​            There are ghosts in the hills of Pennsylvania that many local residents have never seen.  They are the snowshoe hare, also known as the varying hare.  They are confined, primarily, to the northern part of the state, and in the higher elevations.  In the 1980’s the season for hunting these elusive lagomorphs was approximately a week long and hunters could shoot two per day.  The bag limit then dropped to one per day.  The snowshoe hare changes it’s coat color to white when the days shorten.  It has nothing to do with how cold the weather might be, or if there is snow on the ground.  When I was a youth hunter, I looked forward to hare season as much as deer season.  Indeed, deer season was a good time to scout for hare.  While walking through the snow, you would see the large tracks of the hare, as their feet are much bigger than those of their cottontail relatives.  Hence snowshoes.
            I looked forward to the day after Christmas, when the hare season started.  My father and I would load beagles into the truck and head into the Allegheny National Forest, to find the ghosts.  Unlike a cottontail, when a hare runs from the beagles it will routinely go so far that you cannot hear the baying of the dogs.  They almost always go at least a ¼ mile away before returning, and that distance is usually at least ½ mile.  It is not uncommon for the dogs to chase the hare in a circle of 1 mile in diameter or more.  I only know this now, because of modern GPS collars that allow me to track the hounds.  There was no GPS in my youth, and I still hunt as if the technology doesn’t exist, because a hare will go so far that you lose contact with the tracking collar.  At that point, it is just like the old days, and you wait, and listen for the hounds’ voices to Doppler back towards you, echoing through the hemlocks.
            In the early 2000’s the game commission began a limited bobcat season in the northern tier of the state.  They subsequently published results on the bobcat diet, and the results showed that the bobcats were eating hare.  This makes sense, and shows that the ghosts are in more places that people might think.  As I write, the hare season in the Keystone state is about to end in a couple days, and there isn’t a bit of snow on the ground.  I did not go look for any, as I felt that it might be too easy. I’ve seen hare sneaking along the swamps and hemlocks when there was no snow.  They feel invisible, and have no idea that they stick out like a sore thumb with that white coat on brown ground.  When hunting them on snow, I always say that I intentionally allow my eyes to go out of focus, and look for moving snow in my peripheral vision.  That moving snow is the ghost-like hare.  You have to be quick, and it often fails.  Sometimes they ran past you on the powdery snow and you never see them. You only know that they had been within range after the beagles follow, a few minutes later.  It can be a challenge.  It doesn’t take a lot of skill to kill a white snowshoe on brown ground.  It takes even less if you are hunting without dogs and walking along and shooting one that is squatting, statue-still, thinking it is invisible.
            Snow arrives later than it did in the past.  And it melts in between snowfalls.  I live in central Pennsylvania, and Penn State trains a lot of meteorologists.  Accuweather is based out of this town.  Every year, it seems, the meteorologist from the local news will predict a big February snow and say, “The reason this is going to happen is that Lake Erie, which is usually frozen by now, is still open water and the cold air arriving from the northwest will be able to gather a lot of moisture that will produce heavy snowfall.” In other words, it is warmer, even if it snows in February or March. It means that the warming climate will make it more difficult for the hare.  I am glad for the February snows when they come, as they will help conceal the snowshoes, but those white ghosts have to spend a lot of time without camouflage as the snows come later and melt earlier.
            I didn’t hunt Pennsylvania hare this year, or last year.  My last hare hunts have been in New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  Hare do not breed as prolifically as rabbits, and that also makes things difficult for the varying hare.  Which brings me back to those bobcats.  They too, are finding the white snowshoes on bare ground.  So are the fox, coyote, fisher, hawks, and owls. I know that my hunting will not have much impact on the overall population, and that the real threat is a lack of snow, not predators or human hunters.  For some reason, I just can’t bring myself to shoot one sans snow.  If (or should I say when) hare disappear from Pennsylvania because of climate change, many people will not miss them, because they never knew how close they were living to the wilder cousins of the cottontails in their yards and gardens.  I am looking at a taxidermy mount of a hare in my office, and wonder if it will, in the future, become a reminder of a species that once lived here, but no longer does.  It looks alive, but I know that it is quite dead.  Invisible ghosts that most people have never seen, and therefore will never miss.  Isn’t that the problem, with climate change and conservation, regardless of the species?  They are ghosts to most people. 

