OK, Hay Maker. But just the one. Don't want to bore folks too bad.
Here's one I did a few years back. Goes on for a bit. But some outfit was dumb enough to give me as prize for it. Musta been short on entries.
The Gido Buck
By NEIL WAUGH
In Kalyna Country bucks and the hunting of them act are intimately and intrinsically woven into the cycle and spirit of life. Sure there are mulies in the area. And the great march eastward of the prairie moose is one of the most remarkable Alberta game management success stories.
But it's the pursuit and passion for whitetail deer that is as much a part of the culture and mystique as are the births and the weddings and the proud gidos resting deep in the thick black loam of the burying ground that slopes away from buck-blood bell tower and silver onion domes of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church.
I pull up to the solid fieldstone farmhouse of my brother-in-law Marvin long before first light – let alone legal light. But the yard lamp is already on and I see movement through the kitchen window as I shut off the Jeep.
The bite of the foggy air gets to me and I hurry inside to the coffee I know by experience is already cooking on the stove. Marvin appears a little perplexed. Anxious may not be too strong a word. He hasn't been out much since bringing the outfit home from his annual horse hunt for Kanaskis elk. And the rifle season for whitetail is all but used up. To make things more complicated Pete's coming too. Pete hunts good. Without stepping on any toes and bruising any egos, Marvin may hunt even better. Me, I just like hanging out and learning from these guys.
When the lights of Pete's truck hit the driveway, we make plans, discuss strategies and leave for the morning session. It's more of a scouting mission than actual hunting. We cruise the grids, glassing the field edges and the hidden places were whitetail like to come out. There are game trails leading to pea fields. And another place where the deer have carved a wide lane into some second growth alfalfa. This country comes with a history and, I suspect, its fair share of ghosts. In overgrown corners far away from the lumberyard package farmhouses, the old peoples' cabins sit empty, bucked and busted from a century of heaving frosts. The dovetailed, square-timbered homes of the long dead Ukrainian pioneers, lovingly broad-axed from impossibly twisted poplar logs, are now lonely places where only the bucks live. And the old hand-cleared homesteads, with their cherry-choked fence lines backed up by mysteriously tangled woodlots, are the deer's homeland and sanctuary.
The barley, canola, alfalfa, and the more recent buck candy, field peas, are what they eat.
We end up at Fred's place where his missus and a smudge of cats ask us in. He's got six quarters of incredibly pure whitetail habitat. But he wants us to sign an access document. There's apparently been trouble with road hunters and such from the city. But Fred also needs to talk grain prices and weather and all the other things that stack the odds so unfairly against the mixed farming business.
By then it's time for morning chores. I haul barley chop to the market hogs while Marvin fires up the John Deere and takes a round bail out for his range cows. He spots a coyote on a pig carcass in the field. But by the time I get my 30-30 his blue heeler has already put the run on it, and at best I have a near impossible shot. I miss miserably. But what else is new.
Pete gets back and we head out to do a push. We turn off a secondary and two more trucks follow us in a convoy. Just as we get to a line fence opposite a thick bush I spot movement. And a big 5 by 5 – his neck swollen and stinking with love – crashes through the ditch and clears the wire.
It's land we have permission on so we bail out and organize a drive. The bush is a big one. And the moose have the dogwoods and hazelnut thickets trimmed neat like the hedges in an English country garden. With only one walker and arm's length visibility it's a low percentage push at best. But to make a veteran 10-point whitetail move, it's borderline hopeless. Marvin does manage to kick out two moose that stand black and sinister against the clean, combined fields.
We head back for steaming plates of thick farm kitchen stew and in Pete's words to "re-vamp."
On the old field edges where we make two more pushes granite boulders the size of cast iron cook stoves are piled up like ruins of a mysterious, Neolithic society. One man and a good team of horses is all they had to make those fields. Now you hire a guy with a Cat to do in a week what it took the gidos a lifetime to accomplish. And the old homesteads are bulldozed and burned along with the precious deer habitat in the insane rush to grow more and larger crops that nobody wants to buy.
Both were awesome pushes through bush pounded flat with deer trails and loads of big scrapes and savage rubs. But all that came out were more moose. And a mule deer doe.
As the sun began to head seriously to the west we go to our evening hunts. Pete back to where we'd seen the big buck earlier. Marvin and I for the peas. Except when we get there a truck is already parked and a hunter is heading into the bush. The alfalfa is to be our back up. But on second thought it seems a long way from the closest likely bedding area. And when we got on the field that the deer would have to traverse it turns out to be peas. Luxurious, rough-combined peas that would make any hungry deer think twice about the half-mile hike to the hay field.
We set up on a rise and wait. A truck comes on the field and heads down the south fence to the willow bottoms in the east and we figured that was it.
But just as the last rays lit up the tin roofs and shining domes of St. Nicholas, a deer walked out in a swampy corner by the church and headed along the north fence. Time was against me and so was the light. And the only option I had was a stalk through the willows then chance a long shot.
Halfway to the bush I put the glasses up and incredibly the buck has changed course and is heading directly at me. I hit the cover fast, make it to a conduit of bales stacked against the bush, catch my breath, then look up. The buck is still working across the field, walking, stopping, nibbling the peas. Then walking again. I lay the Winchester against a bale, get the cross hairs on him, ease the hammer back, and wait it out. When he finally halts and gives me a decent broadside I squeeze the trigger and it's done.
As I walk over to tag my compact 4 by 3 in the fast fading light I glance at the granite headstones neatly lined up in the burying ground by the church. And I can't help but feel that, somehow, all this had been done so many times before.
