Archery Talk

jus payin it forward my friend, mebbe sumbuddie will forward me a 15 yr or older bottle of scotch...J/K

 

Yeah you are going to love that climbing stand! That style seat is so comfortable when you get reclined and settled up in the tree. If you are anything like me you have just received a two hour nap in a box!

 

Imma go search for a Christmas buck in a little while.

 

I'm about to climb up! (I'll shoot a doe if one walks by)

 

Lol I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable enough in a climber to nap. I hate heights but it’s a necessary evil lol.

now when I’m in a blind or hunting from the ground.. I’m a snoozer for sure. Took one of the most epic naps at about 9500’ of elevation on my last day of elk hunting in Colorado last year

 

i spent an entire day.. in my climber, once, piss bottle was full, i was thirsty, but i napped well, bout 23 foot up..

 

Shoot one with a red nose

 

Only seen 1 small 8 pointer.

 

Checked cameras tonight and looks like 2 of my best deer survived all 3 gun seasons.

 

Wow

 

With a well-adjusted climbing stand seat sleeping way up a tree becomes a great motivation to go hunting! I once set up in an old steel Amacker tree stand (the first tree stands ever made, in Louisiana, Pre API, Pre Johnny Morris buying them both out and making them Bass Pro Shops-owned companies) way back on Type II land up Bee Tree Slough on opening day back in the 80's. It had a solid metal seat that sat on top of those side rails. You didn't sit down in it like your Summit or my API Grand Slam Supreme, you sat dangerously up on top of it. When you relaxed you didn't relax back INTO the tree and down INTO the stand like we do in ours, you relaxed and FELL FORWARD away from the tree. Some of the greatest moments of terror in my life occurred up in the trees, the tenths of seconds between half-waking, remembering you were up in a treestand, recognizing that you were falling forward and did not have your balance, and actually getting your eyes opened and focused to take in info with which to snatch yourself from a certain fall.
Yeah, you be REAL AWAKE two seconds after that! The safety belt would not stop you from falling out of the stand, only from falling to the ground. I never did, but came close a few times. Heck, a few times EVERY HUNT! I started taking a length of rope up the tree with me and tied myself to it if I was going to take five. (Forty)

So I sat that Amaker up in a long leaf pine, kinda rare now in Texas, you know, the one with many limbs on it, some reachable even from the ground. I didn't even have to climb it up the tree using the stand there were so many limbs, I just pretty much walked up that tree! Set the Amaker up about 23-25 feet off the ground with a couple of limbs strategically located where I could lean against them when I was standing up in my stand, or as armrests when I was sitting down. In all of these years it was probably the best tree setup I had come across.

So about 3:00pm I got tired and wanted a nap. Another nap. Rather than tie myself in with the rope I pushed the seat out away from the tree, stepped over it where I was between it and the tree, set down FACING the tree and leaned against it. I laid my arms OVER those two limbs, one on each side, and proceeded to go to sleep. PERFECT sleep setup! No terror. Didn't even have to use the nap rope.

About 4:45pm...from across the high game-proof fence a couple hundred yards away I hear BOOOM! BOOMBOOMBOOM!, then "Anyone over there on Type II, you got a pack of hogs heading right for you, they headed like they'll be comin' at you from under the end of the fence where it goes across the slough!"

I'm groggy, disoriented, having been snatched from a GOOD, deep sleep. I try to sit back and it is then that I noticed: Both my arms are asleep...All the way to my armpits. They were totally useless, dead. I had relaxed against that tree and allowed my weight to rest on my armpits and by doing so I had cut off the blood flow to my arms from there. I have never been incapacitated that bad before, nor ever since: I COULD NOT use my arms. I've had hands and feet go to sleep before, maybe a calf or forearm go to sleep a little bit, but never a whole limb. My arms were experiencing the onset of that numb you must go through before you are awarded the use of your whatever again. The "it's gonna' get worse before it gets better" onset. And it was only in the "gonna' get worse" part! Here I got hogs comin', and I can't feel my hands or lift my arms.

