Joe’s Hunting and Fishing Adventures

Joe hunts and fishes. I didn’t know how to bring it up to my yuppie, vegetarian or granola friends on Vancouver Island. It’s kind of like admitting he doesn’t recycle or something. Anyway, I soon learned that I could look for certain signals, and sure enough, other Victorians, in nervous, relieved whispers, admitted they, too, fished or hunted. Phew! I’ve entered an underground world of outdoor delight. It’s a good thing I had moved to Langford.

Joe started 2007 with a very successful salt water fishing trip courtesy of my friends Kate and Rick. The delightful host and hostess took us off the West Coast of Vancouver Island to the “Halibut Highway” for halibut and salmon. We may get invited back again. Joe’s surgeon-like skills at gutting, cleaning and filleting the catch were only slightly offset by his snoring.

Then the season went downhill from there. My first trip to Montana last fall was greeted by thousands of pick-up trucks with hooves sticking up out of the truck beds. This season, amid stories and pictures of huge deer and elk from practically every other hunter living in Glacier County, my men have been stumped.

On the first hunting trip of the season, “the other guy” got one and decided not to share. (Apparently he wasn’t a regular of the “hunting team.”) On the second hunting trip, Joe and his hunting partners, cousin Skippy Red Fox and brother Alex, got nothing but a flat tire about 90 minutes out of town. Joe and Skip left Alex with the truck and headed to town to get the tire fixed.

The wind was so strong that day, that it blew three 4"x4"x8' posts wrapped in a tarp across my backyard! Joe says he saw one of the large corrugated metal cattle watering drums on its side rolling through barb wire fences and mowing down aspens before it finally came to rest in a hollow.

No, this was certainly not the best day to have to go to the bathroom next to a stranded truck. Alex thought he had made the best decision to go to the leeward side. Unfortunately, the swirling vortex of howling wind merely caused the stream to spray straight up into his face. With the shock of it all, he couldn’t stop. He was so soaked, he had to remove his shirt to dry off. It must have been like trying to hang on to a fire hose by yourself.

Hunting trip number three didn’t get much better. Thank goodness for adequate cell phone coverage. The story started out as a possible frozen gas line, then turned into a punctured gas tank and finally ended in the dark of night with Skippy and Joe just plain old running out of gas, twice. (How does that happen?)

His dad now says that any time Joe and Skippy are going hunting, he is just going to drive the hour out of town and wait at an isolated coffee shop for the phone call.

Today was hunting trip #4. I now know to expect the phone call, but not to tell me that they shot anything, but to tell me how late they are going to be for supper. Sure enough, the phone call comes. What? There’s good news? They’ve actually shot two deer? Unbelievable.

Then there is a long pause. Wait. Of course there’s bad news. While gutting and cleaning the deer, Joe flings a handful of greasy deer guts and his new wedding ring into the snowy forest. They looked everywhere without success. We haven’t even been married a full seven days.

Really, the phone call is to tell me that they are driving back to town to borrow a metal detector from a buddy. They want to try to get back up to the forest to find the ring before the winter storm sets in later today which will most likely close that hunting road until next spring’s thaw.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t borrow the metal detector. The result:

• Browning Pawn Shop: + $85 (opened especially for Joe on a Sunday to relieve him of his cash.)
• Joe: minus one wedding ring and now the proud owner of a secondhand metal detector.

All I can say is that they’d better run into some elk on their way back.....

▲Editor’s note: as this newsletter went to press, Joe reports that the wedding ring has been found! Joe returns triumphant with his new metal detector!