Back Cast

We’ve never bumped into anyone wearing camo and carrying a bow in this chunk of Missouri River bottom, but the number of tree stands we see most years suggest that we certainly could.

Which is why we often drag our feet at home, drink black coffee, collect and load hunting gear before leaving, instead of doing it the night before. While this doesn’t make positive our stumbling through the woods won’t mess up someone’s morning hunt when the deer are most active, I think it helps.

On this morning, though, seeing other hunters isn’t much of a worry. It’s Christmas Eve – a day we’ve hunted in the past and one that I’ve written about before – and we think most everyone will be home with family, doing some last-minute shopping, driving to grandma’s house, those sorts of things.

While North Dakota’s hunting season for pheasants, grouse and squirrels doesn’t close for roughly two weeks, our odds of getting in another hunt after this aren’t good. Holiday gatherings, school, basketball practice, work – those everyday things that eat so much of a person’s time – are going to make it darn tough to get outdoors before the start of the new year.

It’s overcast, several degrees south of freezing and there is a bit of a breeze that works its way through layers of wool and flannel as we hike the prairie bench before dropping down in the wooded river bottom.

It’s different down here. Quiet. The tops of the naked cottonwoods and bur oaks move in the wind, but you don’t hear it. Dozens of Canada geese loafing on a sandbar nearly a quarter-mile east of us sound much, much closer than they really are.

Big birds making big noise.

I’m not armed, unless you count the folding knife in my right front pocket or the metal, travel coffee mug that I hold in my gloved hand.

Jack is carrying a scoped .22-caliber rifle, which hangs from a sling over his right shoulder. We both lean against a towering tree that is too big to hug and join your fingers on the other side.

Sometimes the biggest mistake you make in these woods hunting fox squirrels is walking and hoping that you run into an animal rummaging around on the forest floor.

Leaning against a tree or sitting on a log looking for the fluttering of a rusty colored tail blowing in the breeze 30 feet up works often enough.

On this morning, patience isn’t paying off. Finally, we move, slowly, to get the blood flowing and warm up a bit. We follow a deer trail that snakes through brush, over fallen logs and crosses a frozen creek that heads in the direction of the Missouri River, but peters out before getting there.

Guide books tell you the five-toed hind print of a fox squirrel measures about 2.5 inches and that the fore print is rounder, smaller. They are easily recognizable and are seemingly wherever we look in the snow. Jack gets tired of me whispering, pointing out the abundant sign. I get it and decide to stay quiet unless I spot the animal making the tracks.

I never do.

On the hike out, we’re not as careful, certainly not as quiet, as we semi-hustle to get back to town in time for Christmas Eve plans.

While our freezer at home isn’t to-the-top full, it does hold venison from a couple deer and a pronghorn. There’s some pheasants and grouse in there, too, if you move stuff around and look for them. There’s also a couple of squirrels, frozen hard, shot sometime before deer season.

Not a bad fall that ends with a walk in the woods. Hard to argue with that.