Back Cast

Christmas eve and we have the woods to ourselves.

It’s 12 degrees, cold enough that I need to get moving, get the blood pumping. I’ve been leaning against this tree for a while now, watching my sons ease through the timber. When I turn my head away, I track their progress by the occasional snap of a limb, the muffled crack of dead branches buried in snow.

One is carrying a single-shot .22 cradled across his chest. The other has the same caliber of rifle slung over his right shoulder. I’m carrying a backpack and nothing else of significance. Inside is one fox squirrel that the taller of the two hunters shot a half-hour ago. I can feel the lump of the animal against my back.

If you discount the noise we make walking through the woods, the tap-tap-tap of busy little woodpeckers searching for food, the nasal yank-yank call of white-breasted nuthatches and the infrequent, distant barking of fox squirrels, this stretch of riverbottom timber is strangely quiet.

Yet, because of the incredible amount of sign left in the snow, it doesn’t take a trained tracker to see that this is a busy place, not necessarily noisy, but busy when the animals have it to themselves.

You can’t throw a dead branch without it landing next to one of a series of deer trails that, from the crown of one of these old cottonwoods, must look like the confusing, overlapping course that tree roots take underground. Near many of the trails are deer beds – three here, two there, some singles. Some of the beds are seemingly used repeatedly, as tufts of dead, brown grass poke through where inches and inches of snow has melted.

Partway down one of the trails we start seeing scattered clumps of deer hair no bigger than the palm of my hand. Farther along, we see a dozen or so small birds poke at a deer carcass, searching for whatever bits of fat they can find.

Winter is tough on wild animals in this neck of the woods and it’s only going to get more difficult. Tomorrow, Christmas Day, an ugly combination of freezing rain, a bunch more snow and wind is expected.

The forecast is a big reason why we’re here today, creeping through the woods trying to shoot squirrels and maybe an unsuspecting cottontail kicked from a pile of deadfall.

If we get a foot or more of snow as predicted, this will be it for our hunting season. Our window, as we see it, to get in one last hunt is today.

The day, our season, doesn’t end unceremoniously because we can’t argue with a hike in the woods and the three squirrels shot on public land.

Certainly, we’re not taking anything for granted because who knows what’s in store for us in 2017.