Sunday January 8, 2012
Opening Days are easy, childish things. It seems that every hunter and fisherman participates in one Opening Day or another.
Camaraderie is often cited as the reason most join in. Everyone loves Opening Days, yet they are usually over-rated and nearly always disappoint.
Manufactured build up and unreasonable expectations, meet cold, hard reality and an empty bag.
I've put away childish things. Hunting late into the season will convince a man to do that.
By January, most hunters in my neck of the woods have put away their bows and guns.
Solitude marks the days of hunting late season. Compared to the heady days of late September, the landscape is now barren, lonely even.
The animals that live here are different, too. Wild things are engaged in a battle of survival every day that they walk the earth, but in the early days of winter there is a quiet seriousness that settles upon the hunting grounds.
Deer spend most of their time bedded down in secret thickets. A calorie saved is a calorie earned, you know?
Expectations, as well as temperatures, are lower now. Is a buck spotted from your stand in January more thrilling than one spotted in September?
Of course.
I spent the last hour of this year's Wisconsin archery season in the same place I spent the first: twenty feet up in the air in a treestand in western Dane County.
In between the first and last hunts, there have been 105 days. I didn't hunt every day, but I thought about hunting every one of those days.
Today, it ended.
No deer were spotted. The January woods were deathly still. I sat in my stand until sunset. I walked out of the woods as a hunter for the last time this season under the light of a full moon.
It was a good, sweet end.
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