Hits and Misses

Contents

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Honk if You Love Geese

Mule Deer Odyssey

Blizzard Blacktail

Whitetail Wanderings

The Elusive Elk

Talking Turkey

Partial to Pronghorn

Bears are Where, and If, You Find Them

Feather Busting

Wild Boars of the World

Homegrown Exotic Game

The Spanish Connection

End of the Hunt

About the Author

Hits and Misses

A Memoir Collection

by

Jim Woods

All rights reserved

Copyright © September 2011, Jim Woods

Cover Art Copyright © 2011, Charlotte Holley

Gypsy Shadow Publishing

Lockhart, TX

www.gypsyshadow.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

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ISBN: 9781619500129

Published in the United States of America

First eBook Edition: September 24, 2011

Acknowledgments

Having been both a hunter and a writer for a number of years, portions of my personal hunting experiences have found their way into other publications prior to this book. Some of the stories I relate here have been told in print in other venues; a few in a manner similar enough to a prior treatment as to be recognizable by readers who have read my work before. I ask the indulgence of those readers and assure them that most of this book is new, and that many of the repeated stories are told differently this time around. That is not to say that the antlers grew to larger proportions or that the close encounters became more harrowing; but just are told with different choices of, and hopefully improved, words and phrases.

My thanks to (then) Petersen Publishing Company for permission to use Honk if You Love Geese that appeared in Petersen’s Hunting magazine. Thanks also to DBI Books for permission to use, rewrite and re-title Buck Knives Buck Hunt, and Queen Charlotte Blacktails from two separate issues of Gun Digest Hunting Annual. And to The Omega Group that returned to me the rights to material used in a special issue of their Focus Series, World Hunting. Portions of the material here also appeared in substantially different form under my byline in Guns Magazine, and other outdoors publications.

Jim Woods

Tucson, Arizona

Honk If You Love Geese

Choosing a favorite big game species is a difficult and arbitrary decision for me. My selection could be swayed by the latest daydream inspired by one of my trophy mounts on the wall, or by one of my rifles that I associate with a particular hunt. I might vacillate between an African species that I have collected several times, or one that almost collected me; or I might settle on the noble western mule deer that I have loved to hunt. It would be a tough choice. But among the birds, everything comes second to geese.

For no good reason that I can offer, I do not have a taxidermy mount of a Canada goose, although I favor those mounts with giant wings cupped for landing. The only tangible goose decoration in my writing work space is a pair of carved birds; not decoys, but miniatures carved of fir and not painted, just the natural color of the wood.

What makes them special is that they were fashioned by a Cree Indian, carved over several evenings during the winter freeze that imprisons the far reaches of Ontario, and finished to splinterless perfection by being scraped with broken glass. Not that the Indians could not get sandpaper if they wished it; on James Bay where the Crees live, the historic Hudson Bay store still supplies all the necessities of life, and that could include sandpaper. Why broken glass then, instead of sandpaper? Because they have broken glass, and materials on hand are to be used. It could be called conservation and recycling.

Geese are godlike to the Crees. Tribal hunters take them by the boatload under the native subsistence laws of Canada, and the tribe does subsist on geese for the entire winter when the waterways freeze over. For a people normally given to hard work, days of forced inactivity produce some native art of exceptional merit, including my toy geese.

I do love the big birds. If there is a greater thrill than a flight of geese lifting off the water and flying past my blind, I haven’t experienced it yet. It’s exciting to have them pass close enough to get off a shot, and a pure satisfaction to bring one or two down from the flight, but many have been the times I was content to watch them pass without my ever slapping a trigger.

It’s another thrill to have the grand creatures come to your call and decoys. In fact, I’m not sure I could say whether sitting in a morning blind waiting for and experiencing the liftoff and formation or turning the birds from a high flight by a coaxing call is the more exciting.

Much of my sitting in blinds waiting for the over-flights has been on Maryland’s eastern shore of the Chesapeake. There is little in the United States to compare with the Chesapeake when it comes to geese. James Michener captured the spell of the geese in the novel, Chesapeake, and to have written that novel, he had to have experienced the flights over Chesapeake Bay. If I were to build a permanent waterfowl blind on Chesapeake Bay, I’d outfit it with a pew for a bench, for at no time do I feel more in church than when the geese fly.

I was fortunate to have hunted the Chesapeake without having to compete for space along the public accesses, and without the necessity of joining one of the expensive private clubs that control much of the admittance to the waterways. All my Chesapeake experience has been as a guest of Remington Farms. Remington, the arms and ammunition people, at the time operated Remington Farms on the bay. The farm, which included a wetlands sanctuary, was a virtual field laboratory for wildlife habitat and related sciences. It was common to observe university students and wildlife biologists at work on Remington Farms, and not only on waterfowl projects but also on those associated with deer and small game, and with general agricultural-improvement methods that benefited farmers nationwide.

In addition, some limited hunting was authorized, controlled hunting being a prime wildlife conservation tool. Remington utilized the setting to host outdoors writers from time-to-time for introduction of the company’s new firearms products. Those sessions usually included a couple of days of hunting. It was during these sessions on Remington Farms that I enjoyed my well-remembered Chesapeake Bay goose hunting. At all times when hunting on those press junkets, the Chesapeake geese were zealously protected, by the federal waterfowl regulations, those of the state of Maryland, and perhaps most rigidly of all by the caring custodians of Remington Farms.

The geese at Remington Farms do not originate at Chesapeake Bay but only stop there en route to wherever their instincts take them on their annual journeys. The geese moving down the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways, and perhaps some that take the Central Flyway as well, gather for their odyssey at James Bay, the southern projection of Hudson Bay between Ontario and Quebec. The birds don’t necessarily originate there either. Most of them are spread much farther north, summering all along the northernmost perimeter of Canada, including frigid Victoria and Baffin islands and all of the Arctic landfalls.

The great gathering of geese, primarily Canadas, at James Bay just prior to the far north’s freezing over in November, is so incredible as to defy description. One could speak of birds by the millions, but a million of anything is difficult to comprehend. How about geese on the ground as far as the eye can see; in those treeless marshy flats, the eye can see a long way indeed.

I’ve likened the goose assembly point at James Bay to those temporary encampments of westward-bound settlers at St. Joseph, Missouri, but on a grander scale. The settlers gathered friends and acquaintances for the wagon train that was to bind them as a unit for their long journey. The geese choose their associates for the flying wedge that will be part of the southern migration. From all over the north country they come—bachelors and families of just a few birds, and small flights comprising several families. They all seek out and sign on with the larger outfit that will see them through to Mississippi, Florida, and points south.

Not every flight gets off at the same time, or even the same day. It’s as though a feathered flight controller schedules out the flights, so that the airways and overnight feeding grounds en route are not taxed beyond capacity. By some wonderful system of internal clock and calendar, the big birds know when it’s time to depart; and that liftoff, the start of a journey of thousands of miles is one of the most awesome sights on earth.

For the hunter headed for James Bay, the jumping off place is Timmins, Ontario, by way of Toronto first if you’re flying in from the United States. My hunt price included a DC-3 flight from Timmins. The outfitter I signed with no longer has a concession, so his name is not very helpful to someone wanting to hunt James Bay today, and neither are his prices that were in effect in the mid-1980s when last I hunted there. However, there are sixteen to eighteen other such camps on James Bay, and probably the same DC-3 still flies in from Timmins. Contact Ontario Travel, Queen’s Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M7A 2E5 for a current directory of the James Bay goose camps, then write to them directly to get their prices and arrangements.

The plane I flew on was ancient, and it was loaded with a couple of dozen