Day: November 25, 2018

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2018 Adventure in Bad Deer Hunting

I have posted in the past about how bad of a deer hunter I am (here and here for example) and I have posted about my desire in deer hunting, to harvest the weak and stupid.  Weak, young, and stupid deer fear me, the strong and healthy just laugh at me and I’m just fine with that. After all, I know I’m a lousy deer hunter.

This week was gun deer season and as typical I was very excited about it because I like to read in the woods as I try to shrink the Wisconsin “rats with antlers” (i.e. deer) herd. In the previous weeks I had spent a fair amount of time in Eric & Natalie G’s woods bow hunting. I saw deer while bow hunting but none were within my 30 yard comfortable range for bow hunting. So I was ready to hunt and read on their property during gun season. Opening day came last Saturday and early in the morning I was ready in the tree stand with coffee, snacks, and reading material.

The sun rose and instead of reading I looked up to see two deer walking toward me, I watched them slowly walk closer and closer for about 40 minutes. I then determined that I wanted to take the larger of the two and watched until he was 70 yards away and in the clear. Then I took my shot. The deer jumped straight up, like they often do when the are hit, and darted 5 feet ahead into some brush. I assumed the other deer, which had been ahead of the one I was shooting, had run off into the woods. I sat and waited to make sure the the deer I hit was dead or if I had not hit it as well as I thought and it would ultimately poke its head up or dart off somewhere else. After a minute of watching for him I saw a white tail jump up and run into the clear as it was running away from me. I took another shot and saw it fall down. This time I could see that the deer was dead. So I climbed down and started to walk over to it.

In this photo from earlier in the year you can see the clearing where I shot both the deer (marked by the star) and the brush that is around it.

When I walked past the brush I noticed a deer and instantly realized what had happened. Actually I instantly thought to myself “Crud, this is going to be twice as much work.”  I had placed a good kill shot on the first deer, which ran to the brush and fell down dead. The other deer, which I had ignored, had run for cover in the small brush instead of going to the woods like I assumed it had. When it jumped into the clear, from the same brush as my first deer, and started to run away I had assumed it was my first deer and hit it too with a clean clean shot. I had the tags for both deer so it was legal that I had killed two, and didn’t therefore didn’t really matter other than double the work for me for that day and no no longer having a desire to go back out into the woods for the rest of the week.

So my reading took place at home instead. This week I only finished 3 books which is especially light for gun deer/reading season since two of those books were start before gun deer/reading season. Here’s what I read:

Anyhow I have maintained my average of  killing a deer every other year of deer hunting, though I guess I need to phrase it to killing at least one deer every other year.

SIDE NOTE – There was a bald eagle flying low over me as I was field dressing both deer. She was just waiting to get at those gut piles. Thanks to being convicted a few years ago to use lead-free ammo for deer hunting, because of the rampant lead poisoning in eagles from lead based ammo fragments in guts piles, that eagle got a good meal with no harm. If you aren’t using lead-free ammo for deer hunting please consider swapping to it. Lead-free ammo doesn’t cost much more and it won’t poison our national bird.

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Pawns are the Soul of Chess

Listening to a podcast today I heard the following phrase “The pawns are the soul of chess.” I had never heard the phrase and I found it fascinating. The phrase comes from François-André Danican Philidor, a famous French chess player. Francois was one of the first to realize that pawns instead of being weak, almost throwaway, pieces were more important than the back row seemingly high-value pieces. I am no expert on chess but I love Francois’s thought concerning pawns. Many may love and concentrate on their queen, or have intricate plans for the use of their bishops and rooks, or love the power of their knights, but Francois insisted that “the winning or losing of the game depends entirely on (your pawns’) good or bad arrangement.” Apparently in chess, as in life, the little things are the most important.

2.3 Million Choices

This is why our small choices matter so much. winning or losing in life depends so much upon the good or bad arrangement of our many small choices. Those small choices when arranged properly add up to wonderful things. The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed by methods that we still don’t completely understand, but the most likely scenario is that 30,000 workers through incredibly strenuous and monotonous labor moved and placed 2.3 million two to thirty ton blocks of stone. Nothing special other than the incredibly result of a lot of people pulling and working together.

Many years ago anytime our boys would leave the house Pam started telling them to “make wise choices”. Because, even though we can’t control everything about our lives, if we consistently “make wise choices” things go better in life and if we consistently make unwise choices then the opposite is true. Pawns may be the soul of chess but our small choices determine the soul of our lives.

This is true in faith:

  • small choices to forgive small things tend to lead to being able to forgive the really big things
  • small choices to serve in small ways tend to lead to being able to serve in big ways
  • small choices to pray in small ways prepares one to pray in big ways
  • etc, etc, etc

It is true in our families:

  • making consistent, small choices for our marriages tend to lead to healthier marriages.
  • parenting is all about small choices – uncles, aunts, and grandparents can do the big fun things, but the small choices that parents make define who the child will become (personal side note here, I personally think one of the best small choices you can make for your kids is a consistent bed time.)
  • Our families’ finances are all about small choices.

This is basically true of almost every aspect of our lives. The issue is that making consistently good small choices it much more difficult than making a good big choice once in a blue moon. The big choices come around much less frequently. The small choices come by every day, if not every hour. That is why they are so important. That why true servants serve in lots of little ways. True loving people love in lots of little ways. True leaders lead in lots of little ways. Etc. Etc.

Pawns are the soul of chess and our small choices determine the soul of our lives. So make wise small choices.