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My hunting rifle hang up

I like cool guns, and I am not ashamed. All guns are good. But I like them better with a black stock, and Picatinny rails, and a pistol grip.

That makes it hard to buy a hunting rifle. I keep wanting to buy a ridiculous contraption with a 40-round mag hanging off it. An ordinary run-of-the-mill AR platform weapon can surely be used to hunt deer. But first of all it’s not very comfortable to have it bumping against my back on a sling, and second — and more important — I like to hunt elk, not just deer, and .223 isn’t really a suitable elk-hunting cartridge.

I know, I know, any cartridge will take an elk if you place it right. I’m just not that much of a marksman.

I also know that one can buy AR Platform weapons in .308, which is a caliber I feel confident about ethical elk hunting with. You can, in fact, buy AR’s in 300 Win Mag and other big game calibers. But they’re heavy, heavy, heavy.

Once I bought a Savage Model 10 with a bull barrel and an ultimate sniper stock. Heavy? The word heavy is inadequate. I actually did carry it around in the field a few times. It’s a good thing I didn’t find game, I was too tired to hold the crosshairs on the target.

So, I have a nice, ordinary, boring Ruger American on the way. It’s light. It’s .308. It’s inexpensive. It’s absolutely positively fine as a hunting rifle.

But man, I sure wish they made an after-market pistol grip and adjustable stock for it!

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A wet forest just above freezing

20130929_143307On my way home from Lincoln yesterday, the pull of the forest overpowered me as I went over the top of MacDonald Pass. I turned in to the Continental Divide Trailhead, pulled my bow out of the truck, donned all the warm weather gear I had, and wandered in to spend some time in the creation.

Razor-sharp wind whipped across the mountaintop, and cut through my thin gloves quickly. Slush and snow covered the trail from the parking area forward, making careful attention to my footing a necessity.

Before I even reached the forest, I glanced up from picking the least-slick spot to put my foot and saw a brown shape moving against the trees. Like lightning my head came up. I lifted my bow as the animal came into view.

Big!

That’s no muley, I thought. That’s a… cow. Not a cow elk, a bovine. Boooo!

Snow covered the ground in the forest, but the treeline stopped the wind. drops of melting snow fell from every tree in the 38-degree weather. Several trees brought low by wind blocked the trail, and made picking my way forward a very slow, wet endeavor.

Eventually I found a stump to sit on and see if any deer came by. None did, but the forest made up for their absence. The song of distant wind beyond the trees beat the sound of tires on a highway, hands down. Trees creaked, ice-cold snowmelt dripped, and God loved me.

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The good kind of tired

Last weekend I paid my first visit to the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I didn’t go much more than a mile or two over the border, but the beauty of it still struck me.

The area was largely burnt out; my friends and I were near the end of our trek before we saw any living trees. One thinks of dead, burned forests as ugly. One is wrong. A haunting, desolate beauty whispered all around us.

We found huge moose tracks about the size of a human hand. The maker of the print no doubt rested along the river we walked past, but we never caught a glimpse. Just the hint of what we might find someday turned a disappointing hunting trip into a memory.

 

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Anticipating the forest

Tomorrow I go into the woods with two friends, hunting elk.

There’s a strange desire curve that goes with hunting. In the time before I go, it fills my whole mind and makes it hard to think of anything else. I picture the fleeting glimpse of an elk, not even the whole animal. In my minds eye I simply see the rippling muscle behind his shoulder, and try to pick out one specific hair on which to put my sight. I see it over and over, in a hundred different ways. I lay awake thinking of how hard it will be to pack him out after I get him. I worry about how much it will cost to get him stuffed and mounted if I accidentally take a trophy animal. I worry about how to make room in my freezer for the meat.

All of this, of course, before the animal is even seen, let along arrowed, let alone dead.

Once I get to the camp, though, everything changes. Get a fire going, get a bit of red wine in a tin camping cup… and I think, “The elk can wait. It would be so hard to dress him, and cost so much to have him mounted…”

But then I push through, I walk out into the setting sun to scout, I wake up the next morning while it’s still black outside. And everything I fantasized about fades away. The reality of forest and mountain wipes out all the daydreams about trophy bulls. The delight of moving through the forest soundlessly fills me. The sounds of forest creatures going about their lives pulse with power and mystery.

I cannot explain it. I cannot point to anything in scripture that would tell me why it’s true. But in the mountains, much more than in the city, I can feel the closeness of an omnipotent being who speaks universes into existence. Forest mornings, it’s possible to get a sense of the raw, mind-numbing POWER of God.

This weekend, I know I will be content to sit in the presence of the Father and enjoy the fact that he permits me to watch him work. If he lets me take part, and help steward his creation by taking game, so much the better.