Moose Droppings

 A few years ago, a couple of my friends were making their way along the edge of a large cutover, heading to a stand of hardwoods for an afternoon deer hunt, when they noticed another hunter in a tree stand in the distance. A few moments later, when they looked back in that direction, the other hunter was gone but his climbing stand was still in the tree. Fearing the worse, the two men headed in that direction. They reached the tree where the stand hung and found a man slumped on the ground, rubbing his shoulder and rotating his arm slowly.

“Hey man, you alright?” one of them asked.

“Yea, I reckon. I don’t think I broke anything.”

The dazed man slowly got to his feet, gathered his rifle and a few other scattered items, and started down the path my friends had walked in on.

“Hey, how about your stand? Aren’t you going to get it down?”

“Hell no, you can have it if you want it. Every time I get in it I fall out. It’s happened three times now,” the man answered and kept walking.

My friends stood there, dumbfounded. They couldn’t believe the man had continued to climb twenty feet up a tree without some kind of safety harness, especially after he had already fallen out a couple of times. They also couldn’t believe that he hadn’t broken his neck.

Don’t take unnecessary risks and use a safety belt, I think most new stands come with safety belts. The entire article is good so check it out and don’t be a statistic.