​            Elk County, Pennsylvania was formed in 1843 from adjacent counties.  It has the name because it was the last place where the eastern elk survived.  Sitting atop the Allegheny Plateau, there was wild space where the elk survived until the 1870’s, when European settlers eliminated the once massive herd that roamed much of the Appalachians. The Pennsylvania Game Commission formed in 1895, and within two decades, elk were reintroduced to the state, the first 50 animals arriving by rail from Yellowstone, and were released from the train with no further management in 1913. Despite the fact that many of the western arrivals were released in adjacent counties, by 1930 the small herd was confined to Elk County and neighboring Cameron.  By 1974 it was estimated that there were only 38 in the entire herd.
            The modern success story of Pennsylvania’s elk herd, now over 100 years old and the largest east of the Rockies, is one of conservation and management, due in no small part to RMEF. The foundation funded habitat management at Winslow Hill with $38,000 in 1991 and over $90,000 in the next couple years for the installation of electric fences that kept the elk out of farmlands where they were being killed for crop damage. In the late 1990’s a trap and transfer program expanded the range of the herd to 800 square miles.  The range had previously been 350 square miles.  Moreover, the range is now 2/3 public land.  At one time only 1/3 of the range was on public land.  From that low water mark of 38 elk, the herd is now 1,000 animals strong and has extended well beyond Elk county.  My closest encounter was in Clearfield County while conditioning beagles rabbit season.
            In September I was wanting to put some rabbit tracks under the dogs in advance of the October season. I could condition dogs and gauge the highly variable and cyclical rabbit population.  My small pack of dogs was circling a bunny when I heard a bull elk’s bugle.  It was loud. I was quite satisfied with this moment, then I heard hooves.
            I turned and saw the bull. I once ran through a barbed wire fence running from a farm bull when I was a teenager. I was 40 years old at the time I saw this Elk, and I was certain that I had slowed over the decades.  The good news was that I was not hunting, so there wasn’t the extra weight of a shotgun.  It turns out, with enough adrenaline, I am faster than I was as a kid. I set a personal record for the 40-yard dash while getting to some larger trees.  The bull and I danced around the tree. It seemed like an hour, but I am sure it was only a few minutes. He walked off, and I cautiously got my dogs and went home.
Currently there is a season that is managed in 9 different counties, and the limited tags are issued by lottery.  This results in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for conservation and elk management.   Pennsylvania is a state that is rich in natural resources, and in many ways the success of this large herd is one of reclamation after said resources were harvested.  The now famous Winslow Hill was once surface mined for coal, leaving poor soil. The RMEF paid to have fertilizer produced from leftover wood pulp hauled to Winslow hill from the paper mill in the small town of Johnsonburg also located in Elk County.  The mill, located on the confluence of the eastern and western branches of the Clarion River, produces wood pulp every day.  RMEF paid for the shipping of the material that enriched the soil and made the food plots possible.
            The heart of the elk herd is located near the Bennet Branch of the Sinnemahoning Creek, a tributary to the Susquehanna, which drains into the Chesapeake Bay.  It was heavily polluted by acid mine drainage, but has been restored to the point where trout are now stocked there, another victory in conservation.  Most of the county drains into the Allegheny River via the Clarion River, and flows to the Gulf of Mexico. You can find me running my dogs and listening to the elk that is a modern success story of conservation, overcoming overhunting and pollution to form one of the great attractions in Pennsylvania.  

          ​I spend a lot of time afield.  Upwards of 300 days per year have me in the hills and forests for at least a few hours.  Primarily, I am training my hunting dogs, and this often finds me sleeping outdoors.  I travel up and down the northeast competing in field trials with my dogs, and will also take a week and and remain in the briars, and not waste the gasoline to come home at night just to return to the wild in the morning.  At other times, I will park my truck and use it as a basecamp as I take a few days to explore the surrounding area for potential hunting spots.  While outdoor journalists are often “roughing it” we also can be found camping with some creature comforts with  a 4 x 4.  My pickup truck has a rooftop tent, and it provides a great deal of comfort.  Indeed, the Maggiolina tent was designed as a four-season tent intended for the Alps.  Summer months can make it a little warm.  So, I roll up the canvas doors and let the wind keep it as cool as possible during the day.  Then, at night, I resort to something else.
