Hunting

Second attempt. It makes me feel like a newbie to blogging to have my first disappear. Entirely. 

So yes, we went hunting. Well, Elv, Josh, and Brad hunted. We girls stayed at home in the cabin and baked cookies and sipped coffee. Elv cooked our breakfasts each morning while Francis made the other meals. Which is to say, more clearly that they cooked and I did clean-up. It’s my favorite arrangement.

The guys saw deer the first day. But not having any meat to bring home didn’t keep them from having all the fun of the hunt. With maps, GPS apps, orange, muzzle loaders apiece, the paraphernalia pertaining to northwoods hunting including boots, numerous coats, gloves, orange vests, and over-alls. Somebody stepped across the little creek at the bottom of the cabin lawn and missed, twice. Hunting clothes hung drying everywhere: on the rack and  over chairs pulled up to the stove so that we could hardly walk. Boots. Guns in corners.

They saw deer trails, beds, and rubs. But no meat. Which didn’t keep them from enjoying the maps or from taking long tramps from river to swamp to Buck Mt. trail and around to get a sense of where these deer were “moving”. Nor from strategizing the next hunt and who was going to stand where, when.

Hunting during Thanksgiving week brought back happy memories to me. Seems to me that Thanksgiving falls a little flat without orange and drying boots by the stoves. The long evenings of visits and games and dozing by the fire. What better way to reminisce other hunts and gatherings. What better place to dream up next year’s hunts and gatherings. Not to mention the next homesteading adventure.

Francis took to cookstove cooking and baking like she had always known how to do it. And enjoyed it. That large, friendly surface holds three pans at a time besides the constant brewing of fresh coffee. And out of the water reservoir that Elv kept full, we had hot water to wash the piles of dishes and daily baths for grown-ups and even bathed the babies in a bin turned bathtub by the warm stove evenings. With a cookstove, wood, water and cast iron pans our basic needs are met. Every cabin should boast a cookstove. But you’ve heard this all before. I am still trying to understand why we took them all away trading out for flimsy, complicated ranges and ovens. In the very least we should have only added the more modern conveniences until our saner minds returned. Homesteading, gardening, and cookstoves are back, though, just in time for me.