Most years I try to get in the habit of moving around a bit more in the weeks prior to hunting season, and this year, I pretty much avoided all attempts at fitness of any kind.

Sure, I have been on a lot of jobs that require me to walk around a bunch more than usual, but basically, i went afield cold.

See, I had a slot in the Dunes Deer herd reduction, and i figured, how hard can this be? Go into a park, shoot a deer, gut it, drag it home, right?

The last herd reduction I was at was Tippecanoe, and it was pretty flat. I had forgotten about the dunes.

So I spent two days, maybe four or five miles each day, climbing my big ass over 50-65 foot changes in elevation. it’s all sand, of course, so what little surface loam there is is thin, few trees over 2′ diameter, lots of deadfalls. Some of the ridges I was walking were literally footsteps thick, only the marram grass keeping the dune from collapsing beneath me.

I followed a set of footsteps that had come from the opposite direction. They were Vibram soles, the imprint clear in the damp sand. They were from that day- it rained yesterday and would have obliterated any tracks more than a few hours old. There were a few places I was glad I’d grabbed a hiking stick. There were a few sandsteps in the worst places, stout pine branches a couple inches thick jammed into the path to keep the sand from just drifting off. Sometimes the trail went through leaves, but Vibram Soles kept coming everytime i found a sandy spot. An hour and change later I came to the park entrance, not a shot all day, and unloaded, and went back to the truck. Sitting next to me was a kid taking off his boots- the same Corcoran Vibram soles I’d been tracking.

“Any luck?”

“No. You?”

“No. Nice day for a walk, though” It had been 60-64 most of the afternoon.

“yeah. I just walked the ridge around the edge. Took me forty minutes.” He couldn’t have been more than 25.

“I just followed your footsteps in the opposite direction. I took my time, an hour and a half, maybe”

“Really? Some of that shit is pretty technical. How did you get up the edge of the Furnessville blowout without a rope?”

“I had a stick. I took my time. I rested a lot. I have had surgery on both knees and the hips and ankles aren’t what they once were”

“Still. Forty vertical feet of mostly loose sand, you must be tired”

“I am. My first stop is Speedway for some coffee”

“I got a thermos, you got a cup?”

I did. he shared some coffee with me and I found out he was a recently-out ranger, a smart and capable kid who loved to fish and hunt, and shoot. Like me, he hadn’t seen anything, but he heard shots.

“me too. I counted 24 shots” I told him
“yeah, the DNR says one deer on this end of the park and nine on the other. I can’t imagine that many misses, I think they were just shooting because they were bored”

Maybe. I feel better about being skunked when an Army Ranger was skunked right along side me.

I also don’t feel too badly out of shape knowing that I was able to walk the same path as him, however slowly. Actually, this morning when I put on my long underdrawers, I’d forgotten how big they were; when I started losing weight i had turned the corner on four and was on my way to five; while I’ve backslid some, at 3 something I’m in a whole lot better shape than then, so the longhandled underdrawers were almost technically Bib Underwear. They only lacked mere inches of being able to go over my shoulders. I had to wear a regular pair of drawers over them to keep them up.

Thank God for Danner Boots, though. Had I not been wearing them, I’d be a hurting unit right now, with emphasis on “unit”