            There are a number of modern coolers that can be utilized to keep your provisions or catch of the day cold. Yeti, Pelican, Orca, and more are all available.  I own one.  But I also own a cheap Styrofoam cooler.  Why?  Well, for the air-conditioning.  Let me explain.  I have modified a cheap Styrofoam cooler by using a knife to cut a hole in the lid slightly smaller than a PVC elbow that I bought at the local hardware store.  I then bought a battery powered fan, and cut a rectangular hole in the lid to accommodate the fun.  The fan can simply rest on top of the lid, but I sometimes tape it down.  Make sure that the fan is situated to blow air into the cooler, not out.
            Of course, there is finite space inside the cooler, and I pack it full of ice, or ice packs. This chills the air inside the cooler.  With the PVC elbow in place, the fan blows warm air into the cooler, and the laws of physics require that some of the air has to come out, via the PVC elbow.  When that air vents out of the cooler it is noticeably colder than the ambient air.  It certainly won’t cool my house in August, but you know what it will make comfortable?  My small rooftop tent or a small dome tent.  I bought the same Styrofoam cooler again, just to get the lid.  When I go on the road (off road) and stay for a few days, I fill the cooler with frozen gel packs and travel with the non-modified lid on top of the cooler to keep the gel packs frozen.  When it is time to sleep, I utilize the lid made to accommodate the PVC elbow & fan.  I can always get one night of cool relief from the gel packs, maybe two.  After that, it is a matter of transferring ice from my expensive cooler, which can keep ice for much longer.  If you are going to be living out of your vehicle/tent for a few days while working in the summer, I highly recommend giving this cooler a try. A good night’s sleep is worth a bag of ice and a couple D batteries.  

            As a youngster, my plan was to grow up and become a mountain man.  The idea seemed like a good one.  I could hunt and fish all the time, and trap for furs to get my walking around money.  I had seen some movies too, so I knew it would be simple as anything to put a pan in the river and get some gold to supplement any major purchases that might be necessary.  Log cabins and lean to shelters seemed easy enough to construct. They built them in the span of one, short, uplifting song in the movies.  All the survival books I read from the library made lean to structures look simple to build.  I decided to practice my skills at living like a mountain man as a kid by erecting a structure that I could utilize while camping—why pack a tent, when you have a semi-permanent dwelling.  I was so proud that I showed it to my father.
            “Hey,” he said, “Nice brush pile!  But we need you to build them in the beagle club.  There is plenty of cover for rabbits here.”
            “That’s not a brush pile,” I said.
            “It’s not?”
            “No,” I said as a squirrel ran out of it.
            “Then what the heck is it?”  Only he didn’t say heck.  He utilized a geographical term of theological origins.
            “That’s where I can sleep while camping!” I pointed at my shelter.
            “I thought that I bought you a tent?”
            “This is for survival situations,” I said.
            Needless to say, the mountain man lifestyle would take more effort than I had realized.  Then I discovered girls.  It is tough to get a girl to commit to living in the wilderness.  Living on wild game and fish doesn’t appeal to most gals.  Let alone sleeping in a brush pile.  Sure, a nice romantic stroll in the woods is one thing, but sleeping on the ground is another.  Whenever my wife, Renee, and I go camping, I take supplies to make sure she is comfortable in the woods.  The last time we packed to go for a wilderness getaway the neighbor stopped by with bad news.  “It was nice knowing you, Preacher,” he said.
            “You okay?” I asked him.
            “I’ll be alright.”
            “Oh good,” I said, “The way you talked I thought we were never going to see each other again.”
            “Well, we probably won’t.”
            “Man, I am sorry to hear that,” I said, “How much time did the doctor give you?”
            “What are you talking about?”
            “What are you talking about?” I said, “Why else would we never see each other again?”
            “Well,” he said, “It is obvious that you are moving!  You could have told me.”
            “Oh,” I looked at the truck, packed to the gills, “I ain’t moving.  I am taking Renee camping.”
            I don’t think I could get Renee to live a mountain woman lifestyle.  So, I put my mountain man dreams on the back burner.  Until I got this sweet little muzzleloader.  It is a side by side 16 gauge, percussion cap shotgun.  Black powder, just like the mountain men.  It is perfect for pretending to be in the past.  I mean, I would love to hunt and fish for a living.  Naturally, it would be great to be inaccessible by cell phone 24 hours per day.  Then again, antibiotics are nice.  Death by diarrhea is no longer a common event in the developed world, but could happen if I walked off into the frontier.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss hot showers when I have been in the field for a week.  Solar showers are cute, but they only warm up the water sufficiently to stave off hypothermia long enough for you to build a fire.  I like pretending to be in the past.  Black powder is the way to pretend!