And that's when I looked down an noticed the two bobcats. They were not ten yards from the base of the pine, sitting behind the palmetto glade, on the trail that ran along the water's edge, between the palmettos and the water of the slough. They were just sitting there, spellbound, both watching me intently, but it did not seem like with bad intent. It seemed that they were just fascinated with that thing up in the tree. I thought that I had heard bobcats fighting or play fighting a couple of times earlier in the day farther back down the slough, and had become concerned as I had to walk out that way after dark. And here they were, sitting side by side like housecats waiting for a thrown snack, staring me down. I don't know how long they had been there, but it was obvious to me that they had come down that trail by the water, noticed that blob in the tree, probably snoring, and were mesmerized. Even when I looked at them direct and full-face they just sat there unfazed and stared back.

SO I'm like trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with two arms that are beginning that excruciating reanimation process, you know, the more asleep your appendage, the more it "hurts". I'm sitting up there just effen' dyin', can't get my arms to work, couldn't pick up my 700 if I had to, and DAMN SURE couldn't work that safety to save my life. All because of how I had to sit ON, not in, that stand to take a nap safely. And if you know anything about me you know that I'm out there in the woods to sleep up in a tree as much as I am out there to hunt. Or at least that is how it has worked out these last forty years...

I'm banging my arms against the tree and they are slowly coming around, and those two cats just sit there and watch me, well amused. They are probably like, "Ain't never seen a human do this before, have you?" Two or three minutes passed. Never in my life have I ever had anything go to sleep this much. My arms are still tingling but they had come around and it was almost over. I could at least pick up my gun with very numb hands and get ready for the hogs. STILL not 100% though, way from it. All of a sudden I hear a noise like several fat men running in hip boots coming from the fence where it went out into the slough about 120 yards away. The hogs had gone around the end of it and are about to head across the little open salt grass pasture I had set up on. Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash where the bobcats were, glance there, they've heard it too and have bolted down the trail along the slough towards the hogs to cut them off and hopefully get an easy dinner, I see a flash of them through a little gap in the buckbrush on up further on the water-side trail, then the hogs are out in the salt grass in the open, four, almost identical, all good size ones too! All brown, all a little over 200 (that lease over there is owned by two brothers who own the bank in Huntington AND the cattle auction barn there. Seemingly since the Old Testament they have been releasing the hogs that they can buy favorably at their auction onto that 2200 acres, letting them go feral, and that has awarded us some real monsters that, being hogs, always find a way to get around or through the fence. Advantage anyone smart enough to setup around where that fence ends twenty yards out into the slough!).

I pick one out with the too-short zoom selected 3x9 Leupold and squeeze off a .270 round. They don't even flinch. Thanks Edward Scissorhands. I'm jackin' another round in, vaguely feeling the bolt under needles of pain, to try to get one more shot off before they meld with the palmettos in the twilight but I am too slow. However I did notice the two bobcats flash through that last gap where I had seen them and they are hellbent for leather. (queue Rob Halford here.) The shot scared them and they are coming back my way, wide open. Hogs, gone, bobcats not: I put the crosshairs in the gap from which they were watching me. Gonna' pull the trigger as soon as I see hair. BAM! All falls silent. Instantly silent. The hogs have disappeared, not a sound to tell where they went. Eerily silent.

I get down out of the tree SCARED SHITLESS, this has all been a bit much for me, startled from a dead sleep less than five minutes ago. None of it advantage me, and I don't do nothin' that's not advantage me. SO I'm a little rattled. Listen, as I have said before, I like getting the shit scared out of me out in the woods, makes it fun, makes it an adventure, that's why I go, but this is a bit much being that I was alone, this late, this far from my boat. I'm still trying to come to grips with I've got to go in after the cat. I'm afraid I'm going to be close quarters with a wounded bobcat and it is getting dark, sun is below the horizon in front of me, and the cat has it at his back, I'm looking into the last glow of sky and the woods and palmettos and slough is in various shades of greyscale. I've got chest-deep palmettos I have to part, impossible to do without producing cover noise for him if he decides to come at me. He could be wounded behind them, ten feet away and I wouldn't see him. With a bolt action. I'm gonna' get one chance. He ain't gonna' kill me, but he could tear me a new asshole or two. I'm alone, WAY BACK in there, as far as you can get back in there, an hour and forty five minute walk back in off the Angelina River. I can feel my heart beating in my ears. I step into the palmettos, then out on the trail on the other side. To my left there is a 42 pound male bobcat dead about ten feet south of that gap on the trail. Dead silence. Cold. Dark.

