Fishing in the time of COVID-19<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nHearing only the right bird as I climbed toward the left one, I started thinking about all the other things that can go wrong. Birds stop. Sometimes the nastiness of the upper branches never provides a shot. Sometimes you just don’t find them. Well, at least these things happen to me while hunting hooters this time of year.<\/p>\n
I reached the soft, wooded crest and picked up the sound. The going was easier since I gained elevation and was soon close enough I felt the sound. Anyone who has hunted hooters knows this feeling. There’s that extra tone that seems to vibrate the inner ear. He’s close.<\/p>\n
I found him most of the way up a spruce tree and tried to figure out a way to point my rifle at that angle. I backed up a little bit, braced against a tree, but that put a branch in the way. I sat down. Nope. Branch. The best shot was when I was at a half squat but that wasn’t going to happen. I morphed from a pingpong ball bouncing back and forth to a dog circling, circling, circling before finally laying down.<\/p>\n
I laid prone, using the slope to assist me in getting the right angle. I propped the barrel against the top of my pack, and rolled my head back until the back of my head was resting on my spine. I fired a warning shot — one of my least favorite, but often used euphemisms. The grouse didn’t fly off, instead it just worked its way closer to the trunk of the tree. I readjusted and made the shot.<\/p>\n
When it comes to eating a sooty grouse, the calorie math gets a little sketchy. The amount you burn compared to the amount you harvest, can be a little off in my case. I combat this by making it deliciously sketchy. Downing a hooter means I have permission to go to the store and get bacon, jalapeno peppers and cream cheese for grouse poppers. But not everything is about numbers — steps, elevation, calories, shots, and if you start to over analyze everything you’re in danger of missing the point.<\/p>\n
• Jeff Lund is a writer and teacher based in Ketchikan. “I Went To The Woods,” a reference to Henry David Thoreau, appears in Outdoors twice a month.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you start to over analyze everything you’re in danger of missing the point. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":60196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-60195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60195"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=60195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}