Rifle Season: Part 3
Cut for those that honestly don’t give a shit.
It must already get darker a lot later than last week. We left at the same time, before 6am, and it felt like the sun came out a lot later.
I swear the coldest time of the day, is right when the sun first starts to come up. I don’t know if the heat from the sun coming up pushes the cold air down and makes it more dense or what. But until the sun actually hits you, it feels 10 times colder than if you were out in complete darkness.
When I first nestled in my spot next to a big cherry tree, I started hearing some sort of sound in the woods. It was still almost completely dark so I had no idea what it was, and had my adrenaline running because I was worried something would come right up on me.
I listened to it for about 15 minutes and eventually saw a little fluffy white tail hopping along the ground. Damn Rabbit. Was a cute lil thing though. I watched him run around for another 10 minutes or so before he ran into a thick pile of debris I was sitting next to, and then I didn’t hear anything more from him.
Later on I started hearing tiny scratching noises that I couldn’t quite pick out. I kept trying to focus my eyes, as the sky was starting to lighten up and I could make out more of the outlines of the trees. Eventually a big fat racoon revealed itself and walked past me, disappearing into the thicket.
The sun started to come up more, making the sky a light blue with mixtures of yellow, but everything still appeared as a silhouette to me since it was still fairly dark in the thicket I was in. I was looking up over the ridge and I saw the dark outline of a fox prancing along the edge of the woods. I watched him go about 40 feet or so and then lost him, I’m guessing he either darted over the cornfield on the other side of the ridge, or came down into the blackness of the trees.
Once the sun came out enough that everything was fairly visible, I didn’t see much beyond the regular cardinals that apparently make this thicket their haven.
My father and I both take our cell phones with us and keep them on vibrate. That way if we need to warn one another of a deer or if we snag one and need someone else to go get the F-150, we can do so. He called me around 7:30am and said he was going to cross the creek and head up over the ridge to see if he can flush out any nesting deer.
I heard him rustling through the woods, and eventually caught sight of his bright orange tabard. I kept looking around but saw nothing else move. I watched him reach the top of the ridge and then walk along that till he came around the thicket towards my side. The fox from earlier darted out from the thicket and ran once my father got near him but neither one of us saw a single deer, so we decided to come home around 8am.
We might go back out later this afternoon, but first I might go have lunch with my former Terminix co-workers.
Entry viewed times. Posted in Dad, Natural Living
One Response to “Rifle Season: Part 3”
December 3rd, 2006 at 2:09 pm
aw, that sucks. wish you luck!