Oct 11, 2014 4 min read

I have a hard time remembering what I was hunting, but I can’t forget watching the groundhog as it stuffed cornstalks down the mouth of its den.

It would drag a stalk over to the hole, then push and pull until it disappeared. He was preparing for winter, so I was probably hunting the edge of a woodlot with a bow.

That is one of the offerings of archery season. An alert, or should I say aware, hunter can be entertained by nature.

Another time, I was in my old tree stand, which was replaced by a large home, and listened to a pair of turkey flocks talking back and forth. One flock was below me, the other above. They chattered back and forth as they moved through the woods like army ants, eating everything in sight.

As fate would have it, they met under my stand and began to fight. I assumed it was a fight over territory as the feathers floated in the slight breeze.

Sharp-eyed as ever, the few that suspected my presence ignored me and took part in the donnybrook.

Another time on a nice, warm fall day, I was relaxing in my stand, watching and waiting.

All was well, and I must admit I was daydreaming, when a fox squirrel came down the tree onto my head.

Startled, I made a quick move to stand up. After all, at that moment, I didn’t know what it was.

He jumped on my lap, down to the platform and scrambled down the tree. Once he reached the ground, he chattered away, giving me a piece of his mind.

The chatter went on for a long time, alerting every creature in the woods to my presence. As I calmed down, I kept thinking I might have to stick him with an arrow to make him shut up.

While tempted, I didn’t attempt the shot. After all, it wasn’t squirrel season and I probably would have missed, anyway.

I am a believer animals alert each other of danger, and that bushy tail thought I was the most dangerous thing it ever encountered.

I always felt the last 30 minutes before dark is better than the preceding three hours when watching for a big buck. I definitely become more alert when the shadows begin to get long. And so it was on this particular day.

If I relax or make a trip down the tree to get rid of some coffee, I do it well before that magic last half-hour.

I waited for this best of times and was on high alert. Just by chance, I glanced down, only to see that squirrel using my ladder to make its way up the tree.

If he made it to the platform, he would put all the other animals around on high alert, letting them know George was up the tree. He continued his climb, rung by rung.

Instead of going back the way he arrived, he went around the tree trunk and poked his head around the tree within a foot of the back of my head. I think it wanted to fight, but couldn’t figure out what I was.

Any deer would have to be blind and deaf to come to the stand with all of that commotion going on up that tree.

What keeps a person perched in a tree for hours on end? It is the expectation. It is the passing of a great buck or the chance to bag a trophy.

I once shot a big buck only to almost shoot myself. I was on the ground that day and, naturally, the buck approached from thick cover.

He was probably 10 yards from me when I took the shot. The problem arose when the arrow struck a small tree I hadn’t seen and went straight up in the air.

Not the most brave soul, I thought, “abandon ship.” I bailed out of the ground blind.

The buck ran one way, and I ran the other, remembering what goes up must come down. In disgust, I returned to the ground blind to find my arrow stuck in the ground just a foot or so from where I was sitting.

I could see the headline: “Hunter shoots himself in top of head with arrow.”

That is archery season in a nutshell. The weather is nice, but, more importantly, you never know what kind of adventure you’ll face.

George H. Block writes a Sunday Outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.