Go to where the geese are

 

“If you want to get geese,” my old man would say, “do what the goose hunters do: go to where the geese are.”

Motor out on a big lake and look to where the other boats are. Get onto a lake in winter and look where all the ice houses are; if there are no other houses or fisherman, look for where the old holes are drilled. Most importantly, look for blood on the ice by the old holes. That’s where you start the fishing.

“Don’t go to where the puck is,” the Great One’s father taught him, “go to where it will be.” Gretzky learned that lesson well.

It’s like that in trout fishing. If there’s a trout steadying himself in the current, in an ambush under the sod, or a log, feeding deep or sipping flies off the surface, don’t cast the fly to him, but upstream of him, so as not to spook him, to manufacture a natural drift downstream right up to his snout.

When the goose is flying low but 70 yards out, the bead of your shotgun is three or four or five feet ahead of him.

Photo by Katie Mumm

I feel different because I’m not always into getting the geese, or the trout or the fish or even the puck. Sometimes I skated just to skate.

In March and April, we go into the woods, so bare now and windy and wet and dry, looking for antler sheds. We go to where the deer were during the cold heart of winter, when the bucks shed last year’s antlers, where the does and yearlings yarded up and the bucks gathered in packs.

We follow deer trails. There may still be some snow on the ground in the cool, shaded, north-facing woods. Often the ground is muddy and bare. The trails are littered with droppings. Sometimes we find wolf kills – shredded hide and fur and bones and skulls. Occasionally, very occasionally, we find the shed antler of a white-tailed buck. Once, a spike; another time one side of a forkhorn. A few times one or the other side of a threeor four-pointed antler. Twice the full skull and complete antlers of eight pointers: one a wolf kill, the other a gut shot buck lost in the woods from the previous November.

For the shedded moose antlers too, we look where the moose had been. These places are much farther up the trails and further into the woods, and there are no trails to follow. You find the evidence of moose that had overwintered by the big scat in piles, and the popple and birch saplings broken off six feet up, and old, old moose tracks frozen in the snow like a dinosaur footprint frozen in lava, or the young white pines that have been denuded by rubbing.

We go to these places where the moose had been, and we find no moose antlers. The old wisdom is right, but there’s something wrong with us.

But sometimes we do not follow the old wisdom, and we do not go to the deer or moose lairs. We follow our own folly and go into the woods just to go into the woods and look to find if anything might be seen and not found.