Schooling Butch

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Butch never could tolerate Jim for some reason... (photo from money.cnn.com)

Butch never could tolerate Jim for some reason… (photo from money.cnn.com)

…I do not recommend Jim Pavlec’s method of behavior modification for an aggressive dog. But I do admit that in this particular case it was effective.

Schooling Butch

Lester Haugland, a dairyman whose farm was eight or nine miles east of Creighton, Nebraska, was not an excitable type, so when he came into Ray’s Tavern all flustered and red-faced one evening after milking he attracted a lot of attention. He had that consternated look on his face – the look a guy has when he needs someone to buy him a beer and hear him out.

Our recreational league softball team, Potter’s Pirates, was sitting around the two round tables in the middle of place, celebrating winning our second straight league championship – not a particularly notable accomplishment in a town of 1,500 people, but reason enough to drink several beers on a hot Saturday night in July. Dave was the first to notice Lester’s agitated state, and he called for him to join us.

Ron, Dean, Bob, Steve, Roger, Dave and I scooted chairs around to make room for Lester at our table, and Dave called for another round of draws. Lester sat down, pushed his Surge Milking Machines cap back on his head, and drank half his glass of beer straight down. Well, it was a hot night.

Dave expressed our concern. “Lester,” he said, “you look like you got a corncob wedged up the crack of your ass.” Dave was a sensitive guy that way.

“So, would you, if you had the day I’ve had,” Lester said. And he launched into his story.

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The vagaries of scent

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
To learn about the vagaries of scent, drop a chunk of smoldering of wood into the grass on a windless day, lay on your stomach, and watch the fingers of smoke spread in unexpected directions.

To learn about the vagaries of scent, drop a chunk of smoldering of wood into the grass on a windless day, lay on your stomach, and watch the fingers of smoke spread in unexpected directions.

Any information presented here about the phenomenon of scent and the ability of whitetail deer to detect and respond to it is strictly anecdotal, a compilation of my observations and conjecture, not the result of a disciplined scientific study.

The vagaries of scent

At the end of a late afternoon bow hunt for whitetail deer with my father in a scrub-wood flood plain of the Missouri River, I was forced to admit my abysmal ignorance about the mysteries of scent and scenting in the animal world. Scent is a huge factor in a bow hunter’s success, or lack of success, and that after that weird hunt I vowed I would learn all I could about it.

Forty years later I am not sure I have made a lot of progress.

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Jacob and Esau

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Choosing lentil soup over venison, we traded the freedom and risks of the nomadic life for the security and order of the settled agricultural society. The hunter in us stubbornly regrets the decision.

Choosing lentil soup over venison, we traded the freedom and risks of the nomadic life for the security and order of the settled agricultural society. The hunter in our psyche stubbornly regrets the decision.  (Photo from crispybits.com)

We live in Jacob’s village, but we yearn to wander with Esau’s tribe. And so we hunt.

Jacob and Esau

The parable of twin brothers Jacob and Esau, found in the Book of Genesis, is a hunter’s story.

Each fall when we don our boots and vests, load dogs into the pickup, and drive to the Dakotas for a week’s hunt in the “wild,” we are trying to escape Jacob’s village and join Esau’s tribe.

The core of the biblical fable, Jacob outwitting a hungry Esau by offering him a bowl of lentil stew in exchange for his birthright (his right to assume the patriarchy of the clan), is usually interpreted as the triumph of calculated forethought over the mercurial passion of the moment, a lesson that reasoned intelligence will prevail over impulsive instinct. Jacob’s virtue is his understanding of the concept of delayed reward; Esau’s failing is his desire to have immediate reward and satisfaction.

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Three Guns

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1268

You are granted a year’s leave of absence from work and family responsibilities, handed an itinerary of a few dozen hunts across the North American continent, provided with all the necessary equipment, and are sent forth on this dream of an adventure with one stipulation: you are limited to three guns. Which three would you choose?

Three Guns

We used to play a game called Three Guns: “If you could have only three guns, what would they be?”

For the four of us – Fred, Phil, Dave, and I – the Three Guns game became a standard topic of conversation while we drank coffee during the pre-dawn hours in a duck blind, shared a bag of cookies and water bottle on the late-morning break of a deer hunt, or split a six-pack of beer while cleaning pheasants in the evening in someone’s garage. It never ended, because there are no definitive answers, only subjective opinions, and everyone’s arguments changed from week to week.

The game was based, I think, on an article we had read in some outdoor magazine that proposed the possibility – or perhaps the impossibility – of doing all types of hunting in North America with just three guns, if these three firearms were chosen wisely. Not that any of us would ever venture to Alaska’s Kodiak Island to hunt a 1,200-pound brown bear, be invited to a Georgia plantation to shoot quail over a brace of blueblood setters, or expend a thousand rounds of ammunition at prairie dogs in South Dakota, but you get the idea.

Give it some thought yourself. You are granted a year’s leave of absence from work and family responsibilities, handed an itinerary of a few dozen hunts across the North American continent, provided with all the necessary equipment, and are sent forth on this dream of an adventure with one stipulation: you are limited to three guns. Which three would you choose?

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Better is more

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1206The greatest adventure in creating a bird gun that is uniquely mine was the decision to have the receiver engraved with scroll and images of game birds. 

Better is more

The seed of understanding true value was planted some 50 years ago, but it took a long time to germinate and a longer time to grow to fullness. Indoctrinated into the consumer society and culture, we are taught from day one that more is better, but later in life many of us learn that is false wisdom.

The reverse is true: better is more.