            Black powder?  That’s old school.  And fun.  You get to carry a powder horn.  A possible bag (mountain man purse) is pretty cool too—it can hold your ammo and premeasured powder loads for your gun.  I even have traditional wadding for this shotgun—beehive.  My traditional wadding comes from a hive that encased my modern electric meter.  I accidentally disturbed the pesky wasps by mowing the grass.  I got stung—a lot.  I vanquished them with bee spray and gathered the remnants of their home to use in my shotgun.
            Each barrel takes 70 grains of powder.  Then some beehive.  Then the same measure of shot—I mix #7 ½ and #6 together, something that doesn’t happen in factory loads.  Then you have to add more wadding to keep the shot from running out of your barrel.  I grabbed that old smoke pole for one of the last hunts of the Pennsylvania rabbit season.  It had been a good season, and I had killed a lot of rabbits.  I decided to make the day a little more challenging. I headed afield with traditional gear and traditional clothes.  I added a blaze orange vest and hat to be compliant with the law.  The first chase was long, and 4 circles later I got a shot. 
Smoke belched out of the muzzle and hung in the air.  It cleared as the dog was approaching.  I didn’t see the rabbit, and figured I had missed.  It did not go far, and Duke brought it back on a retrieve.  I reloaded as Duke found another bunny.  I became transfixed in hound song.  His rolling bawl took me back to the brush pile campsite of my childhood. I thought about dreams of living off the land.  A pristine wilderness, with game abounding.  I remembered the romantic notion of having a hunting dog in the pioneer days, and always having food ready at hand, brought to the gun by the dog.
            I snapped back to the present, and the sun was sinking low.  Duke was in full cry.  I was not in a wilderness, but on land that had been surface mined for coal just a few decades ago.  The rabbit came zooming past me and I held a sustained lead and squeezed.  When the smoke cleared, the rabbit was just a foot or two from where it was when I squeezed the trigger.
            I decided to set up my modern phone (or is it postmodern) and take some old pictures.  Well, pictures of me in old time garb.  Me and the dog and the bunnies and the old gun.  I was wearing a wool pullover, leather brush pants, and leather boots.  I took off the orange vest and the orange hat.  I took the GPS handheld, suspended from a lanyard, off my neck, and took the GPS collar off the dog.  I intentionally brought a leather leash—not a plastic one in some neon color.  I put the cell phone in a tiny tripod and synched it to a Bluetooth remote control button.  Sure, it was theater.  I killed two bunnies that way. That’s all.  But it was an homage to our hunting heritage, an acknowledgment of how we used to hunt.

            One of my fondest memories is from childhood.  Every Sunday, my father would take me to the woods with a bolt action .22 long rifle.  It had no magazine, you loaded the rounds one at a time. Open sights. We would take a box of shells, and an empty coffee can to an area with an embankment behind it.  He would walk the can 30 or more yards away, and then return to stand behind me. I would try to hit it 50 times.  I got to where I could do that every Sunday.  So, we started getting snuff cans (Copenhagen) from my uncle for a smaller target. Copenhagen had the metal lid.  It made a satisfying ping when I hit it.  All of this is to say that I am a decent marksman with a rifle.  I like to aim.
             Anyone can tell you that this is not an asset when you are shooting shotgun.  You don’t aim a shotgun.  Well, you can, but it doesn’t work as well.  Trust me, I have come a long way to be a decent shotgunner. Bows? For years, if I hunted archery, it was with a compound bow.  I have killed more whitetail buck with a compound bow than any other way.  A compound bow has peep sights, you see.  You can aim the dang thing.
        A few years ago, I went with a few relatives to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous, or ETAR.  It is known worldwide, and attracts at least 8,000 people and as many as 10,000 to come shoot traditional bows (no pulleys, no sights, no crossbows).  The whole event is here in Pennsylvania, and not far away from home.  There are courses and competitions.  Over 100 vendors sell bows, arrows, accessories, and anything else you might need.  People swap things like an old-fashioned rendezvous—you can put a limited number of items on a blanket for swap or sale.  People camp there all weekend. I caught the bug for traditional archery.
