Lovely, dark and deep

At five I put my ear to the window, listened for a moment and heard the telltale sound of rain. Heavy rain. Drenching rain. So back to bed. Aroused from my slumber at about six forty five, I heard my uncle rustling around, making final preparations before heading out the door. "You're missing daylight, boy," he sang, though that was only barely technically true. The daypack was pretty much packed and ready to go so after a quick breakfast it was out the door and up the mountain.  

Wet, heavy snow weighs down every living thing in one of Paddy Mountain's clear cuts

Snow can be a boon to hunters. Movement is quieter, tracks are more visible and it takes more work for prey to forage for food buried beneath the fluffy stuff. Plus, should one actually shoot a deer, the snow makes it much more convenient to drag it back to the cabin. But it can also be disorienting. Fortunately on Paddy mountain there is only one way home - down. I frequently stray from established trails up on the mountain, but once I find my way down to the road I can always find the route back to the cabin.

This particular morning I overshot the trail up to my blind, but after having realized it, I decided to just keep going and explore an area I haven't seen before. So I turned uphill from the forest road that Fairmont Lane becomes (there's some debate about whether it's still Fairmont Lane at that point or Bonnet Hill Lane / Rt. 1857, as indicated on the National Geographic Massanutten and Great North Mountain map).

I crossed an earthen tank trap I'd never noticed before, thinking it was a jeep trail that would lead up what several of the neighbors refer to as Tartesall's Gut. Basically the next stream over from the one I usually go up. Any obvious signs of an established trail up the mountain petered away within a few hundred yards, but your intrepid narrator would not be deterred, even if I was slightly detoured. Despite being somewhat uncertain of my exact location, I was determined to get as high up the mountain as I could. The going was slow but quiet and lovely. I easily got up on the bench that runs across the mountain just beneath the spurs. It was there I started to see several sets of fresh deer tracks in the snow. I did my very best tippy toe stalking, slowly moving my way higher up the slope, following tracks as they zigged and zagged upward into the laurel. The higher I got the more jagged the tracks, with increasingly indistinct prints. I suspect I was pushing a small group upward as I moved, but as always with such scenarios, the tracks let straight into an impenetrable wall of evergreen claws and I eventually dead ended into an evil snarl of laurel. Ah well, it was beautiful and I took the opportunity to have a seat and enjoy a nice meatloaf sandwich in a peaceful little laurel cul de sac. 

Buttloads of snow

Suffice to say, the way home was considerably easier than the trip up. I wended my way down the mountain in a direction generally intended to put me back at the clear cut around which I generally hunt. As it happened I ended up within a few hundred yards of my blind. I then worked my way down the mountain edging my way around a clear cut with a stream bed running through its center, as is my typical pattern. I frequently close out my day with a visit to a rocky outcropping, overlooking the cut, that affords great views of the mountain above and the valley below.

The blanketed spurs of Paddy Mountain, Shenandoah County, Virginia

The next three days were wonderful. I only spotted a single deer, but didn't have a shot. Still, I wouldn't have traded the time in the snowy forest for anything. This year my brother, his sixteen year old son and fourteen year old daughter were able to come up for a couple of days after Thanksgiving. My niece accompanied me for two days which was a great deal of fun. I've never seen anyone who can sleep sitting on buckets, on rocks and in the snow. The girl, a lanky, athletic ginger, would sleep so deeply that her neck gaiter would become saturated with drool. Revolting. But this was a rare opportunity to spend quality time with my family and I cherished it. We should all be so lucky every year. 

After the hunt, a buttload of shearling-lined Chippewas drying in the mud room - Natural, waxed and vintage

The Rut

The autumn has come and soon it will be hunting season. Okay, it's already hunting season, but I can't go yet on account'a I got this job and all. So, following the emerging pattern over the last two years, I'll take to the mountain during the week of Thanksgiving. It's becoming a family tradition, heading to the mountain with my uncle and whatever other family members are willing to come up and spend time tramping around the frozen forest from predawn to post-dusk.

This is what it looks like at my parents' house at Thanksgiving. How 'bout yours?

Of course successful hunting trips don't just happen. Like everything else in life (delightful Thanksgiving meals, for instance or securing the right to an adequate standard of living) they take planning and preparation. This year I got a non-resident lifetime Virginia Hunting License and bought the requisite Bear/Dear/Turkey tags early, so I'm legal. The paperwork is in order and I'm all set should Game Warden Timmy inquire about my bona fides.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

So, with my '42 Swedish Mauser I'm all set for deer. With the proper planning this year I should get five full days in. Many of the hunters up at Paddy Mountain extend their season by going out for the late muzzle-loader season, which could add another couple of weeks of opportunity, and my uncle offered to lend me a spare muzzle. But that would require an additional license and the season goes from December 13 - January 3, during which I'd probably have a hard time getting away from work and family obligations.

