Thursday, November 06, 2008

Still Another Hunting Report from the Bolt Hole

I set the alarm for 5:45 this morning and when it went off, I turned it off and rolled over for "just a minute" that turned into an hour. Then I got my sorry butt out of bed and dressed for another walk in the wods with my rifle.

Yesterday I made the mistake of donning long johns thinking I would need them to keep warm. Not today. I shed my outer jacket and put it in my back pack after an hour and switched to a lighter hat too. Even so, I was still quite warm as I slow walked for four hours. The day wasn't sunlit my any means yet the temperature still reached into the upper 50s and ow 60s by noon. Leaves that were damp and silent at the outset were crinkly and noisy at the end. The four hour walk covered just over a mile and a quarter.

There were plenty of deer scat and tracks in the beech woods I wandered but I saw neither hide nor hair of the animals that left them behind. Nor did I come across any sign to indicate the deer may have enter the rut--no scrapes or tree rubs to mark territory.

Returning to the cabin, I went to work on repairing the sliding screen door. It's an easy job when there are no kitties to climb all over the work and catch their claws in the screen. It took me less than an hour to pull the old, ripped screen out and put the new one in. I've done it before on window screens and I guess practice makes perfect. Having the right tools helps too. At one point I needed a small Philips head screw driver and found that was one of the tools not in my tool box. Luckily the screw driver on my Swiss Army Knife fit perfectly and I was able to use that. The one on my Leatherman probably would have done the job also.

I'll be heading out again tomorrow to try and cover a different section of the state land. If it's too noisy to walk, it could be a very short day. It's supposed to be even warmer tomorrow but there's a slight chance of some morning showers.

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