We’re taking turns fishing.
Three of us are sitting on a giant log that was parked on sand and rock by the unimaginable force of spring runoff in south central Montana, while the fourth wades knee-deep in a river side-channel casting to cutthroat trout.
Catch a fish and the next person is up. Miss a fish, take a seat on the log.
It’s the last day of an annual weeklong trip in early August and it feels like it. Getting up before sunrise to beat the heat and hiking up the canyon a little farther each day to get away from other anglers has lost some shine.
We’d argue that we could do this for another week, and maybe we could, but talk on the log turns to home and what awaits us.
It’s not often nowadays, with our two oldest kids living in Colorado and the youngest a freshman in college, that we’re together as one, all face to face over the course of the year. Holidays draw us together, certainly, as do hunting season openers, which is where our conversation has wandered atop the log.
Like ballplayers having a pregame catch in the outfield, we talk bird and deer numbers just to warm up, knowing full well no matter the forecast from wildlife managers that our hunting plans won’t change.
Next, after some discussion we mentally pencil in a weekend in the badlands for the sharp-tailed grouse opener, which has fast become an annual outing for us. We could argue, and maybe even buy it for a beat or two, that shooting birds isn’t a priority on this trip because the scenery (and typically the weather) in western North Dakota in early fall is worth the price of lodging, food, licenses and a plane ticket to Bismarck from the Centennial State.
A better argument, one that holds more water in our camp, is that you’d be hard-pressed to find handsomer country to flush and shoot early season grouse but having a heavier game bag than when we started always makes the view even that much easier on the eyes.
While we can certainly count to four, which is the number of doe tags we drew for North Dakota’s November gun season, no one has bothered to count the fish we’ve caught and missed from this side-channel run in the last half-hour.
We surely don’t dismiss them. The trout are as gorgeous as the country in which they swim and at times can be a little hard to tease to the surface, making them even prettier when they do.
They’re kind of like our doe tags in a way. Considering the difficulty for my nonresident kids to draw a tag (nonresident applicants compete only against other nonresident hunters for 1% of licenses), teasing a “successful” lottery message into my email inbox is a lovely thing.
Last season we rented a place from friends that is located, as the crow flies, about 5 miles from where we deer hunt. The accommodations were great. The location even better. It beat driving back and forth from Bismarck and, more importantly, had the feel of a deer camp. Friends hunting in the area stopped by after last shooting light, knocking on the living room window to get our attention, to talk about the ones that got away and the ones that didn’t.
These animals, all of them – hard-earned whitetails kicked from heavy cover and mule deer bedded in impossibly open country – stick with us and we can’t help but count them.