            Anyway, shooting a traditional bow is like shooting a shotgun in the sense that it is instinctive.  You don’t really aim.  Well, some do, but the instinctive shooters seem to do the best.  They calculate drop, distance, and all the rest in their minds from repeated practice.  As you can imagine, this is not easy for me, or at least not natural.  My asset while small game hunting is that my dogs will keep circling the rabbit until I get a shot that I can make, which is usually when I see the rabbit before it sees me!
            After watching the ETAR crowd, I decided that I needed to give traditional archery a try—for rabbits.  I would trade in hundreds of pellets per shot for one arrow.  I decided to shoulder the burden of doing better, and bought a cheap recurve at ETAR.  Golf, in my mind, makes little sense. 3D archery, on the other hand is fun, and I began frequenting various courses.  You walk around the course, record your score on each target (They have all kinds of critters—deer, bear, moose, elk, beaver, whatever) remove your arrow from the foam animal, and walk to the next target.
            Of course, this was when The Hunger Games was popular, which is important, because there were scads of little girls, not old enough to hunt, who were walking around 3D shoots with pink bows.  Every single one of them had been shooting since they saw the first movie in that franchise, and every single one of them could shoot very well.  They began shooting instinctively and progressed quickly. They were all better than me and they gave me pro-tips at the range.  They encouraged me with such advice as, “Why do you stand like that?” and “Were you shooting at the target?  I think that arrow is gone forever.”
            So, I just kept slinging arrows with my recurve.  On hot summer evenings, I would spend an hour developing muscle memory and becoming more instinctual.  Did I ever get good?  No. But I got to where a 10-yard shot on a small target would not completely embarrass me.
            As an avid rabbit hunter, it seems to me that the vast minority of rabbits that have entered my game vest have not been killed within a range of 10 yards. 20-30 yards seems more common with my shotguns.  So, while trying to kill a rabbit with a bow, I often find myself watching cottontails amble by at insanely far distances like 20 yards.
            “You’re lucky I don’t have a shotgun,” I mumbled to myself as it went past.  Heck, even my compound bow, with peep sights, would be easy to use at that range. I kept trying.  I figured that if I could get a rabbit with my hounds using a traditional bow that I would be participating in some really prehistoric stuff.  A bond with our Neolithic ancestors that domesticated the wolf.
            I also discovered that a pack of dogs made the hunt more difficult.  If I put four dogs behind a rabbit, I was having to shoot at a much faster target than if I took one dog.  It isn’t as exciting to hear a dog sing solo as it is to have the whole band making music, but a solo hound made my shots easier.  When I say easier, what I really mean is that they were near misses.  The first dozen near misses on a sprinting bunny are certainly exhilarating.  After all, I was accustomed to completely missing the mark!  When you hear an arrow rattle off a stand of saplings, you know you missed bad.  Or if you see it soar into the multi-floral rose, you can count on never finding that arrow again.  Certainly, the near misses were fun.  At first.  Then, they become depressing.  Just under or barely high are the worst.  You know that the tiniest change on your end would have made all the difference on the end where the rabbit was.  Oh, there are a variety of small game arrow tips that are available, but I seem to shoot better with plain field tips—the same practice tips that I use when shooting at the block targets in the heat of summer when it is too hot to run my dogs.
            Then, I bought a longbow from my nephew.  It was made by Wild Horse Creek Bows. It just seemed to work better for me than the recurve. You can distinguish a longbow from a recurve by whether the tips of the bow bend toward you when you draw back, or if they curve again (recurve) to bend away from you. I was better with the longbow, at least on target.  It’s simpler.
            So, after a great hunting season for bunnies last year, I decided that I did not need to shoot any more on the last day of the season.  I donned traditional archery clothing—leather and wool—and added my blaze safety orange hat and small game vest to be legal.  Placed my quiver over my shoulder, and unleashed one dog—Duke—hoping that he could give me a close shot.
            Have you ever been facing the wrong way when a rabbit crossed?  It crosses behind you?  That happened a half dozen times on rabbits within my range, giving me no shot.  You can react quickly and still harvest the prey if you are shouldering a 12 gauge, but with my longbow I simply waited for Duke to bring the bunny back one more time. There were many bunny sightings that were well within shotgun range.  I could have shot my limit.  I missed a few within archery range.  In eight hours, Duke ran 5 rabbits and they all holed or escaped.  The sixth rabbit ran past at 25 yards at the end of the first circle and gave no shot.  It kept running through the same stand of pines.  So, I moved there after several circles.  It was quartering at me, streaking through lanes that were created when a coal company planted pine trees in straight rows after reclaiming a surface mine. The trees were now tall and I could see under the canopy. I would glimpse the rabbit, then it would pass behind trees, then it would emerge again. As it neared I drew the bow to full draw and the rabbit noticed and paused to turn.  It was at 15 yards. I loosed the arrow, and it felt like a near miss—a little high, but the rabbit made a big leap when it turned sideways to me.  The field-tipped arrow anchored the rabbit to the floor of pine needles, finally success! I hurried to a dirt road before dark, took off my orange, and snapped a pic of the hunt in traditional garb. If you love the chase and don’t care if you shoot your limit every time, I highly recommend a bow bunny.
