Weekend two

Our second weekend of hunting found the weather changing, cold and snowing.  This is good news for the rut and helps get it going, and gets the animals moving.  It was in the teens as daylight broke, and with the wind chill it easily was in the single digits, and there was a light snow.  Sounds like some great late season hunting to most of us, not so much to my 12-year old daughter.  She agreed that ice fishing was much more enjoyable.

The cold weather had the game moving though, we ran into about 25 does, two bucks (a 2-pt, and a 3x4), a small herd of elk w/ no bulls, and a flock of about 20 sage grouse during our day of hunting.  These birds are pretty big, it's overwhelming to come upon them out in the middle of nowhere in the sagebrush.  Here is one just sitting out in the sagebrush.

Here are the marks another one left as I flushed it and it took off across the open sagebrush.

I managed to grab some video of this one flying away.

We ran into a nice rub out in the mahogany brush, if this was a monster muley I'd like to meet him.

It was a fairly miserable day being cold, and me with the on sought of the 24-hr flu coming on.  It was about everything I could do to keep from hurling all day with the nauseous feeling I had.  But we braved through it, like you have to do when your hunting.  We saw quite a bit of game so it was a good day in the end, and once again my trooper made it through with a smile on her face.

Unfortunately the next day we both had to stay home because the 24-hr flu hit us hard, the two of us were the last ones in our family to get it, so hopefully that is the end of the epidemic in our house that has gone on for the past few weeks.  We're on our road to recovery, and we'll be back at it again this weekend.