So this year I figured I would go out for Fall Turkey in addition to deer, which will extend the season at least as long as black powder would, and probably more. Plus my license runs through the Spring Turkey season so I can potentially go out again in April. Last year while I was ostensibly deer hunting, I heard what could only have been turkey up the hollow overlooking which I had established my stand. And this year while scouting around I found two turkey feathers quite close to the hunt club. So I've kind of got turkey fever. With that in mind, I turned my attention to my tools. I have a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun left to me by my uncle, but it had a 28 inch barrel with a fixed modified choke; good for deer, but not so much for turkey which require a very narrow choke to keep the shot in a tight pattern. So I picked up a 24 inch turkey-specific replacement barrel and an XX-full choke tube - the narrowest I could find.

A proper turkey gun. Mossberg 500A, with a 24" vent rib bead sight blued finish barrel 90135

...and an XX-Full choke tube.

A few weeks ago I went up to the range to figure out what ammo to use. I've settled on Winchester Long Beard XR. I also tried Remington Turkey Loads, but the Winchester held a much tighter pattern much farther out. The description of their revolutionary polymer technology seems a bit gimmicky, and I worry that I am filling the woods with tons of plastic, but in my highly unscientific survey, they really did perform far better than the competition. For the moment I'm sold.

So now the ol' Mossberg is a proper turkey gun. Maybe not a perfect turkey gun, but good enough. And shortening the barrel by 4 inches makes the gun feel infinitely less cumbersome for a little guy like your faithful author. By contemporary standards a turkey gun should probably be all camo'd out. Apparently turkeys have good eyesight, and the conventional wisdom is that you need to be completely invisible. I've been advised to wear the equivalent of a camo burqa, and to paint my face in festive RealTree™. Turkeys are known to have very good hearing too, which is why, when hunting them you need to be vewy, vewy qwiet. Since this is my first foray into the quest to get a gobbler, I'm not quite ready to go full Rambo. I reckon the pilgrims managed to kill turkey with blunderbusses while wearing buckled shoes. So I should be fine in my LL Bean camo and Mossberg 500a.

Historically valid proof that the Pilgrims used blunderbusses to hunt turkeys - Gobble gobble BANG!

Speaking of shoes, that's another preparation I've made for the season. I got the old Chippewa Arctic 50s out of the closet and put a coat of beeswax on them, the better to keep the tootsies toasty and dry. I used the Justin boots beeswax-based waterproofing they gave me up to the Alvin Stokes General Store when I bought the boots last year. I am of the opinion that beeswax is by far the best treatment for waterproofing, and the fact that this was free from the manufacturer pretty much sealed the deal. And sealed the boots! The treatment darkened the leather a bit, which I like a lot. The Arctic 50 only comes in a colorway known as Bay Apache, a pleasant medium brown, but if I had my druthers I would have preferred a darker color in the first place. So form follows function and I couldn't be happier.

Newly waxed Chippewa Arctic 50's

During the summer The Managing Partner and I made a scouting trip up to Paddy Mountain to do some maintenance on my blind. It was always a kind of ramshackle affair to begin with; well situated with long sight lines in several directions, but with no more cover than a hastily assembled brush pile. We spent a couple of hours gathering up branches and leaves to construct a serviceable camouflage barrier which should obscure my presence. By the time I'm sitting in it, the blind will have been there for several months, so hopefully the wildlife will have come to take its presence for granted and won't notice the little man now sitting in it. 

So I got my gun set up, my boots are waxed and the blind is in tip top shape. The leave slip has been turned into the boss, and the plan is to spend the entire week up at the Twin Spurs Hunt Club. We will come down from the mountain long enough to make our way to Chester Gap for the Thanksgiving feast with family. Then it will be back to the mountain for the last couple of days of the deer season. Judging from the impending polar vortex, I'm sure going to be glad to have those fleece lined boots.

Best foot forward

Vibram - the first lugged rubber sole

I have spent large swaths of my life walking in the Shenandoah Mountains. I have done it in sneakers, in cheap work boots I bought at the hardware store and in hand-made Italian hiking boots. And to some degree or another, my feet have always suffered. But never have I known podiatrical misery like that I experienced last year when accompanying my brother on a hunting trip up Paddy Mountain in Shenandoah County, Va.

