Author: Crooked Arrow

Memories 3: The Best Hunting Dog In The World

“Do you think Aika will be able to find my deer?”

We were standing on a cut line in the municipal forest where my uncle leased the hunting rights on some 700 acres. My cousin had shot a small buck that had jumped off the trail into a stand of immature pines. Thick stuff. He’d looked in the first rows of trees, but found no sign. So he backed off and waited for me to show up after the morning sit.

Aika was a German Hunting Terrier, six months old. I had picked her up at a breeder near Hannover, Germany in late winter. The pups were born in a small unheated kennel in the heart of winter. There were six pups. More had been born, but the breeder had killed them, because he “didn’t want to deal with bottle feeding”. She was so small, fitting into a shoe box. Hard to see at the time how she would grow into a fierce little hunter, flushing pheasants from thorny cover that bigger dogs couldn’t (or wouldn’t) enter, retrieving anything up to the size of a big hare, crazy about working in water, never losing the drive to hunt during long, taxing days in the field. But that was still uncertain future when we were zipping West across the Autobahn, with a furry bundle in my wife’s lap.

Aika and I had barely moved beyond training on continuous-drag scent trails to a trail with discrete drops (more like small gushes) of blood. She’d been doing just fine, but it was all still pretty playful; short trails in easy terrain with no distractions. After all, at six months old, she was still all puppy-brain.

“Do you think Aika will be able to find my deer?” my cousin asked again.

“I don’t know. It may be asking a lot of her, but let’s try.”

We drove back to the cabin to pick up the little munchkin. About 90 min later I rolled out the long line, trying to relax and send calming vibes to the bouncing pup at my feet. As we walked up to the first blood, beyond where the yearling buck had been standing, the change in the dog was striking. She went from playful to business in a heartbeat. During practice sessions on a fake trail she usually was borderline disinterested, but now it was all concentration.

With a final confirmation from my cousin about the direction the buck had disappeared we entered the thicket. About 30 feet in, the little dog sniffed up a clot of blood. Perhaps 100 feet beyond that, she found a patch of bloody hair, rubbed onto a tree. This was actually working! Five minutes later I was not so sure. Aika lost intensity and started meandering. We were off the trail.

I took her back to the beginning for another try. She pointed out the same blood, and the same hair, but again lost interest a little later. It was just too much to ask for such a young and relatively untrained dog. We started to circle back to the cutline, when Aika took a sharp left and pulled hard. I almost told her to stop playing around, but something told me to give her a little more time and trust. Moments later we were standing next to the dead buck.

Opportunities to work on lost or wounded deer don’t come very often. Aika’s star really shone brightly when hunting small game. I fondly remember so many great retrieves of pheasants, ducks and hares, that I gladly forgive her for the time she made me swim out into a beaver pond. She had not found the duck but instead had grabbed onto a branch, and was determined to retrieve it, even though it was attached to the beaver’s lodge. Her tiny brain had momentarily locked up, and I was afraid she’d drown before letting go. I swam out, and she cheerfully greeted me, happy for the support. With mixed emotions I pushed her into the direction of the duck that floated a ways beyond the lodge. We swam the loop around the pond, she picked up the duck and after some drying off we continued to hunt.

Unfortunately Aika died too soon at the age of nine. Kidney failure. I still miss her.

F.

Memories 2: Making Fire

My office wall has photos of over three decades of hunting, though the memories go back much further. In this series of posts I'm recounting some of the stories that go with them.


I acquired a PhD in Chemistry, so I am pretty much an authority on the subject matter. In order to make a fire you need three components: a combustible material, oxygen, and some way to overcome the threshold of energy required to let the two react; AKA a lighter, or a flint and steel, or a stick that you rub between your hands vigorously, or a lightning strike. For most people a lighter will do.

Oxygen is available, in varying quantities, depending on altitude, all across the globe. Combustible material, on a morning of hunting in a forest setting in an Eastern European country, two decades and a half ago, can also be called ubiquitous. That leaves component #3. Right? You had one job…

We headed out early that morning, sights set on pushing a few sections of forest. Not a big affair. Just my uncle, cousin, and myself carrying the rifles, my dad as independent observer, the local forest warden and his little Dachshund, and one of his friends with another dog whose progeny was hard to guess. We were hoping for wild boar, but expecting to settle for a roe deer. I think we got skunked.

