Pheasant Opener 2011
This entry was posted on 10/18/2011 5:33 PM and is filed under Family Fun, Vacation.
We left home just before noon on Friday. Katie and Adam joined us and we drove together. Conditions were perfect; overcast but no rain. Easy drive.
We packed a lunch so as to make better time and arrived in Wessington Springs, South Dakota around 5:30. We went straight to the hardware store to buy our hunting licences then hit the VFW for a beer before starting the night's festivities. The VFW is located at the top of a rise and the eastern side of the building is nothing but windows with a spectacular view that goes all the way back to Minnesota.
I called Peg and got directions to the party at Ann and Larry's house. Peg gives directions just like my mom;
"Go straight down the main drag, north to ninth. Go one block further and there are some grain elevators, turn west and keep going till you go around a curve and up a hill and their house has a flag pole and a trailer out front. You can't miss it."
"Aren't there any numbers?"
"No."
Well, despite the fact that Main street is not the main drag (we figured this out because Main goes east/west and Dakota goes north/south and Jay didn't want to turn until we got past the grain elevators,(everyone in the car yelled at him until he turned around) it turned out Peg was right; we didn't miss it.
We did see three dear grazing on the hillside near the road on the way.
The party was fun; we got to re-meet lots of folks we'd met at the wedding last year. There was a lot of food and beverages and kids running around. Ty called from the airport during their brief stop to say that Megan was feeling poorly but they were on their way.
Toward the end of the night, the men folk all wound up out in the garage, playing dice. They all had so much fun that Saturday morning at the ranch, some of the guys found wood and built a craps table.
Ty and Megan got to the ranch a little after midnight but I had already crashed so didn't see them until breakfast. They both looked great, Megan felt wonderful by then and she, Katie, Nancy and I went into town so Megan could visit her grandma who couldn't come out to the ranch and the rest of us visited the craft show going on at the school. I bought a jeweled ring to attach to my needle threader. We got back to the ranch in time to eat a quick lunch before the first hunt, at noon.
There were three pick ups filled with hunters all decked out in canvas pants and blaze orange vests and hats.
We had a quick meeting to let all the new hunters (both new, as in me and new as in Adam, who hadn't hunted with this group before) know how this particular group worked. Then we piled into the pick ups and headed out to the fields.
Katie came along although she wasn't shooting. She walked all the fields and helped flush birds. It was a beautiful, crisp autumn day but out in the fields, the sun quickly became hot. There was no breeze to speak of and hiking through those sloughs and corn fields was work. I think everyone had broken a sweat before we saw our first birds.
I had been a little worried about being able to distinguish a hen from a rooster but it turned out to be really easy; they don't look alike at all. The hens are gray and have short tails and the roosters are brightly colored and have long, trailing tail feathers. Also, everyone shouts out whatever rises so in short order the fields were ringing with shouts of "Hen", "Hen", "hen" "ROOSTER!" And when roosters rose into the sky, everyone with a shot took it.
We saw a few coyotes. It's open season on them all the time.
We also saw at least a dozen deer. No one took a shot at them, not even when a huge buck bounded out of a corn field straight at Jay. Fortunately for all, it turned and flew back into the corn field before it mowed him down.
I don't think I got my gun to my shoulder once during the first two fields. By the time I could see the rooster in the air, someone had already hit it. By midafternoon, I had figured out the motions to get the gun to my shoulder, sight while disengaging the safety, squeeze the trigger and pump another shell into the chamber while someone else very kindly knocked the bird I was after out of the sky.
After two fields, one of the cousins came over to me and Jay and said "I don't want to walk near your daughter's boyfriend anymore. He's making me look bad."
By the end of the day, Adam hadn't made everyone look bad but he sure as heck made himself look good.
After a few hot, sweaty, noisy hours, we went back to the house for a break and the sisters who hadn't walked brought out trays with at least four different kinds of bars and cookies on them.
After the cookie break, we went back out. One of the guys brought his two boys, five and three out to walk. With their round little faces, huge blue eyes and freckles, they were ridiculously cute. Both were decked out in camo with blaze orange caps and vests. The five year old had a b b gun and the three year old an air gun. They both handled them as conscientiously as their dad handled his shot gun. He told us the three year old had a scabbard on his two wheeler for his air gun.
The little boys took an immediate shine to Katie and the three of them walked the fields together.
At one point, I was afraid we'd lost them; we'd fought our way through a thicket of thorn bushes similar to the ones Maleficent grew up around Aurora's castle in Sleeping Beauty. When Jay and I finally made it through that nightmare, I looked back and couldn't see tiny little Katie and her two buddies. Turns out it's because they were way too smart to tackle the thorny thicket; they'd turned aside and come out through the tree line.
