With all the children and grandchildren coming home to the farm for Christmas day, for the first time in several years, Patti wished that we would have snow on this strangely warm winter to make the celebration perfect. You got your wish, Babe. I thought I had the grandkids’ gifts covered with my latest blog, but yours was the best. I love you.
Merry Christmas!
Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.
― Peg Bracken (1918-2007), American humor writer
I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.
― Harlan Miller (b. 1964), British writer and artist
It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas means a little bit more.
― Dr. Seuss (1904-91), Theodor Seuss Geisel, American writer and illustrator of children’s books
Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.”
― Truman Capote (1924-84), American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
Christmas gifts for my grandchildren
Gift wrap, ribbons, and bows will not adorn the gifts I most want to give my grandchildren this Christmas season. The truly important gifts need no decoration or embellishment because they are not material things.
That does not mean they are not real. To the contrary, they are the most real and substantial and valuable possessions in my power to grant.
Technically, these are not Christmas gifts because they will not be opened under the ornament bedecked cedar tree in the big kitchen of our farmhouse Yuletide morning. These gifts will be unwrapped through the course of the coming years, on this day or that, in this place or another, with pomp and circumstance or with casual notice, some with joyful enthusiasm and some with somber contemplation. I may be there to witness some of the gift-sharing, but it is likely that the most valuable presents will come to light on a day of solitude.
The gnarled hands of the Over the Hill Gang are cross hatched with a maze of scars, and our knuckles have been jammed and dislocated so many times they now look like badly carved dresser drawer knobs.
A man is the sum of his scars.
~from the novel Blood Sport – A Journey up the Hassayampa by Robert F. Jones (1934-2002)
God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.
~Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher.
Scars
Each and every member of the Over the Hill Gang has taken a battering in life, leaving us all marked with an assortment of scars, blemishes, and disfigurements. Collectively, we are a sort of human Rosetta Stone that can, if you know how to read it, be used to decipher the long and convoluted narratives of misfortune and poor decision making that are the history of our hunting and fishing adventures.
The hieroglyphs chiseled into us include wrinkled toe tips lost to frostbite, ears with ragged edges where barbed fish hooks were extracted, hands cross hatched with a maze of scars that are the result of clumsy knife handling, knuckles jammed and dislocated so many times they now look like badly carved dresser drawer knobs, a fingernail that is permanently black and furrowed from a whack with a wood splitting maul, and the raised red welts that mark the surgery sites for knee replacements, hip replacements, spinal disk removals, shoulder rotator cuff repairs, arterial stent implants, and insertion of the numerous pins, wires and staples that were used to repair a diverse range of incidental injuries.
Previously, camp etiquette was based on coarse and uncouth behaviors, those all-male enclave traditions that we bearers of the XY chromosome combination learned in junior high school and never progressed beyond. Demonstrative belching and farting, for example.
A woman in deer camp
A woman in the hunting party is a new experience for me, and one that does not easily fit into my narrow, entrenched concept of what life in camp is supposed to be. Heather has joined the Over the Hill Gang, and being the only female member of this disreputable bunch and far too young to be over the hill, she has brought a whole different dynamic to our hunting expeditions.
The days afield are not much changed. She has certainly not hindered the pace or the tactics of the hunt since she can out-walk, out-shoot, and out-think all of us. If she is not as physically strong as the males of the troop she is surely more tough and durable. More driven and tenacious, too.
Good bird season
Winter’s first serious snowfall brought out the curmudgeon in me. I’ve been grumbling the past two days that this might be the beginning of a series of storms that will bring bird season to an end.
National Weather Service predicts warm and sunny days are coming next week to the North Country, which should melt the accumulation of snow and ice, but NWS has deceived and disappointed me before. I can tolerate the cold, but when the snow gets deep my bird season is over.
After this morning’s plodding walk around the farm with Sasha and Abbey, I holed up in my clubhouse to do some editing and rewriting on a soon-to-be published book while the French ladies slept on the couch. Looking at a few photos scattered across the tabletop I was cheered by the realization that, coming to an end or not, this has been a damned good bird season for the three of us, in company with the Over the Hill Gang.
Here are snapshots of a few of the best days. All credit to good dog work.
Abbey – at the end of the only day we came back from the Fort Pierre National Grassland in South Dakota with a limit of grouse. Despite low numbers of birds, we had four great days of hunting in beautiful country.
Sasha, my best woodcock dog ever, with three she found for me on our mid-October hunt in northeast Minnesota.
Abbey – with the four birds shot over her points one day on our early November pheasant hunt in northern South Dakota.
Double-teaming ’em. Abbey, left, and Sasha with the bounty taken from the steep hillsides of a restored native grass prairie in western Iowa.
Back in the clubhouse after a cold and windy day’s hunt in northeast Iowa last week. I forgot the camera, so Abbey had to suffer through an indoor photo shoot. As you can see, she thinks this is ridiculous.
