I have the woods to myself. Save for a single set of boot tracks that I cut earlier in the soft snow, it appears this chunk of public land in the Missouri River bottoms has attracted few visitors of late.
Considering it’s the last day of the deer muzzleloader season, I knew there was a chance to bump into blaze orange, but I get lucky.
The are other hunters around, however, well upriver of me as they repeatedly give themselves away with volleys of shotgun blasts. Canada geese, the target of the hunters, cut the silence between trigger pulls as they loudly chatter while moving both upstream and downstream without pause.
I welcome the noise made by both the hunters and the geese because it has a way of drowning out the aggravating and incessant buzzing in my ears that is likely the fallout of pulling too many triggers without hearing protection or simply age.
I’ve been in the woods for maybe two hours, wandering slowly down the paths of least resistance, leaning against the cold bark of trees and sitting on logs for minutes at a time.
If someone was spying on me from the high ground above the floodplain, they might conclude age has stolen more than just some of my hearing. I move this slow, pause this often, not because I don’t have another gear or two, not because my stamina has left me, it’s because I want to make fox squirrel stew for the kids when they come home for Christmas. And the odds of doing that go way up by slowing down and employing some patience.
At least that’s how I figure it.
Aside from the geese flying over the river well to my east and the everpresent nuthatches navigating around and around tree branches like highwire circus performers, the woods seem dead.
If it weren’t for the squirrel tracks in the snow, sign that these animals do exist, I would have packed it in an hour ago. But I don’t, knowing there are worse things I could be doing, and sitting on a log in the woods on a 40-plus degree day in mid-December isn’t one of them.
I’ve been here before, not on this specific log, but here as in: Not seeing a single squirrel stretched out on a limb with its reddish tail fluttering lightly in the breeze; not seeing a single squirrel bounce from limb to limb 30 feet off the ground with nearly the same abandon and athleticism as the nuthatches; not seeing a single squirrel chase another squirrel in twister fashion around a tree trunk.
I’ve shot squirrels, lots of them it seems, doing exactly those things in seasons past. Caught unaware of my presence while they did squirrel things high above the ground, I doubt they ever heard the click of the safety being pushed from safe to fire.
I’ve also gone home empty-handed before, my waxed canvas backpack weighing the same as when I entered the woods.