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Playgrounds

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

Daydreams“Life is crap, and it’s full of pain and suffering, and the only thing that makes it worth living — the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living — is play.”
            Brian Sutton-Smith (1924-2015), developmental psychologist
             who studied play, games, toys, organized sports, playground
             sports, computer games, stories, riddles, jokes, daydreaming

Playgrounds

In my retirement years I could be a case study for those behavioral psychologists who advocate play and daydreams as activities crucial to maintaining a healthy mind and a positive attitude. Much of my day is spent in play with dogs and toys, and my imaginary adventures make it possible for me, as Brian Sutton-Smith so aptly observed, “to get up in the morning and go on living.”

Playtime for old curmudgeons is just as important as playtime for school age children, for many of the same reasons. Those boys playing a pickup football game in the vacant lot are imagining themselves in the state university stadium with 85,000 fans cheering them on as they drive down the field to score the winning touchdown. They come home exhilarated, feeling like champions, ready to go forth tomorrow and take on the world.

I am doing more-or-less the same thing as I set up a steel silhouette target at the 50-yard mark on my backyard rifle range and shoot at it with an old .22 caliber rimfire rifle. Plink! A 10-point mule deer buck tumbles to the unerring shooting eye of the aged but crafty master hunter who has spent two days stalking it through the rough and rugged Rocky Mountain wilderness.

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Starting over

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Heather insisted on a walnut stock, saying that plastic-stocked rifles were hideously ugly. Some days even an old curmudgeon sees a glimmer of hope for the next generations of hunters.

Heather insisted on a walnut stock, saying that plastic-stocked rifles were hideously ugly. Some days even an old curmudgeon sees a glimmer of hope for the next generations of hunters.

A random thought clicked in my head: maybe the stock bolts are loose. They were. Protocol says to check this before you even start the scope mounting procedure, but unaccountably I didn’t. So I tightened all three stock bolts to the correct torque, and… started over.

Starting over

After much encouraging, persuading, cajoling, and outright badgering from me, my surrogate niece Heather took the irreversible step on the deer hunter’s road: she bought a rifle of her own.

Quite a nice rifle, a Ruger Model 77 Hawkeye bolt-action in 7mm-08 caliber, and she insisted on a walnut stock, saying that plastic-stocked rifles were hideously ugly. Some days even an old curmudgeon sees a glimmer of hope for the next generations of hunters.

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April’s wild card

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Landmark events of life seem static and dull and almost banal printed in ink on the page, but they are vivid and vibrant and alive when etched in the heartwood of a red elm.

Landmark events of life seem static and dull and almost banal printed in ink on the page, but they are vivid and vibrant and alive when etched in the heartwood of a red elm.

…it is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world. A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm.
            – William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet
            and hymn composer

April’s wild card

April is winter’s wild card. This past week, trying to stack the poker deck in my favor before we play the game, I was dealt a card I did not expect. Hidden in the rings of a newly felled tree was an ace of hearts, a twenty-nine-year-old love note of sorts from this reclaimed farmstead where we live.

Let me explain. After thirty winters in the North Country we know the month of March, that raucous, heartless wench, will treat us badly, taunt and abuse us, and try to crush our spirit with two or three end-of-winter storms. But April? We can never let go of our hopeful fantasies that April, who can be a graceful lady, will be warm and welcoming this year.

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Posted in Firewood, Growth Rings, Red Elm | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Schrödinger’s damned cat

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAQuantum mechanics changed the world… by extinguishing the dream of perfect determinism and mathematical predictability that structured the Newtonian universe.
     – Amir Alexander, science and mathematics historian at UCLA and author of the book Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World

Schrödinger’s damned cat

Not once in my life have I broken 100 straight skeet targets, and it’s all the fault of Schrödinger’s damned cat.

One hundred straight has been an elusive goal. Eighty-seven straight was my best ever, and then I missed the high house target at station five and went into a funk for a week. Most days I am lucky to break 22 or 23 targets in a round, so the goal of 100 straight is a pipe dream, a quest beyond my powers.

But a ray of hope broke through the clouds of reality several months ago when a friend listened to one of my skeet shooting tales of woe and told me, “It can’t be that hard; it’s simple physics.” He is a brilliant man with a scientist’s mind, an engineer’s imagination, and a mathematician’s logic, so if he says he can make me into a 100-straight shooter by solving a couple quadratic equations, well by golly I am going to pay attention.

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A walk in the winter woods

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1160My beautiful blond wife is more lithe and flexible than I on snowshoes. She falls less frequently, too, but I contend that is because the dogs step on my snowshoes more often than hers, a trick that always sends me sprawling and seems to entertain them enormously.

A walk in the winter woods

Finding a shed antler is an unexpected treasure on a woodland walk in February. This miracle of antler growth amazes me; fifteen pounds of bone-hard horns grown over the course of six months, used in mating combat three months, and then dropped with no more fuss than a ten-tear-old kid losing a molar.

This annual shedding of antlers that took much energy and nutrition to grow seems a strange evolutionary adaptation for the deer. Although I suppose it is no more bewildering than any of a hundred other animal behaviors as the North Country goes through the survival testing time of winter: the squirrel burying its cache of walnuts, the bobolink migrating 12,000 miles to Argentina, the woodchuck hibernating deep underground.

But stumbling upon a shed antler with four points and heavy beam has a special fascination for me, maybe because it is evidence that the grandfather buck I have been watching the past three years has survived another hunting season and will sire more fawns carrying his grand genetic strain next fall. Or maybe because it is a symbol signifying the cycle of life goes on, and with the coming of spring there will be renewal of all things wild – antler growth included.

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Posted in Antler Sheds, Snoeshowing, Winter Hiking | Tagged , , | 3 Comments