But no room for despair or disappointment, because we were about to enjoy a good fire, and even better fresh-roasted sausages-on-a-stick, washed down with some questionable vodka. Con gusto we attended to the task of collecting one of the three prerequisites that would keep us from having to eat the sausages raw: fire wood. We were counting on the fact that oxygen would be available. OK, light it up!

Despite the language barrier it became clear fairly quickly that we had failed to provide for the third component of a good fire: the lighter. I gave up smoking when I turned twenty-one. My dad gave up smoking long before that, when he found out his father had lung cancer. My cousin only smoked a cigar or two at parties, and I’m not sure if my uncle ever smoked. And by some stroke of coincidence we were accompanied by the only two non-smoking males East of Berlin. Our situation was dire.

But wait! We came here by automotive vehicle. A vehicle contains fuel. That fuel is ignited by a spark. All we needed to do was to somehow combine spark and fuel, outside of the vehicle’s engine, and create a flame that was transportable to the wood pile, without blowing ourselves up. Hunger sparks ingenuity! Old newspaper was crumbled into a ball, doused in gasoline which was sucked from the tank through a rubber tube (standard emergency gear in Eastern European vehicles?), and the battery terminals disconnected, while those with more good sense than a sense of adventure (me) were busy sharpening sticks on which to impale the sausages, a fair distance away from the possible source of third degree burns.

It all worked beautifully! In no time we had the fire roaring, and the big sausages sizzling. We each had two. Fine sausages too, if I may be the judge, leaving us wanting nothing more. We then drove home where we drew the ire of the forester’s wife, who had prepared a big lunch meal for us. We tried our best. I don’t recall if there was any napping in the tree stand that afternoon, but there may have been.

F.

#huntingisconservation

When Emory announced a podcast episode on the topic of the "hunting is conservation" slogan, and if perhaps a new one is in order, I typed up the following e-mail to him. I thought it might be of interest to a broader audience. You can find the info about Emory's By Land Podcast here: https://byland.co/podcast
Emory,
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Do we need really a slogan or a hashtag?
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As far as slogans go “hunting is conservation” is pretty catchy. It is supposed to drive home the fact that hunter dollars pay for a lot of the wildlife management that is going on, both on this continent and on others. The maligned trophy hunters’ dollars pay for poaching control in Africa, and keeps habitat away from sprawling development by allowing people to make a living off the land that doesn’t involve cutting and planting. Projects in Asian countries, like the markhor projects in Pakistan, have shown that hunter dollars provide more value to local remote communities than the meat of a wild goat in the pot, and the population of markhor is rebounding. The story on our continent here is well-known (to us anyway).
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The question is, does the intended recipient, the non-hunter, know how “hunting is conservation”? Perhaps they align with the notion that conserving something cannot mean killing it. They may not buy into the thought that it is OK to kill some individuals for the long-term survival of the species. They may not instinctively agree with the science that says that population reduction is required to keep things in balance (like with snow geese that are eating themselves out of a summer home).
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It is very unfortunate that in today’s fast-paced society we need slogan. The complexity of hunting, of what drives us, and of our contributions to wildlife management, are hard to fit into 3-5 words. I have a hard time explaining it in 3-5 paragraphs, or even pages, and nobody reads that much anymore.
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Perhaps the problem is that we have two messages to convey, and “hunting is conservation” only tackles one. Many non-hunters are likely interested into personal motives for hunting. Nobody is buying it when I tell them I went out duck hunting to help conservation. I went out duck hunting because I love to be out on the water, love to challenge myself by doing things that are difficult, love to see ducks and geese fly, love it when I make a good shot, love it when I pick up the bird, love the feeling of self-sufficiency when plucking and converting a bird to a meal, love the fact that during all of it I forget about COVID, work, relations, future, and so forth. I’m just there, in the moment, making all the decisions and living by the outcomes of them. “Put that in a slogan, Mr. Marketing Guy”. The non-hunter may think I’m a pervert who just likes to kill innocent birds.
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A defining moment in my past, involved a small bird and a BB gun. My uncle hunted, my cousin too, and I wanted nothing else than to follow in their footsteps. Being way too young to legally hunt I would roam their little forest plot with a BB gun trying to kill birds. Some would call it blood lust, I would rather call it a desire to do something similar to what my role models were doing, even though wanton killing of little birds without any intent of eating them is not a cheerful matter.  Good thing I couldn’t hit anything anyway. Till one day, I managed to clip a little house sparrow’s wing. It came fluttering down out of the tree and crawled away in leaves. I was distraught obviously and started to walk away. Then I realized that I needed to finish what I started, the bird would not survive on one wing. I found the bird and killed it outright with the next shot. I didn’t shoot too many song birds after that. But I think it did show me that I could carry the responsibility of life and death of an animal, in a way that many people cannot or will not. And that divides the masses. How can I explain what I just described to a person who has never felt the last breaths of a dying duck in his hands, or who has never looked into the eye of a deer that seconds ago was still alive, or who has never felt the warm heart inside the chest cavity of a moose (or less poetic – who has never struggled to get a pile of guts that would fill a wheelbarrow out of an elk).
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I don’t know. And to me, there lies the essence of our communication problem.
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I encourage you to also read Why I hunt and BC closes the grizzly hunt - what went wrong? for a broader perspective on my personal motivations and some thoughts on how we as hunters are failing in the public relations department.
F.

