A Freezer Full of Ice

I'd intended for this post to be written sometime in November.  It was supposed to have been about my struggles as a hunter, and how, with the help of my two small, but plucky, children, and a belly full of grit, I overcame it all and look! a 5-point high mountain blacktail! a 400-pound black bear!  What? Another giant buck?  Look at that freezer full of wild game.  Damn, Hanna, you're awesome.

Yeah, no.  Instead, I have lots of photos of scenery -- which in and of itself is always one of the best parts of hunting, it's just not edible.  Or only parts of the scenery are edible, the rest give you diarrhea.

There's not much worse than hearing stories about unsuccessful hunts, unless they end with, "... and that's how I survived the mauling," so I won't bore you with too much.  I did get to camp in the Marble Mountain Wilderness with Dylan and we buck hunted until we ran out of Paydays.  I took her to the Russian Wilderness, twice, where we studied bear claw marks on cedar trees and wondered, aloud, where in the hell all the bucks went.  I took both kids on a bear hunt where there were so many piles of bear shit loaded with manzanita berries it looked like Martha Stewart would sell them on Etsy as Thanksgiving cornucopias.  That hunt may have been a little more than we bargained for and I ended up carrying Grady down some particularly steep slopes.

I hunted the August heat and the November snow, I climbed the dry hills of our ranch and the steep forested public land, I belly crawled through buck brush and perched on rocky ridge lines, but came up empty.  I did get one quick crack at a big ol' bear, but whiffed it.  So, right now, my wild game bounty consists of only a sandwich bag with two Eurasian dove breasts (they're invasive and can be shot year-round, plus, they really like hanging out in our yard).

But, that's hunting.  I'd hoped my kids could be witness to my amazing skills as an outdoorsman and provider, but there's always next year.  We're already stocking up on Paydays.