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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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? <\/p>\n
The last herd reduction I was at was Tippecanoe, and it was pretty flat. I had forgotten about the dunes. <\/p>\n
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<\/a> keeping the dune from collapsing beneath me.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n “Any luck?”<\/p>\n “No. You?”<\/p>\n “No. Nice day for a walk, though” It had been 60-64 most of the afternoon. <\/p>\n “yeah. I just walked the ridge around the edge. Took me forty minutes.” He couldn’t have been more than 25. <\/p>\n “I just followed your footsteps in the opposite direction. I took my time, an hour and a half, maybe”<\/p>\n “Really? Some of that shit is pretty technical. How did you get up the edge of the Furnessville blowout without a rope?”<\/p>\n “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”<\/p>\n “Still. Forty vertical feet of mostly loose sand, you must be tired”<\/p>\n “I am. My first stop is Speedway for some coffee”<\/p>\n “I got a thermos, you got a cup?”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “me too. I counted 24 shots” I told him Maybe. I feel better about being skunked when an Army Ranger was skunked right along side me. <\/p>\n 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.<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n
\n“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”<\/p>\n