Moose sausage bounty

Long, long overdue was the making of sausage from the bags of moose ground patiently waiting in my freezer. With hunting plans foiled by a persistent health issue, a beautiful September morning was as good as day as any to whip up a trial batch of three flavours of moose sausage: jalapeno/cheddar, chorizo(ish) and bratwurst.

I won’t dive too deep into the sausage making process, there is so much material available, I don’t need to add to that. Here are just a few highlights, observations, and recipes adapted from online sources that seems to be quite OK for our palate.

The meat

We mixed clean moose ground (removed most of the undesirable tissue before grinding) 50/50 with store bought lean pork ground. I feared we would be a tad low on fat on the final product and I was right. Next time I’ll look for something a little fattier to mix in. But I don’t mind a fairly dry sausage, so in a pinch I’d use the same mixture again.

The spices and additives

For the jalapeno/cheddar we used regular old cheddar, but I saw a thing called ‘high-temperature cheddar’ on the sausage making supplier’s list later. Perhaps that resists melting during the cooking process a bit better, so the cheese doesn’t run out of the sausage as much as regular cheddar.

All the other ingredients were just what we could buy at local grocery stores. Some of the more exotic ingredients were not available without going into the city, which I didn’t do.

The recipes

I’m just giving the ingredients. Everything was mixed well, and stuffed into real hog casings (29-32mm in diameter) using a hand-powered cast iron stuffer. Yes, those still exist.

Jalapeno cheddar

jalapenos (medium size, pits and white stuff on the inside removed; diced)
1/2-1 lb cheddar (one source called for a full pound of cheese, I ended up using less)
4 tsp salt (next time I’ll do 3 tsp, as it came out a bit salty)
2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp sage powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp smoked paprika

Chorizo(ish)

I’m calling it Chorizo(ish) because we couldn’t find a number of ingredients, and shied away from some of the quantities of spices mentioned in a recipe we found. We were going for a milder taste, not a burn-your-tastebuds-off-your-tongue experience (adapted from this recipe at honest-food.net).

1kg moose + 1kg pork
3 tsp sea salt
1 tsp cayenne
2 tbs ancho chili powder
1+ tsp chipotle paste (I couldn’t tell you how to get this, my wife brought some home from work. It’s really concentrated stuff. Could possibly be replaced by the chipotle chili powder I saw at Safeway
2 tsp cumin
2 tbs oregano
8 garlic cloves
1 tsp smoked paprika

Bratwurst

Ended up using 1 kg of pork ground and 3/4 kg of moose for this mixture.

