Sometimes I Wonder
(Warning! Please do not scroll down if you are super squeamish about hunting, although all the victims animals are presentable and there's no gore. But they have been shot, and they will be tasty.)
Lil brought Rose through on her way home from Monday's knee replacement surgery in Salt Lake. She now has two titanium knees that ought to see her through, and I marvel at the way modern medicine can just replace worn out parts of us like we do in our cars. Some parts, anyway. It seems like science fiction.
October is turning out to be a bit of a disappointment for me, the promise of a long season of dazzling fall colors drained by last weekend's snowstorm and a week of freezing nights that zapped most of the remaining green. It's sunny and fine now but a cold wind is whipping the clouds into improbable smooth discs and ringing the necks of cottonwoods and aspens unwilling to release swarms of crinkled, crackling, crisp brown leaves that never got a chance to blaze. M and I spent the worst of the blizzard Saturday piled on the couch in a shared quilt alternately watching Tim Burton movies and the tumbling flakes. Ahhh.
There are a few people who are enjoying this season regardless of its drab, bathetic style, and those are the people with guns, people like my brother-in-law and nephew. Observe:
Don't read anything into that goat's expression. He's dead. (He is actually an American pronghorn antelope, Antilocapra americana, but locals call them speedgoats, on account of they're very, very fast.)
A moose tag is a very rare thing to get, and Kelly got lucky, pulling one the first time he put in after several years of not trying. People were jealous. This is a nice specimen (although I wish you'd tucked his tongue in for the photos -- he looks drunk). What's going to be funny is trying to find a place in their house to hang a gargantuan moose head when he comes back from the taxidermist, and how the dogs are going to react to him. Welcome to the family, Morris.
Kelly also went armed with a camera and caught some very classy nature shots.
But you see what I mean, don't you, about the brown, the blah? And it will be this way now until May at the earliest. 7,000+ feet makes for a looong winter.
Lil brought Rose through on her way home from Monday's knee replacement surgery in Salt Lake. She now has two titanium knees that ought to see her through, and I marvel at the way modern medicine can just replace worn out parts of us like we do in our cars. Some parts, anyway. It seems like science fiction.
October is turning out to be a bit of a disappointment for me, the promise of a long season of dazzling fall colors drained by last weekend's snowstorm and a week of freezing nights that zapped most of the remaining green. It's sunny and fine now but a cold wind is whipping the clouds into improbable smooth discs and ringing the necks of cottonwoods and aspens unwilling to release swarms of crinkled, crackling, crisp brown leaves that never got a chance to blaze. M and I spent the worst of the blizzard Saturday piled on the couch in a shared quilt alternately watching Tim Burton movies and the tumbling flakes. Ahhh.
There are a few people who are enjoying this season regardless of its drab, bathetic style, and those are the people with guns, people like my brother-in-law and nephew. Observe:
Don't read anything into that goat's expression. He's dead. (He is actually an American pronghorn antelope, Antilocapra americana, but locals call them speedgoats, on account of they're very, very fast.)
A moose tag is a very rare thing to get, and Kelly got lucky, pulling one the first time he put in after several years of not trying. People were jealous. This is a nice specimen (although I wish you'd tucked his tongue in for the photos -- he looks drunk). What's going to be funny is trying to find a place in their house to hang a gargantuan moose head when he comes back from the taxidermist, and how the dogs are going to react to him. Welcome to the family, Morris.
Kelly also went armed with a camera and caught some very classy nature shots.
But you see what I mean, don't you, about the brown, the blah? And it will be this way now until May at the earliest. 7,000+ feet makes for a looong winter.
posted by A at
6:02 PM
2 Comments:
I've never hunted, although if I lived in the mountain west, I would seriously consider shooting birds and game for food and of course for the fur and feathers I use to tie trout flies. I do fly fish though. I've fished all my life. My father was an unrepentent bank-napping worm plonker, and I was too until I stumbled into fly fishing something like 18 years ago. I have a buddy in Idaho who tells me that if you go on an October sporting weeking which combines hunting and fly fishing, it's called a "cast and blast". Har!
HA! That's one I haven't heard.
Most of the hunters I know hope for a trophy but mostly appreciate the meat. Hunters are also possibly the most fervent environmentalists and conservationists you'll ever see, pouring money into organizations that protect the habitat and health of game and fish.
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