Moose Droppings

I wasn’t thinking about the date when I agreed to join a buddy on the last day of the eastern black powder season. I’m not a suppositious person but even my wife question my sanity when I told her about the hunt. “Hunting on Friday the thirteenth? The unluckiest day of the year with the worlds unluckiest hunter?” Yup.
Well I’m not sure Brian is the unluckiest but he sure does have a knack for getting into jams while in the woods. There is no way I could tell you the stories like he does but many of my readers are very familiar with Brian’s hunts.
There was the one trip where he was using a boat to get to some spots for deer hunting. There was 3 of them and not enough room for all of them to go in one trip so they had to make two trips. After dropping the first hunter off the boat died ½ way back to the boat ramp. No boat Brian took the long way in by foot to discover the first hunter wasn’t where he was suppose to be. Darkness fell and Brian was standing on a bridge with a high-power spotlight scanning the shoreline looking for this hunter who was waiting for a boat that wasn’t coming this is about the time the warden pulled up to see what the heck was going on. Don’t you know he wished he had just kept driving. Many hours latter and a full scale search on the hunter stumbles out of the woods . After everyone is reunited and the warden service and the other searches pack it in the hunter informs Brian that he killed a deer and it’s still out in the woods. So it’s off to get the canoe and fetch the deer. They got home with the deer around 3am.

Then there is the time Brian throws his climbing stand and the rest of his equipment on his four
wheeler and takes off for the perfect spot to kill that big buck. Halfway there his four wheeler comes to a screeching halt. Brian then discovers the cable from his climbing stand at some point started dragging and is now snuggly wrapped around the axle of the four wheeler. He can’t go no where so he has to spend the afternoon cutting through the cable with his knife so he can get back to his truck.

We won’t talk about his turkey hunting needless to say he now knows you have to have your gun in shooting position prior to the gobbler coming into your setup.

There is more stories but I better stop there. I guess you can see why people were concerned with me hunting with him on Friday the thirteenth.

We were hunting on Falls of the Neuse Game Lands. This was the first time I ever hunted these Game Lands and it was some pretty land. The hike in Brian told me this is the logging road the warden and him rode down that fateful night when he lost a hunter. I doubled check to make sure my GPS was working and I could feel my compass that was hung around my neck and tucked under my shirt.

I opted to hunt from the ground and Brian showed me a good grove of white oaks that the deer had been hitting hard. He continued on down the trail with his climber. I set up in a nice draw that the tracks suggested was US 1 for the local deer. With about 45 minutes left in the hunt I heard Brian’s muzzleloader roar. I didn’t see anything but shortly after dark I hit the trail and saw the light from Brian’s flashlight as he was walking out. He had a little extra weight in his cart, he dropped a spike buck that trotted by him. As we pulled his deer and our equipment out he told me that maybe I was a good luck charm because this was the first hunt on these Game Lands that had gone off without a hitch. Myself I think the unluckiest hunter on the unluckiest day canceled each other out so maybe I better not press my luck the rest of the season. “If you ever tell anyone this I’ll deny it but I love you Brian”

PS Thanks Jaybird for coming out to make sure we got out of the woods

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