            “Why are you grinning?” my wife said when I returned home.
            “I just did some stone age stuff!” I exclaimed, “Sorta.”
            “Yeah,” she said, “Was it so easy that a caveman could do it?”  

          Here we are at the end of the year, and we get a break from the school busses and waking up kids while we are on Christmas break.  It made me think about following those behemoth yellow busses, as they meandered down the road at the start of the school year, and the doves in the freezer from the beginning of the school year. Those doves will be appetizers for the Christmas feast.  Around here, they got rid of bus stops.  I guess they figured the kids couldn’t walk a couple hundred feet to a centralized location.  So, the bus stops in front of each house.  Often it waits as the kid lumbers out of the house and lollygags to the bus.  Then, the bus lumbers 30 yards, and stops in front of the next house to repeat the process.  Poor kids miss out on the social interactions at the bus stop.  They don’t have to deal with bullies or negotiate how to get along with each other.
            I have also noticed the abundance of pictures that parents place to social media to document the kid’s first day of school in a new grade.  I think that they should also post a picture on the 100th day of school, when they had to yell at the kid for 20 minutes to wake him up, after being awake fighting with the child to do homework the night before.
            I can’t tell you how many times I have refused to go to Disney, for free. My wife has many conferences for her job (instructional designer) at Disney World.  It still seems weird to me that a bunch of grown adults would go to Disney, but she always asks me to go as if it is the best thing in the world.
            “No,” I said, “It is hot there.  And adults that go to Disney without kids?  That sounds creepy.  It would test my patience to take a kid there,, let alone go alone.  It’s hot.”
            “There is stuff for adults to do there too,” My wife, Renee, said.
            “Didn’t an alligator eat a kid there, a few years ago?” I asked.  “I’m anti-alligator and anti-snake.  I am a dog guy.  I can’t go around gators and all those many snakes they have down there.”
            That conversation, or one like it, has happened every year since we have been married.  Multiple times in a few of those years.  I just won’t go.  This was all convenient when my stepson, Wes, was little.  She would go to conference and I would watch the kid. I still remember an incident that happened while helping him with his math homework.  The assignment was to estimate the answers to some addition problems.
            “What do they mean by estimate?” Wes asked.
            “I dunno,” I said, “Just add them together.”
            The next day, I got a call from his math teacher.
            “Mr. Ford?” the voice came through the phone.”
            “Yeah,” I said.
            “I am calling about Wesley’s homework,” she shrieked.
            “Well, I check it, but I am not one of those parents that will fix it so he gets a 100% on everything,” I answered.
            “I should say not,” she said with disdain dripping from her voice, “He missed every single question.”
            “That can’t be true,” I said.
            “I am his math teacher,” she said.
            “He got all of those right!” I said.
            “He most certainly did not,” came the teacher’s response, “He did not estimate anything.  He added them and got the exact answer.”
            “Yep,” I said, “He estimated pretty well.”
            This, of course, was not what she wanted to hear.  The same thing happened on his homework the next day.  The math teacher called me again.
            “Mr. Ford,” she said, “Do I understand Wesley correctly?  He says that his mother is out of town for a conference.  Do you know when she will be back?”
            “She is away,” I said, “I think she gets home Sunday.  No, wait, the conference ends Sunday.  So, she returns Monday, perhaps Tuesday.”
            “Well, Mr. Ford,” the disdain was back, “Which is it?”
            “So,” I replied, “You wanted estimates yesterday, and today you want specific answers?”
