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Milestones

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 I GOT A SQUIRREL!! That's the text I sent my wife shortly after crossing this milestone. Here's the story... I drive a school bus, and thanks to COVID I have Wednesdays off. Monday and Tuesday sees half the elementary students go to school, and Thursday and Friday the other half goes. They all do distance learning on Wednesday. So I decided to get up early and hit the woods. I went to the second parking spot on the back road we had scouted on Saturday. It was the end of the road and the beginning of the path leading into many hundred acres of game reserve. The sun was barely up and the weather was delightful!  Before I go into the woods, or on any adventure really, I say a little prayer. Now, a little history... The first hunt I ever went on (as an observer) was a buffalo hunt with my Lakota friends in South Dakota. They offered up tobacco before the hunt and after the kill and basically prayed and thanked throughout the whole thing. So three years ago when I started to learn...
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Our First Opener

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 This year, I decided to get into the woods on the FIRST DAY OF THE SEASON. As a bonus, my kiddos joined me! Nothing better than spending time in the wilderness with my kids. The only drawback to this was that I wanted to get to the woods before the sun broke the horizon and the kids moved slooooow when their alarms went off. We got on the road just before sunrise. Having never been to a season opener, I wasn't sure how crowded it would be. Turns out we weren't the only ones out for opening day.  Cars, trucks, even a camper, at every official parking spot we passed and even along the road from time to time.  As it happens, it was not only small game opening day, but the first day of the archery season for deer. I checked my normal spots... full. Naturally I forgot the map that shows all of the parking spots all over Whitewater, so after seeing all of the vehicles I was a bit concerned that we were going to have to head to another bit of hunting woods somewhere. I vaguely ...
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The Boyo does Live Fire

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Today was an historic day. My son fired his first shots from a proper firearm. I taught him the way the Marines taught me. He spent a LOT of time dry firing Opa, the Remington model 23 that was my grandfather's rifle.   Practicing sighting in, proper sight alignment, breathing, squeezing the trigger, etc. He got bored fast, much as I did at boot camp. But still he practiced. I had him memorize the steps for firing. Unlock and open bolt. insert round. close and lock bolt. Pull back firing pin. Sight in. Breathe. Aim small, miss small. Squeeze. Until he knew it by heart. We talked at great length about firearm safety. How to carry, don't aim at anything you don't want to kill, treat every firearm as loaded at all times. He knows to check the chamber when he is handed the weapon, even if he saw someone check it before they handed it to him. The kid knows the basics.  Lest you think I'm forgetting about the Sweet Pea, rest assured that she has also been trained the same...
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Elk Pizza Casserole

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Yesterday was the opening of small game season, but due to busy schedules I wasn't able to go out looking for squirrels or rabbits. My little family has started planning out our meals a week or so in advance to avoid the last minute "what should we eat for supper?" plans where we end up getting fast food. So today, I'm making one of my childhood favorite meals, Pizza Casserole. My mom used to make this for me on special occasions, and she taught me to make it. Why is it here on my learning to hunt blog? Because today I'm making it with ELK! No, I didn't hunt the elk, unless you count a sharp eye spotting it from across the local Farmers Market. We spent the summer finding new and different meats there and at a local store called Fresh Thyme, which has led to eating such game as elk, venison, wild boar, antelope and even yak. (And yes, the yak is surprisingly and amazingly good!) Those are stories for another day. I want to get the bulk of this written before...
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Proper Zeroing

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I think I figured out why I missed the other day. I went to the local range and decided to just zero Peach at 25 yards for now. I can't see taking much more than a 50 yard shot in the woods I've been hiking, and my missed "perfect shot" made me question my outdoor "close enough to 50 yard, don't take too many shots" zeroing day. I set the scope to 5x and set up for my first three shots. Here's my second and third shot. (I jerked the trigger on the first shot and hit waaaaay outside the circle.) pew pew As you can see, my shots were about an inch or so down and left from my aim point 9the center of the 1 inch orange circle). Which explains why the squirrel leapt so high and far when my round hit an inch lower and left from his head. I must have scared the nuts out of him. So I clicked in some correction and tried a second group on target 2. I felt like I was wandering a bit, and the shot grouping reflected that. Some improvement, but n...
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Ten Yards

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This was the day. I could feel it when I woke up. It was going to be a warm, drizzly day. Upper 30's, maybe into the 40's. And I could feel in my bones that today would be the day I shot at a squirrel. I dropped the kids off at school and reflected on the night before. I had been catching up on transcribing my journal onto the computer. On January 4th, I had been part way up a steep hill and heard chittering that I thought might be a chipmunk. Last night, on the 6th, I had done some more research and found that it was actually a squirrel. So that day, all of those critters I had heard were squirrels. Lots of 'em. And I knew where they were. So today HAD to be the day. HAD to be. I drove up to that same spot and decided to climb all the way to the top of that big, steep hill and glass the trees for the squirrels. Imma gonna climb that hill. It doesn't look that steep from here! My pack seemed particularly heavy on this day. I got a two liter water po...
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