Several years ago I was in northern Manitoba in early October hunting geese in a big harvested crop field. During the afternoon, the landowner’s son wanted to take me for a walk into the “bush,” the land to the north of their farmstead which is something to see, but hard to describe. Beyond it, there are no croplands, and no tall timber. All the trees, which include oaks, and aspen and birch and a few pine groves, are stunted and gnarled. Hundred-year-old oaks may only be six inches at the base and maybe 15 feet high. Throughout the bush there are openings here and there and marshy ground where the water is at the deepest, only a few inches. We were hoping to see some ducks, but we didn’t. Instead I shot some snipe to take back for the farmer’s wife to cook.
But back to our evening trek into the bush. I saw a few deer tracks back in that wild country, and a set of timber wolf tracks.
My young guide said that there were a few moose back in there, even some bear and wolverines. Geese and ducks would come soaring into their crop fields in mid-September by the tens-of-thousands, and you hunted them with decoys right out in the middle, by digging in shallow pit to lie in and cover yourself with crop stalks. It was some of the best duck and goose hunting I have ever experienced.
No writer can explain what it is like to watch 400 or 500 blue and snow geese circle you for 30 minutes in a great white spiral, and then have them alight on all sides of you in a crescendo of snow goose music, loud and excited calling, the ones on the ground urging more of the flock, still hundreds of feet above you, to drop down and join them.
Canada geese, and mallards, pintails and other species of ducks, come in much lower in smaller flocks and circle wide over the crop field, taking little time to set in. The ducks, especially the mallards, are not beautifully colored, just beginning to develop the winter plumage they have when reaching the lower Midwest.
But that isn’t so much what this column is about. Walking through a small grove of oaks, there it lay on the ground before me 15 yards or so away.
“A small moose antler,” I thought to myself.
Hardly. It was the biggest deer antler I have ever seen before or since. There were six tines, the brow-tine 7 inches long with two other tines close to 14 inches. My hand wrapped around the antler 12 inches above the base would not close, and I estimate the circumference of the base was about 12 inches. The total length of the antler from base to tip would have been very close to 30 inches if mice hadn’t chewed off some of the end of it. My young friend was amused at my fascination.
“He has bigger antlers this year,” he told me, “but there are several bucks that size at the edge of the crop fields late at night. Maybe we can spotlight some tonight before they come back into the bush.”
We looked for quite a while for the other antler, but never found it. I wondered about hunting deer in that bush country, where you couldn’t really find a place to hang a tree stand. Hunting that bush country would be difficult. The farm family didn’t hunt deer because they didn’t want to eat venison. They wanted moose meat. All Manitobans wanted a moose, but they weren’t easy to get, their numbers threatened by the occurrence of something called a brainworm, carried by white-tailed deer, whose numbers were growing.
I told the farmer and his son that some very undesirable hunters from the U.S. would pay up to $20,000 to shoot that buck, bringing back only the cape and antlers and leaving the body to rot. They had heard that before, but they told me they didn’t have an interest in catering to those kinds of people.
That antler is still at their farmhouse. I have been laughed at when writing about some of those deer in the northern Manitoba crop country weighing from 350 to 400 pounds. I guess they aren’t hunted much, but when someone does kill a buck up there with 15 points or so and a 12-inch beam, they don’t get too excited about it. It’s a moose they are after!
Next year come hell or high water, I am going to hunt geese and ducks up there with my old friends, a half-dozen farm families that are so much like the old country people I grew up around. Might go out in the bush and hunt deer antler, too.
Outdoor note: On my website (larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com) there is a letter from a high-level enforcement agent that gives information on the telecheck system that every hunter needs to know. You may email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.
I also urge you to find our Lightnin’ Ridge Facebook page.