            Needless to say, the teacher wasn’t pleased.  I gave her my wife’s cell phone number.  No, late august doesn’t make me think of school.  It is doves!  Dove season starts at the beginning of September in my home state of Pennsylvania.  There are a lot of reasons to hunt doves.  They are delicious.  Also, it is the return of bird hunting!  Oh, and what can be better for working a retriever.  These are all great reasons to hunt doves.  Why do I hunt doves?  I hunt doves to completely shatter my confidence as a shooter in advance of the impeding grouse, pheasant, and rabbit seasons that will arrive in October.  Every time I miss, I am in disbelief that it could have happened. Again.
            Then, some smarty pants always says to me, “You aren’t leading them enough.”  Oh, yeah?  Did you think I was pointing behind?  I keep giving more lead, and that never works either.  Oh, sure, a few birds fall, but not with the consistency that you would want.  Then, I got to thinking that perhaps the problem was that they were too far.  Doves are quick, and distance can be hard to read.  Also, I never miss them when walking my dog and he flushes one.  It is standing in a big field that gives me trouble.  Also, my dogs are all beagles.
            “Can I dove hunt with a beagle?” I asked the game warden.
            “What?”
            “Well, I can hit them pretty well when the beagle flushes them while I am rabbit hunting and dove season is still in,” I said, “So, could I let my dogs chase bunnies in the early dove season, before rabbit season opens, and just shoot doves.”
            “I think that would technically be dog training, and you can’t carry a long gun while doing that.”
            “But,” I said while pinching my index fingers together to make a point, “I could also argue that I was bird hunting with dogs that are prone to chasing rabbits.”
            “Of course they are prone to chasing rabbits!” he said, “They are beagles!”
            “Good point,” I said, “It was worth a try.”
            Anyway, I now limit my shots in the big fields to closer doves.  Maybe not as close as the ones flushed by the dogs, but still a lot closer.  The end result is that my take home in dove breast is about the same but my ammunition bill is substantially less.  Oh, and I also use a 12 gauge!  I have gone from my 16 gauge to the .410 while rabbit hunting on many days.  And I have swapped the 16 for the 12 while after those doves.  You might want to try the same.  If that fails, you can always stop by Lion Country Supply and get some spreader loads.  They are made by Polywad, and I use them in my side by side 12 gauge in the left barrel, as my second shot.  This works well on birds flying at me, with a close second shot.  Also, since the left barrel has a tighter choke, the shot pattern doesn’t get quite as dispersed.  A pattern that is too open simulates shooting too far away.  But I love them as the second shot.  If the flights of birds begin giving me crossing shots or are flying away from me, I will reverse my loads and put the spreader loads in my first barrel and save the tighter pattern for the second shot.  I never go smaller than #7 ½ shot either, not for any load, spreader or otherwise.
            That all sounded good, right?  Well, my confidence will still be shattered, as the dove makes me wish I was shooting as well as a good baseball player hits, where failing 7 out of 10 times makes you a .300 hitter, and that is terrific.  But I do better than I once did.  If I could only convince the game commission that the beagle is a bird dog!  Happy hunting.

        Well, the silly season is over.  What is the silly season?  It is the two weeks in Pennsylvania that is devoted entirely to the deer season that allows us to use a rifle.  The woods are full, and I certainly do enjoy the scramble for venison.  I got an 8-point early in the season, and then found myself in the position where I was saving my doe tag for a larger doe, and “walking the pines” and “pushing the bottom” in the hopes of helping a youngster get a deer in the second week of the season, when a kid can shoot either a buck or a doe.  So, what makes deer season silly?
            It is the only two week stretch of the year when my beagles chase no rabbits.  I exercise the dogs 300 days per year, and never take two entire weeks off.  The dang hounds go crazy!  They see me put on boots, and hunting pants, and then see me grab a rifle.  Now, I have smart dogs, but they have yet to discern that the side by side shotgun means that we are rabbit hunting and the bolt action .30-06 means that they are being left at home while I pursue the elusive whitetail deer.
            “The dogs howled for an hour after you left,” my wife, Renee, texted me one day, “And you left at five o’clock in the morning.”  Did I mention that my beagles live in the house?  Obviously, I did not answer the text.  My phone doesn’t work where I deer hunt, and it would be useless to reply to her 12 hours later, after I was out of the woods and getting gasoline and a sandwich.
            So, I decided to have “quality time” in the evenings with Renee, to help smooth over the chaos that she was no doubt enduring as I left the house in the mornings.  Quality time in late November and December can only mean one thing for her.  Hallmark.  Not the cards, and not the store.  It’s the channel, and they run nonstop Christmas movies for what seems like two months, leading up to the big December 25 itself.
