If you have been reading some of my recent posts, you are probably aware that I have been talking about some of my exploits and experiences after being assigned to the JITC at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. My story today centers around a subject that is near and dear to my heart, hunting (once again). More specifically, my post today once again deals with deer hunting. The deer hunt that year was the first deer hunt since we had moved into our newly built custom home out on the edge of town in Sierra Vista. I posted last time that this make It take a little bit longer to commute to work on post at Fort Huachuca, but I saved time by working out at my gym in my shed. Also spoke about how I took my daughter with me on the hunt that year. And if you recall, I mentioned that it rained quite a bit during the winter monsoons that year. Needless to say, the deer and us humans were getting pretty wet. It took until three days after Christmas for my daughter to fill her deer tag in the rain that year. That meant that I only had three days left to fill my tag before the end of the season. Another thing that I talked about in my previous post was about how deer are kind of like people. They hate the rain. As a result, they find thick brush and wooded areas to provide shelter from the wind and rain. They don’t have the luxury of using umbrellas and rain jackets and Gore-Tex to protect themselves from the elements. Not that umbrellas would do him that much good because umbrellas would get stuck in the thick brush that they like to hide in. It would be pretty difficult for the deer to move through the woods on their deer trails with umbrellas. However, as luck would have it, sometime during the evening after my daughter filled her deer tag, the rain let up and the storm system cleared out. As a result, cold temperatures set in during the night under the clear evening skies. Those cold temperatures forced the critters in the woods, including the deer, to get up and move to stay warm. That played in my favor. I drove up canyon from the area where we had first spotted the deer that my daughter eventually shot and tagged. We had seen quite a few deer earlier in the season in that canyon moving along a deer trail, but we were never in position to take a shot at them. I selected a spot halfway up the canyon that was on the opposite side of the canyon from that deer trail. That is where I set up shop to glass the deer trail for activity. There were plenty of acorn trees along that trail for the deer to stop and feed on. The only bad thing about sitting along the side of a hill on a cold morning when you’re half-awake is that you start to doze off and stop paying attention to what you were really there for. The reason that you stop paying attention is because you are way overdressed because you don’t want to freeze your ass. You don’t want to freeze your ass because you know that it’s going to be cold as hell sitting on the side of that hill. And, sure enough, it is cold as hell. Yeah, yeah. I know that I could get into that whole argument about whether hell is exothermic or endothermic. But I am quite certain that all of you are brilliant enough to Google the term “hell exothermic or endothermic” and find out the University of Albany and a number of other supposed University answers to the question. As a result, you would soon find out that hell (the proverbial hell of the Bible) does not get cold enough to freeze over. However, if we’re talking about Hell, Michigan, that is quite a different story. The Detroit Free Press confirmed that Hell (Michigan) froze over on January 14, 2024. The folks up in that part of the world even created a holiday to celebrate the event. I’m not lying. You can Google that too. Google “hell is freezing over day.” Apparently January 31, 2024, is Hell Is Freezing over Day. The holiday occurs every year on January 31. Go figure. But that’s only in reference to Hell, Michigan. It does not apply to the proverbial hell of the Bible. Does that mean that you’ll burn in hell if you worship the devil? I’m so sorry, I cannot answer that question. But I digress. I was talking about how cold it was while I was sitting on the side of that canyon waiting for the deer to walk by. I was also talking about how overdressed I was in response to the cold. Anyway, I may have dozed off for a second or two. I’m not saying I did. And I’m not saying I didn’t. But something alerted me to action across the canyon. Maybe it was my Spidey sense, tingling. Well, I don’t really have a Spidey sense. Maybe it was ESP (extrasensory perception). I started to glass the open area. Just beyond some scrub brush and acorn trees. I call them acorn trees, but they are really Oak trees. There was a single file procession of deer. There were three deer in the procession. The first two deer were does, but the last deer in the procession was a spike buck (a young buck that has no prongs grown on his antlers). I waited until the spike buck came out into the open, into the clearing to the nearest point to me across the canyon. I took aim at its center of mass behind its front shoulder and fired. The spike buck collapsed where it stood. The two does took off like comets across the sky. In seconds, they were gone. That was just as well because I only had one tag. It took me a few minutes to get across the canyon and find the spike buck. I confirmed that it was dead before I approached the body. After I approached the body, I tagged the deer and dragged it down to the floor of the canyon near my vehicle. Once I was near my vehicle, I field dressed the deer, loaded it into my vehicle, and headed to the game management office to have it weighed and recorded. That spike buck was the second deer that I hung in my shed at home to skin and butcher. I harvested that spike buck with no exercises in futility.
by 
by 