Now, on a nasty weather day in winter, I get to write about it! After December 15, look for the publication of “Coot Stews,” the third collection of essays in the Old Coot series of books.
Okay, I’ll stop grumbling. It’s been a good bird season, and we may have opportunities to go afield a few more days before it’s over.
Hope your fall has been equally good and that your Christmas season is filled with happy and rewarding days.
Experience makes more timid men than it does wise ones.
~Josh Billings, pen name of American humor writer and lecturer
Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-1885)
Nebraska blizzard gifts
Unexpected blizzards still sweep across the Nebraska prairies in November, but we no longer go deer hunting in the heart of those storms.
Except this year.
Hunting in miserable weather used to be a frequent misadventure for the Over the Hill Gang. In this year’s deer camp, waiting out the worst hours of the winter’s first snowstorm in a comfortable bunk house, we looked back over the decades and remembered with some astonishment our stubborn insistence on hunting in brutal weather conditions.
Dolores
sel·fie — /ˈselfē/ (noun, informal) a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. Usage: “occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself everyday isn’t necessary”– from Google.com definitions
Selfies doe
Dolores keeps sending me her selfie photos.
Dolores (pronounced doh-lohr-us) is beautiful, shapely, and alluring, but her mania for taking these selfies and posting them where she knows I will see them is become a huge irritation. Her teasing borders on harassment.
It started three years ago when my beautiful blonde wife bought me a trailcam for Christmas. After a brief struggle to master the technology, I strapped the cam onto a tree overlooking the most-used deer trail on our place the day after Christmas and waited two days to see what wildlife images I would catch. After figuring out how to remove the smartcard from the trailcam and insert it into the correct slot on my laptop, I called up the first photo.
There was Dolores, staring into the lens. Nice doe, I thought. I looked through the rest of the images – mostly pictures of weeds waving in the wind – and erased them.
Shooting a limit of birds is not the most gratifying part of a day’s pheasant hunt in South Dakota, but for the Over the Hill Gang it’s a significant accomplishment. Most of the credit goes to (left to right) Ty the Irish setter and Abbey and Sasha the French Spaniels. Happiness is a bird dog on point in a beautiful sweeping vista of grassland on a cool autumn day. May there be many more.
Sasha is a beautiful dog to hunt over, even when her legs and belly are coated with the black, soupy mud of a South Dakota cattail slough.
Live everyday as if it’s your last, boys, and one day in the future when you look back, you’ll have lived ten thousand lifetimes.
– from the novel I Have Lived Today by Steven Moore (b. 1974), teacher, painter, writer
Il n’est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
– Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician and philosopher
One thing’s for certain
Sasha does not know that she is 12 years old. She only knows that it is pheasant season and she is in the heart of it in South Dakota.
I know it’s pheasant season, too, but I also know that Sasha is 12 and that I am 65 and that these may be the last of our glorious days together in Dakota. Bird hunters envy their dogs in many ways, but the greatest of these envies is this: bird dogs know only the certainties of life while hunters know only the uncertainties.
Dogs and people approach things a little differently. For example, I am very fond of pizza but have never had a desire to roll in it. Rolling in more or less odorous things may be somewhat mysterious but I assume the idea is to collect a choice odor and take it along.
– from the essay Roller Derby in the book titled Bird Dogs & Bird Guns by Charley Waterman (1913-2005)
Coon pooh
Of the dozens of canine behaviors that passeth all understanding the most curious is my dogs’ fascination with rolling in coon pooh. Feces of the common raccoon (Procyon lotor) is vile and disgusting stuff, from a human point of view, but it is apparently the essence of ambrosia to a dog.
Of all the larger mammalian species of wildlife that roam the woods and fields of our farm, raccoons are among the most plentiful. We did not intend to develop habitat to benefit raccoons, but inadvertently we created a utopia for the masked raiders: deciduous forest, weedy grassland, nearby corn and bean fields, easily accessible vegetable gardens, and a compost pile to help them through harsh winters. In this paradise they have gone forth to multiply in impressive numbers.
Although we enjoy watching their antics and put up with their pilfering (rural homeowner tip: tip store dog food in tightly sealed metal cans), we find them to be rude and unappreciative guests. Especially in their waste elimination habits.
 | Jerry Johnson on Tombstones |
| Jerry Johnson on Newton’s Third Law |
 | Karla G on Newton’s Third Law |
| Jerry Johnson on Senior hunting camp |
 | Anonymous on Senior hunting camp |
| Jerry Johnson on Tombstones |
| Jerry Johnson on Newton’s Third Law |
| Karla G on Newton’s Third Law |
| Jerry Johnson on Senior hunting camp |
| Anonymous on Senior hunting camp |
Dispatches from a Northern Town 