2.5 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp cardamom
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 onion chopped finely

We have two more 3 kg bags of moose ground in the freezer. I am so happy that my friends convinced me to come back out with the rifle after an exhilarating archery season, even though it felt like cheating at the time. The bounty coming from this animal has no end (well, sadly it will have an end, but for now, we are still eating it).

Moose tongue cakes

Like crab cakes, but made from moose tongue. Sounds delicious?

The other day I finally found the moose tongue that  I knew was hiding in one of my freezers. As I announced my plans to make a dish out of it, my wife immediately declined any further involvement, including the eating part. My kids were reluctant to share my enthusiasm, but not immediately opposed to the concept. In order the stay as mainstream as possible I decided to try to make breaded patties from shredded/cut-up meat and fry those up in some oil.

Step 1: Get a moose tongue

You can try the hard way, the saga of which you can read here: “Your Mother Mated a Donkey!”. Or perhaps you can ask anybody hunting moose for a tongue, chances are he or she wasn’t even planning on bringing it home anyway. Prepare for weird looks and comments of disgust.

Step 2: Clean the tongue and boil it

In my case the tongue had been inflicted some damage during the retrieval process, so it needed a decent wash in cold water, and removing of the tip which was torn up (done prior to freezing).

For the boil I used 50/50 water and stock, and I added salt, garlic, dried chili peppers and some onion. Boil for 4 hours.

Step 3: Chill in ice water and peel

The outer layer of the tongue is practically inedible and needs to be removed. According to those in the know, this works best of if you dunk the tongue in ice water after the boil. The top layer indeed came off fairly easily. Remove any tissue that either looks offending of feels like it would take more than five minutes of chewing.

Step 4: Shred, season and bread

Shred the meat or cut into very small chunks. Shredding is better, as it will be easier to form the cakes. Add spices to taste, and enough flower to make things stick. Form patties. Sprinkle on more flower, dip in egg (scrambled up with a fork), and coat with breadcrumbs of your liking.

Step 5: Fry in oil

Self-explanatory I would think. Don’t set the heat too high, as you want the meat to heat thoroughly before the breadcrumbs burn.

 

Step 6: Throw away the moose tongue cakes and order a burger

I bet you believed me. But actually, they tasted pretty good. The meat is on the fatty side of the spectrum, so the texture is not what you’d expect from venison. The first bite was a bit weird therefore (I never had moose tongue before). But I ate two, my son ate one, my daughter tried a bite and said she would have eaten more had she not known it was tongue. My wife staunchly refused, despite admitting that it smelled delicious.

I tried a piece cold after running an errand (picking up hog casings for making sausage), and did not enjoy it. Eating fatty meat when hot is one thing, eating it cold did not agree with my taste. In any case, it’s an interesting cut of meat, worthy of attention. There is a myriad of other things it is suitable for apparently, even as a cold cut for sandwiches. Next time I get a moose, I may have to try that. My wife already said “no” to that as well.

Project Duck Boat – Part V (Finale)

The alarm went off at an ungodly hour, and it took a quick shower to get some of the haze out of my head. I don’t know who these people are that jump out of bed straight into their boots, and are ready to go, and I don’t understand how they do that. Regardless of what the day ahead has in store, waking up is a process for me. With joints creaking I took the dogs out for a quick one, and slowly the blood started pumping and the brain geared up.

It was a long dark drive to the lake I had scouted out in the spring, and this being opening day, I feared I’d show up at the sandy staging area on the North side a little late, with other hunters out on the water before me. This sneak approach really only works if you are the only one, or the first one, to paddle along the reeds.

I needn’t have worried, nobody was there. It was still cold, and the last of the fog was rising off the water as I set off. In spring the marsh had been full of sound of ducks and geese. It was a lot quieter now. The 20ga loaded with steel shot #4s rested on my right, and slowly I paddled the meandering water. When a couple of teal came soaring past, I dropped the paddle, grabbed the gun, swung, and missed twice. Not a great start.

