Sometimes Mother Nature Pushes Back

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322 – The Annual, 2024-25

By Chris Robinson

When I was growing up, it was high praise to call someone a good woodsman. Those folks could build cabins or even houses, chop up logs for campfires or cut poles to hang a deer they’d shot, pitch a tent or make into a stretcher to haul people out of the woods who weren’t good woodsmen.

It wasn’t unusual to hear, after someone had committed some serious crime, that “Ol’ Artie has his faults but he’s a good woodsman. If he made it to the north woods, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals won’t find him even if they get help from the Mounties.” Not that I recall Ol’ Artie or any of the other local miscreants, for that matter, ever bothering to try and make it to the north woods. As for Ol’ Artie, when the feds caught up with him, he had his foot on the rail at Joe’s Bar, a long way from any woods at all–let alone the north woods. Still, it was the idea that Artie had the skills necessary to elude capture and to pull a living directly from Mother Nature. Of course, sometimes the old girl gets cranky and decides to push back with all her wrath.

A man I interviewed told a harrowing story about being trapped in a Kansas blizzard with his brother-in-law while pulling food from nature–in this case hunting pheasants and quail with his champion Gordon Setters and his brother-in-law’s Weimaraners. “We were hunting in central Kansas and the dog work had been outstanding. On that day, we got a reminder about Mother Nature’s evil side, we had several pheasants in our game vests–all shot over point. We had listened to the weather forecast the night before as I could see a fairly substantial cloud bank off in the west but the forecast was for light snow starting late in the afternoon. I figured we’d be done hunting long before anything of any significance occurred.

Click here to read the complete article
322 – The Annual, 2024-25

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Posted by AnthonyA on Jan 9 2025. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.