I think that everyone remembers their first hunting trip, but I might remember mine a bit better than most. That’s not because I got my bag and tag limits – it’s because I was almost thirty.
I was blessed to have been born and raised on the Keweenaw Peninsula – a heavily-wooded and thinly-populated finger of land projecting from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior. I’ve never lived anywhere else but, in my travels, I’ve heard that this is one of the best places in the country for a sportsman.
Growing up, my family spent a lot of time outdoors – hiking, snowshoeing, canoeing, kayaking, camping, fishing – but not hunting. When I was young, my father was a meat cutter and even had a cottage industry preparing meat from the deer that hunters brought in, but we never hunted.
In high school, the only sport that I lettered in was marksmanship offered through the JROTC program. Then, when I was in my twenties, I bought a handgun for home defense and went through the process of getting a concealed pistol license. Training with my pistol reminded me how much I enjoyed shooting, and it finally occurred to me to take it outside. I just needed to take a hunters’ safety course to get my hunting license for the first time.
I got a lot of questions being twice the age of the next oldest student in the hunter’s safety course at a nearby sportsman’s club but I learned a lot in the course. And I had something that a lot of the other students didn’t have: a place to hunt.
My in-laws live on a cattle farm a few miles out of town and deer, geese, and rabbits can all be nuisance animals to them. While none of them hunted, they were all too eager to let me harvest these pests from their acreage. My father-in-law drove me around the land in their farm truck telling me where the fences were, which fields the cows would be in, and where I was likely to find my query for the day: geese. And rabbits, if I came across any.
In the Western Upper Peninsula, a number of species of geese are classified as migratory birds and have intermittent hunting seasons. Rabbits, meanwhile, have a long season and a large bag limit. We’re known for our deer seasons, but these alternatives fit my needs in several ways: they would give me an opportunity to get out before deer season started, they would give me an opportunity to practice with smaller animals, and I knew that these (as well as deer) lived on the in-laws’ farm.
My hunting jacket was ancient and a few sizes big for me, but I had considered it a winning garage-sale find as I filled the pockets with 20-gauge game shells. I took the channel lock out of my new pump action, put the case back in my father-in-law’s truck, and began stalking through the back 40.
I knew where I was going – many a time my wife and I had driven to the farmhouse passing geese by the dozen in a field that I knew was just through this line of trees. As I passed through those trees, I was startled by the movement of not geese but a sizeable whitetail rabbit. I didn’t bother raising my barrel. Knowing that I wasn’t yet to where I expected to find the geese, I hadn’t bothered to load my shotgun. The rabbit stopped to take me in from a few yards away. Part of me wanted to draw on the rabbit with my pistol, but the math on whether I could hit the rabbit from that distance with a .38 Special (and what might be left of the rabbit if I did) just didn’t check out. The rabbit ran deeper into the woods as I sighed and dug in my oversized pockets to feed three shells into my shotgun.
I continued through the tree line that separated two adjoining fields. This was the field where I anticipated finding those geese. I moved slowly through the field with my eyes open for all those black bodies but didn’t seem to see as many as I was used to. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether I had waited too late and they had all moved on, I saw a small group of them gathered around an awkward little pocket in the land some way off, probably trying to stay out of the autumn wind.
I knew that I had to get closer, but I also wanted to move around them. By coming up around the side I didn’t mean to surprise them so much as to create a safer backdrop to fire on – I would be able to fire down into the little pocket rather than up toward the ridge. As I crept along, I’m sure now that I was overcalculating again. In conversations about shotgun hunting, some seemed to think that the shot ceased to be dangerous as soon as it ceased to be accurate while some of the hunter’s safety material reminded me of childhood speculation about a shot fired on the moon going all the way around and hitting you in the back.
Whatever the case, the birds saw me coming and took off. If I was too afraid to fire on them while they stood, I certainly wasn’t about to fire on them in the air. I watched where they flew, hoping that they might just go back into the field I had come from so that I could try again, but they were smarter than that and kept on flying.
I had learned quickly enough from my rabbit surprise earlier in the day, but my tactics to get around the geese would require further improvement as a similar scenario played out in the next field over.
Continuing on, I saw a potential consolation prize that I hadn’t considered: a pond with a lone duck floating in it. I was already above the pond, so I wouldn’t have to worry about stray shot – I could get as close as I wanted before the duck was startled and then safely fire on it when it took off. But here I encountered the challenge of retrieving the duck when it landed back in the pond. I would rather walk into the farmhouse empty handed than freeze on my way back because I swam after a duck. So, I let the duck sit.
The rest of the walk back to the farmhouse was uneventful. I stopped seeing geese and started seeing cows. I stayed in the trees that bordered the fields when I could, hoping that I might see another rabbit but with no luck. I emptied my shotgun, put the lock back through the breach, bagged it, and transferred it from the farm truck to our SUV for the ride home, and went into the house. I was greeted by my father-in-law shouting from the living room.
“So, did you catch supper?”