A little later I happened upon a pair of teal, that took off as soon as I came around the bend, and I managed to drop one! As the morning progressed I added three more to the tally, before I ran out of suitable water. There had been some gun shots on the south side of the lake but otherwise I had the place to myself. Plenty happy with my modest harvest I drove home.

That night we had a wonderful dinner of pan-seared duck breasts. Ducks make a fantastic meal, if treated right, meaning searing it on high fire and briefly. You want, no must have, the insides still pink, or risk the meat turning dry and livery.

We ate this with ciabatta bread, oven-roasted tomatoes and onion, and a balsamic reduction drizzle (that’s nothing more than balsamic vinegar mixed with brown sugar, allowed to simmer for a bit to make it thicker). It was fantastic!

A week or so later I repeated the routine, hitting up a larger reservoir that has, according to Google Earth, lots of bays and islands on the East side. I’d love to report about my shooting prowess, how I plucked the ducks and geese from the sky with ease, but that would be lying. Two double misses started the morning, but luckily I was up for some redemption and ended the day with a tally of six ducks. The number of shots fired will hopefully fade from memory, as my brain chooses to remember the highlights of the day only.

This is not a way to get big bag limits, and it was never intended that way. But it allows quiet time on the water, taking in the sights (like the two otters I saw on the first outing), relaxing through the morning, and potting the odd bird for dinner. It’s nice too to vacate the water before noonish, as this is generally a day resting area for birds, migrating birds in the latter half of the season, and they need their quiet time too.

And that’s it. Project Duck Boat finished, but in a way it’s just beginning. We have a month or so left of open water, suitable for such a little boat. I have no intention to fight the fall storms and freezing water. I can get hypothermic in other places without the risk of drowning. Next spring, pike will be waiting in the reeds, to eat the fly that I will present to them.

Good times!

 

Project Duck Boat – Part IV

Though the solid fresh green colour of the boat really was appealing, the glare was pretty apparent, and for duck hunting purposes it would likely be better to have some drab colour on there. So I decided to try my hand at putting a gentle camo pattern on.

The Rust-Oleum camo spray cans were surprisingly hard to find. I had to go to three hardware stores to get three colours: brown, tan, and light green.

The process was pretty straightforward. After a quick scrub down with steel wool and rubbing alcohol, the boat was sprayed with  a base layer of varying colours; four areas of solid colour covered the whole thing. Then I used dry cat tail stems and leaves as a stencil of sorts, spraying contrasting colours across the leaves. For sharp edges, the leaves would lay flush with the boat, for a more fuzzy effect I’d hold them up a little higher. In general, I didn’t give it too much thought, and fought my inner perfectionist from overworking the colours. Just flop on the plant material, and with quick squirts from left to right and back, get some paint on.

For example, on the stern of the boat, the pattern was achieved by laying a base coat of brown and green, and then spraying a layer of tan with leaves/cattails held in front of it. The tan went through the openings in the plants, leaving the darker base colours to show through on the boat. It’s a lot easier to do than it is to describe.

The final touch (for now) was to add a cross bar, which would serve as a rest for the gun barrel(s).  I didn’t feel comfortable laying a loaded shotgun down flat on the bottom of the boat, because an accidental discharge (never happens, right?) would have some very wet and potentially life threatening results.

A few final squirts of camo paints, and she was all done. Well, almost; I added a strip of rubber on the right side of the cross bar to be gentler on the gun’s finish.

The boat was ready, and duck season was just around the corner (see part V – Finale).

Project Duck Boat – Part III

The boat was looking pretty functional, but the inside needed some tuning up, fixing cracks and chips in the gel coat, adding some foam to the flotation and putting on the top trim.

The push fit trim fit perfectly, and will provide protection from and for the fiberglass edge.

The polyurethane foam from a can was nasty, sticky, and probably unhealthy stuff to work with. It stuck to tools, to hands (gloves!), the floor, my clothes, and some of it even to the old foam in the boat. I could not make this look fancy, so I settled for functional.

After patching the inside bottom, it was time for the final coats of paint and varnish. The transformation was spectacular, if i may say so myself.

