I honestly never know what will come of a particular hiking expedition. Some hikes are fairly uneventful--a little scat here, a little salamander there, some interesting flora or fauna, or both. Once in a while, we are pleasantly surprised by nature: like the time a bear came out of a tree right next to Al or the time I saw a bobcat walking through the woods about 50 feet from me. Or the time we saw two bitterns in the Great Meadow. Or the moose that practically ran into Al while he was looking the other way.
Well, okay, most of the time, we see something we've never seen before and a lot of the time, we are pleasantly surprised by what we encounter. No hike is ordinary.
Today, we began our hike on Old Stoddard Road, just across the street from Maury and Martha Collins' house. We headed into the woods following a old logging road toward an area that had been clear cut many years ago. This is an area we have explored before, but we approached it from a new direction. We came upon a familiar stone wall and followed it for a time until we reached an area with which we were familiar. Al suggested that we head toward one of the cellar holes we had visited before, so off we went to find it. As we often do, we scanned the forest and ground around us for interesting features: scat, moose sign, bear clawed trees, whatever we can find to give us clues to the animals who had passed through the woods before us.
We usually walk a few feet apart from each other so that we can cover more ground and increase our chances of finding something cool. So I wasn't surprised when Al called me to come and look at something that he had found. I have learned not to look at where he is standing, but to look down and back at where he has been to find what he discovered. Generally. Al doesn't tell me what he has found, but leaves it to me to find out for myself. This time, he actually surprised me, pointing at the tuft of deer hair that he had found.
Not an unusual find, and one that prompts us to get down on the ground to find more hair. On a previous trip near Kulish Ledges, Al, Lizza Backes, and I had been investigating a deer bed for hair when Al and Lizza looked over just a few feet from the bed and found a deer antler. We always hope that this will be the day when we find another antler, so we are driven to investigate. This time, it was easy to find more hair, and we followed what looked like a trail of hair. Just a few feet from the first tuft of hair, I looked down and found blood. This deer had been injured! It was hunting season, after all, so it wasn't surprising to find blood on the ground. But we had to try to piece together the story, at least from the evidence we could follow.
One drop of blood, another and a trail of blood. The injured deer had most certainly passed this way. We followed the trail of blood, not a steady trail, but one for which we had to get down on our hands and knees and search for the next clue. Our first approach took us to a dead end under a small spruce tree. We searched and searched for another blood spot, but could find nothing. Perhaps, here was the spot where the deer was shot.
Al and I decided that we needed to go the other way, to find clues from the point where we first found the tuft of hair. We marked the location of the last place where we found blood and followed the trail to the clump of hair. We continued from that point, marking the track as we went along so that we could retrace our steps should we come to another difficult spot. This was a good plan as we often had to return to the last spot we marked, the last place where we had found hair or blood and fan out to find the next spot. I often stood up and tried to imagine which way the deer, wounded and probably panicked, would go. Would it take the clearest route or head into a thicket where it was less likely to be discovered?
After an hour or more (we kind of lost track of time), we came to a point where there was more blood on the ground, more hair and two important clues that led us to believe that this was the place where the deer ultimately met its end. Al was crawling along the ground looking for more blood drops and found two bloody rags stuffed into the cavity at the base of a tree and just a few feet from there, I found a spot near a small boulder where deer hair littered the ground, obviously cut instead of shed. Here was where the hunters met the deer and prepared to take it out of the woods.
One more clue led us to believe that there were two hunters. We found a sapling cut off at about waist height, with a section missing. We concluded that the hunters had tied the deer to the section of the tree and hoisted it between them to carry it out. We also thought that one hunter would have had to drag the deer and we could find no evidence of dragging.
We sat and snacked, so pleased with our tracking fun, but also still curious about the whole story. Some day, maybe we will have the good fortune to meet the hunters who bagged the deer on the north shoulder of Osgood Hill and hear the full story of their experience. It would be interesting to find out how well our imagined story, based on the clues we found, matched up with what actually happened.
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