Walking on Paddy Mountain means either scrambling over rocky scree fields or bushwhacking through dense stands of knotty, iron wooded mountain laurel. Ascents are steep and descents are brutal on battered soles; bruised toes jammed into the fore ends of even your good old hiking boots and ankles mercilessly assaulted by the wobble of teetering stones. After a single day I realized that if I was going to spend more time traipsing around Paddy Mountain, especially in cold weather, which seems likely given a recently rekindled interest in spending time in the woods and having access to a cabin abutting one million acres of National Forest, I was going to need a new pair of boots.

The hunters down on Bonnet Hill Road all seem to wear similar 9" huntin' boots. Once you get 'em started on the topic, each will regale you with details of their preferred footwear. Mostly they seem settled on pretty standard boots by Irish Setter and Rocky. Of course what passes for standard these days is pretty high tech. All seem to have intricately interlocked panels, some mixing various fabrics with leather and other space age synthetic materials. The soles look like they could only have been designed by a computer, displaying swooping organic H. R. Giger patterns that wrap up and around the toes. Each man thinks he has the best pair of boots, but they all insist that the real trick is wearing extremely heavy socks in them.

My uncle, who has spent his life hunting in these mountains and who is partner in a hunting club at the base of Paddy Mountain, gave me a couple pair of thick wool socks he insists are the absolute standard of what hunters should wear. These things were huge! Not just that they were a larger shoe size than I wear, but huge in every respect: thick rag wool that came up nearly to my knee, a gigantic red elastic band at the top. They seemed more like some kind of leg warmer an Inuit ballerina might wear or something you might see a Japanese schoolgirl wearing. (Thought: Inuit Ballerina - great name for a band). It seems to me that if you have to wear a gigantic blanket inside your boots to keep your feet warm and pad them from the abuse of actually walking in them, maybe you have the wrong boots.

Chippewa Arctic 50 boots. The best. By far.

Now my brother, a Master Electrician and life-long outdoors-man swears by Chippewa boots, and in particular has been trying to persuade me that the only pair of boots worth wearing on the mountain are the Arctic 50's. They're lined with genuine lamb shearling, a 1/4 inch wool felt insole and a classic Norwegian welt Vibram sole. Old school. Classic. American made boots that have been made pretty much the same way forever. After my day out with him last November I came right home and placed my order on Amazon, but when they came in they were extremely narrow, a bit short and just as heavy and stiff as you could want them to be. I wanted to like them, but I could tell they were not a good fit, so back they went. I couldn't exchange them because at the time Amazon didn't have the next size up and I didn't want to play the back and forth game until I got the fit right. I really wanted to try on different sizes until I found one that fit right. But I couldn't find a retailer in the area that carried them, so I despaired.

Lamb shearling lining and wool felt insoles - what a lovely combination.
And yes, those are little American Flags on the laces. 

Then last month I got back to the mountain and spent some time exploring in my trusty old Timberland Euro Hikers. I love these boots and have had them since about 1995. But man, a couple of hours on Paddy Mountain once again reinforced my need to get a new pair of foot armor. Now as it happened I ran into my brother up around Chester Gap just a few days later and he mentioned that he had just bought himself a new pair of Arctic 50's down at Alvin Stokes General Store in Front Royal. The next thing I knew, I was down at the General Store trying on not my customary 9 1/2 D but a 10 1/2 E. Yes, the Arctic 50's seem to run a bit small. But once I got my feet in to the 10 1/2 I could tell they were going to work out. I was worried a bit by the boots' height, since I'm not used to walking with a collar that high up my shin, but the shearling lining and the thick felt foot bed provided instant assurance that these were boots I could walk and stand in all day, even in the sub-zero cold, even over the broken surface of Paddy Mountain. And I don't need unnaturally thick socks either to keep my feet warm or to provide cushioning.

I know better than to recommend a boot to somebody. Like a bicycle saddle or a toothbrush, some things are just too personal. But if you're in the market for a stout pair of hunting boots, and you're fond of traditional, high quality American craftsmanship, you might just want to stop down to the Stokes General Store and try on a pair of Chippewas. If you like 'em, you'll save money - Stokes undercuts the nearest competitors I can find by at least $25 - and if you don't, well they sell a lot of other brands you might just like. Plus you can pick up some ammo and some beef jerky while you're there.