I decided to not rebuild the oar locks. In fact I built one, from hardwood , but didn’t put it on. The boat is more like a square-stern kayak, and the oar locks would be sitting quite close to the rower, making for an awkwardly short stroke. I would paddle it like a canoe at first and make further decisions later.

I had some trepidation if I would actually be able to transport it in the truck, but that worked out OK.

The maiden voyage took place on a beautiful spring morning. I went looking for snow goose, found none, but did manage to sneak up on dozens of waterfowl, within easy shotgun range. The concept of using this boat to cruise the edges of lakes might actually work!

After this first trip,  I decided to add a hole to the outboard mounting plate, so I could rig up an anchor of sorts, which would be helpful for fishing trips.

With spring season over, it was time to put on the final tweaks (see Part IV).

 

Project Duck Boat – Part II

After a thorough clean and a a proper sanding job, two things had become clear. Firstly the outside of the hull was not in as bad a condition as I had thought, and secondly, there were a lot or divots, scratches and imperfections to fill up. I decided on a skim coat of epoxy for most of the underside.

Since I was using slow-setting epoxy, the same kind I used when building the longbow (see Building a Longbow – Part II ), I needed a source of heat the keep the epoxy well above room temperature while outside the snow was blowing and it was freezing hard. I went through a number of heaters. My electric ceiling heater overheated and started spewing smoke, and a heating fan motor just stopped. The plug of an electric radiator became so hot that it could only be used a few hours at a time. The construction lights proved the most reliable but they only covered smaller areas. (lights below are pointing upwards to reduce the glare for the photo)

It took about a week to get the skim coats done, and a first layer of primer put on.

The next step was very satisfying: putting on a coat of paint! Not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a true marine paint meant for vessels that are in the water for long periods of time (like in a harbour), I picked paint that was meant for surfaces exposed to water, but not necessarily submerged all the time. The outside of the boat looks like the million bucks I didn’t spend, once done.

I used the same green to touch up some mallard decoys.

The inside of the boat still needed a fair bit of work (see Part III)

Project Duck Boat – Part I

She came to me on a cold November evening, and was unceremoniously dumped onto my garage floor. When Lee had said she might need a bit of work, he hadn’t been kidding. Anything wood was crumbling, anything metal had rusted, the fiberglass would need some touching up, trim had partially come off and was swaying gently in the cold Western breeze. But on the bottom lay a gentle layer of mud and grass, faintly smelling of the marsh. A few duck feathers clung to the hull, stuck to a patch of dried-up blood. It was clear: this was my new duck boat.

Where I live, it’s rather hard to give a boat, or anything really, a good hose-down between mid-October and some time in April. First of all, the water will be disconnected to prevent freezing of the pipes, and unless you want to turn the cull-de-sac into a hockey rink, water is best not used outside. But a series of buckets with hot water and soap turned to mud as I tried to clean my new prize inside and out. The kitchen drains did not clog, so I must have diluted the grime sufficiently.

The boat was stripped of anything that would come off: the oar locks, protective strip along the top and the piece of rotten wood on the transom. Before me now lay a blank slate. One in need of some serious sanding, a coat of epoxy and a few layers of paint. But first the most pressing issue needed to be addressed, the rotten outboard motor mount.

I have no immediate intention to use a motor, but it would be nice to have that option some day. Unfortunately the wood of the mountain plate was very wet and very decaying. All the softwood layers of the multiplex had turned to mush, in I spent a few days prying away at it to get that out as much as I could. Then I set the boat upside down and ran a heater under the transom for a long time, until, much later than I had thought, the inside appeared to be dry. In the mean time I started work on the hull (see Part II).

Enter modern chemicals, which according to the label turn mushy, punky wood into rock-hard material. Not sure if it did, but I poured it on thick. Next I used hardwood and bamboo strips and an epoxy to fill up the voids. It still being the middle of winter, all use of epoxy required lamps or heaters to provide a temperature that allowed it to set.

Once that was done, I rebuilt the outside by using aluminum strip, filling the surface with more epoxy.  Time to continue working on the hull!

(Continued in Part II)