Let me tell you what I learned by shooting that bobcat: NEVER EVER shoot a bobcat if you have to carry him out yourself by hand, on foot, an hour and forty-five minute walk. Especially if you gut shoot him. Here I already got a STEEL stand (not an aluminum stand like we have these days) on my back, day pack, together totaling close to 55lbs, my gun, and this gut shot bobcat to carry. Do you know how long a relaxed bobcat is? Do you know how high you must hold him to keep him from dragging on the ground so you can keep him nice so you can mount him? DO you have any idea how BAD a GUT-SHOT bobcat smells? I DAMN SURE ain't putting that bleeding, cat shit-spillin' cat on my back, to drain down on my stand, and pack, AND ME. SO I gotta' carry that sumbitch. To keep him from dragging the ground I have to hold him by his paws with my gripping fist ear high. And I was only five years off a full swimming scholarship at that point. I was still in good shape. Even so, that SOB whipped. MY. ASS. Try carrying forty-two pounds, your fist ear high, smooth slippery fur coat that slips through your ever-weakening grip every 30-40 yards. That was a looong walk out that night. (Glad I missed those hogs quite frankly!)

Yeah, you are going to relax back into that tree in that seat, and you are going to sleep like a baby up in that tree. YOur best, most memorable days in the woods are ahead of you! You are going to feel so secure down between those bars (adjust the seat suspension straps so that the stand's side rails act like high-placed armrests in a chair. THEN you can abandon all hope of staying awake!

 

While I don’t have the experience of the really old school equipment.. I do have the experience of a dirt poor redneck that grew up in Texas hunting out of two 2x6’s nailed up in an old live oak

 

Had 2 bobcats piss me off today.


It was a struggle not to shoot one but I kept my cool. They stuck around for 2 hours, never had that happen before. One of the lazy bastards even took a nap.

 

Sounds like one of my old stands.

 

Now if only we had some of those big boys y’all grow up in IL, down in my neck of the woods.

At least you don’t have to battle the hogs lol

 

2x6 stands in live oaks! Probably more of those across Texas than box blinds! Did you bolt them in or drill holes? I've never been able to drive a nail in one all the way. Live oaks are HARD! The nails always bend over on me! They're too crooked and knarled to climb with a stand so you gotta' build a stand in them. I hunted a white oak (not as hard as a live oak, but close) too old and big around to get the climbing stand on to climb it. I had to screw 21 tree steps into it to get up to where the stand chains would go around it. I had to go buy my first cordless drill and drill holes to screw those steps into, and even then they didn't want to screw in easily. And after all of that I couldn't hunt it if the wind was blowing: when the wind blew it was so big it did not sway. Rather, it pitch-poled, the trunk kinda' twisted almost imperceptibly around its axis. You couldn't see it, but my inner ear could sense it. And I'd get motion sickness in it! I'd get out of it and go get in a pine about thirty yards away and I'd be fine. The pine would sway and you could see it, so it matched what my inner ear was sensing. I've been way up, 36 feet one time in a pine when the wind came up. That was...attention-getting. I usually try to stay between 22 and 27 feet. I've found I can move around in the stand without being seen if I set the stand up in that range. There is nothing more tiring than being in a climbing stand all day than being in a climbing stand all day and having to be real still because you set up too close to the ground. I can move around a bit, with care, if I am higher, and still not spook deer.

 

Always used screws on them! nails are impossible!

hunted from a blind between two cottonwood trees in Buffalo, NY that nearly made me puke because of the constant flexing between the two trees. Crazy cause the stand had been there so long, the deer didn’t even notice the constant creaking

the bois’d’arc are the ones you really got to worry about when driving nails through them. I’ve got corner posts in my fences that are triple my age and still hard as concrete. Remember my uncles playing pranks on me asking me to drive fencing staples into them, knowing it was nearly impossible

 

We had that and a pallet in a leaned over pine tree with no seat about 10’ up over looking a river bottom. Shot at a lot of deer out of it, even hit a couple.