            “I’ve noticed something about these movies,” I said during one of the commercial breaks.  The commercials are all about places for the perfect woman to do her perfect shopping.
            “Do enlighten me,” Renee rolled her eyes.
            “Well, it seems like all of these movies are about a very successful woman.  Her work makes her move to the boonies, or she goes home to her quaint, rural hometown where she hasn’t spent time in years.”
            Renee was silent.  So, I knew that she agreed with me. “So what,” she eventually said.
            “Well,” I sat up on the couch and sipped some coffee, “She also has been having troubles finding a good man, despite the fact that she is fantastically talented and looks like a super model.”
            “What?”
            “It’s always true.  If she has a boyfriend, he is a jerk.” I scratched my beard thoughtfully.
            “That is sometimes true in the movies,” she said.
            “And!” I moved to my pain point, “She has to move into rural America to find a good man!”
            “What’s wrong with that?” Renee said.
            “Nothing,” I answered, “But the guy is the most eligible bachelor in town, and he is handsome and usually handy.  He can fix stuff.  He has a job, but he doesn’t make the money that the women makes.”
            “It is a romance story…”
            “True,” I continued, “But here is this guy, living in that town, being the kindest, most talented, best looking dude in town—and he is apparently unable to get a date.  No women has scooped him up.  He has spent years waiting for the right woman.”
            “Is that it?” Renee asked.
            “Plus, he has a dog.  A well-behaved dog.  And gal meets guy, and after a bit of a misunderstanding they fall in love.  BOOM.  That’s what Christmas means in every one of these movies.
            “I like them,” she said, “And you don’t have to like them.”
            “But,” I rubbed my hands together, “Do you know why you like these movies?”
            “Because I like Romance stories and I like Christmas.”
            “No,” I pointed a finger into the air, “It is because it tells the story of your life.  You moved here to Central Pennsylvania.  You work at the university.  And who did you find?  A dog man.  You found me.”  My wife was quiet again, so I knew I was right (again).
            “Could that be true?”
            “I think so.”
            There was a long silence.  “No,” she said, “You have more than one dog and your dogs are not well-behaved, and you aren’t handy at fixing things at all.”
            “Oh,” I said.
            “But you can hunt well,” she continued, “And I would appreciate if you take these misbehaving, howling beasts to chase a rabbit at your earliest convenience.  They are driving me nuts.”
            Yes, I am happy to report that the silly season is over, and we are after the rabbits again.  Merry Christmas.

Hare hound.  I have heard that term my whole life, often from guys that hunt cottontails and intend the term as an insult.  Oh, I agree that hare leave more scent, but they are often hunted in poor scenting conditions.  Some think that a beagle that hunts hare lacks line control on a cottontail, but I have seen hounds accustomed to cottontails that were unable to reach out enough on a big check or keep up to a big running hare.  After all, they are all beagles--not hare hounds or cottontail beagles.  The good ones should do fine on both!  What has been your experience?

It is no secret that I like double barrels, but the gauge that we use is important too.  I will confess that I have been known to take a 12 gauge afield--especially if I expect to find pheasant.  For the most part the 12 is way more than I need for bunnies.  I also have a .410 that I carry, often in the early season when the cover is thick and the shots are few and close.  rabbits often circle past me, loud as a freight train in the goldenrod, but invisible.  I also use the .410 when taking friends who do not own dogs with me, opting only to take a real easy shot and hoping that my friends get to do more of the shooting--who knows one may become a new beagler!  The 16 gauge is my favorite.  It has good punch, and isn't real heavy.  They say that a 16 in the right hands is as good as a 12.  The 16 is probably only as good as a 20 in my hands!  What is your favorite gauge?

Well, I have used a single shot, pump, autoloader, and the double barrel.  My first shotgun was a bolt-action Western Auto brand I bought for $60 using paper route tips.  I have  missed and hit with them all.  What is my favorite?  By far the double barrel.  In Pennsylvania, where I live, a shotgun must be plugged to no more than three rounds--counting the one in the action.  I have rarely found a third shot to help if I miss twice.  I like the double barrel, with two different chokes.  Sometimes, if the rabbit is a little further, I use the second, tighter choked barrel instead of the first barrel.  If I am honest, I also like the wooden stocks and the tradition of a trusty side by side as well.  I have seen all sorts of guns in the brush, with guys that shoot better than me!  What is your favorite action when it comes to hunting bunnies?