I got my first real shots of the day when Jay and I blocked our first field. Blockers are the lucky hunters who get to wait at the end of the corn field while the walkers flush the birds toward them. As a blocker, all you have to do is wait and shoot at the roosters who'll come flying over your head in a panic trying to escape the line. Man, is that fun!
I took my first two shots with the safety still on. I stomped my feet and cursed, then got ready for the next bird. I emptied my gun and reloaded twice and Jay thought I'd gotten one but I knew that particular bird fell while I was 'shooting' an empty shot gun. I'm not very quick at the re-load yet.
By the end of the afternoon, our group of fifteen or so had bagged 39 roosters without so much as ruffling the tail feathers of a single hen. We called it a day and headed back to the ranch where the guys set up their assembly line to clean the birds.
This was clearly a bunch of seasoned hunters. They had a spot out in the woods to decap, peel and gut the birds. Then they brought the carcasses in to the 'washing machine'; a hose near the barn, where the carcasses were rinsed clean and tossed to Adam, who happened to be manning the bag station. He caught each bird with one hand and flipped it in one fluid motion into the bag, then closed it while squeezing out all the air, so the birds were ready for the freezer.
The time between coming in out of the fields with 39 birds and getting them into the freezer or the deep fryer was less than an hour.
That's when Jay discovered to his dismay that he'd left the keys to the Audi in his vest, which he'd taken off and tossed in the trunk and shut.
The trunk switch in the car is broken.
All our gear, our shotguns, everything was locked in the car's trunk along with the keys.
Jay was about to feel really bad but Megan said "Don't panic till we talk to Lennis. Someone here can probably get into that trunk."
She was right. One of her cousins fashioned a hook out of a hangar and went through the first aid kit in the back seat to the trunk and managed to hook Jay's hunting vest and drag it through the five by seven inch opening. Key's in the pocket, problem solved!
And everyone got to make fun of Jay for the rest of the weekend.
Especially Jay.
Dinner was served down in the quonset hut. It had been decked out beautifully for the wedding last year, but since that night had been a hundred degrees, no one ate inside. This weekend it was perfect; once the sun went down it was nice to have a big warm place for a party.
Again, the food was great, the company was better and we ate and the little kids danced and we all compared notes until I for one, couldn't keep my eyes open any more.
Jay and I sneaked off and collapsed into bed long before the party ended.
I had no idea what time it was but the next morning someone told me that we'd gone to bed around 9:30.
That's how tired we were.
But we bounced out of bed Sunday, ready to gear up, load up and get us some roosters again!
Sunday was a little breezier than Saturday but once we started marching through the fields it didn't matter. I was a bucket of sweat halfway through the first slough and I stayed that way all day.
I got many more shots off (which is more fun than I can describe!)and Jay was sure I'd hit one in a field we were blocking. I was shooting at it, and it did fall but I'm pretty sure (99%) that Steve hit it. Everyone said I can take half the credit but I don't think I hit it. I could just tell.
We went out twice on Sunday. I don't know how many fields we walked but it was fun and completely exhausting. I did tear my brand new jeans on a bit of barbed wire fence as I was climbing through it. I also got bird blood all over them when I accidentally sat on a bunch of dead birds when I jumped into the back of a pick up.
I was much quicker the second day to get my shots off and I think maybe next time, I'll bag a bird.
One young man who had never touched a gun until Saturday bagged two birds! He said he plays a lot of Duck Hunter video games. Hmmm.
Jay and Ty both bagged their limits on Sunday and so did Adam so we had plenty of birds to bring home.
In addition to the hunting, it was really fun to see Megan and Ty. Megan looks beautiful and she felt great all weekend. I think she was so happy to be home and feeling good that it made her feel even better. Ty looks great. They're not the only couple expecting; Megan's brother Owen and his wife, Shannon are having another baby this winter.
Their daughter is three and just as cute as a kid can get. With long, curly blond hair and blue eyes, she looks like she could be Bananas sister. She has a Shetland pony named Peanut Butter who also has long blond hair and she spent the weekend either riding her around the farm house or leading her as she let all her tiny little cousins ride her.
The place was swarming with little kids and babies. I have no idea how many there were under the age of six but at least twice, tiny little kids decked out in blaze orange accompanied the hunt. A pickup full of grandma, grandpa and little kids came along to watch the blockers on Sunday.
Megan and Shannon helped flush birds for a while on Sunday but later on when they got tired, they just drove out and watched. Katie walked every field for two days, flushing and occasionally retrieving birds.
She had a blast, too and said that it was all much safer and less scary than she had imagined it would be. I'll be surprised if she isn't shooting next year.
We stayed long enough to help clean the birds on Sunday but we didn't' stick around for dinner. It was already after six and we had to get home. We packed a lunch for the road and took off before sunset.
We got home at midnight.
It was a fantastic weekend.
