and then, I never had a
clear identifiable shot.
As the pig moved farther up the cut, I continued to
track it off of the sound until all of a sudden a helicopter flew into the
valley. Now, I have hunted for a lot of
years, and I know that many people find the idea uncomfortable, so I long since
learned to stay out of sight whenever possible.
Hearing the helicopter, I stepped away from the cut and over next to the
trunk of a big old live oak and leaned against the trunk to blend in.
The helicopter made six full laps of the valley,
each time buzzing loudly over my head before flying off through another notch
in the hills.
During that time, the pig had continued to move and
although I spent a good 45 minutes after the helicopter left scanning the cut,
moving uphill and down, the pig was nowhere to be found.
Copyright © 2013 Marty Vandermolen
No comments:
Post a Comment