smokepole;
Good afternoon to you sir, I'm glad to read that other than a goblin onslaught you should be alright. Here's hoping...
Thanks for the reply, the kind words therein and for being a Hunter Safety instructor too. Obviously I believe it's important to have the next shift get a good firm foundation.
It's interesting that many moose get shot every year. I want to say we don't hear about that often here, but again it's possible it's unreported and left in the field. Our BC cleanup crew is amazingly efficient so the evidence would be gone in days.
Thanks for the chuckle with the livestock stories, we're well familiar with Black Angus range cattle as pretty much everywhere in the mountains here is someone's grazing lease until today actually when they're supposed to be off the range for winter.
The oddest livestock experience I had was on an elk hunt in the Kootenays back in about 87 so I was younger and more impressionable then. Still, it's got a bit of a Halloween vibe to it so here goes.
My late father and mother were friends with a couple their age, so in their late '60's at the time. The husband had been showing signs of occasional early onset dementia and before we left, his wife took me aside and asked that I keep a little extra careful watch out for her husband, which naturally I agreed to do.
We were there a few days and decided we'd hunt a mountain west of Canal Flats which looked good when we scouted it late one afternoon. The next day then was one of those still mornings on the mountains with just enough fog to keep the visibility to a bit less than 100yds or so, but we'd come a long ways to hunt and had LEH calf tags, so my hunting partner and I split up and headed separately into the fog.
We agreed to meet back at my pickup at 10:00 as I recall.
Maybe an hour from the pickup or so, I heard hoofbeats coming through the old growth in my direction, so I dropped down on one knee and closed the bolt on my rifle.
Out of the mist a white horse appeared, trotting towards me with it's head down so obviously trailing me.
He trotted up to about 25 yards from me, didn't change pace as it went in a circle snorting quietly like horses will do sometimes and then it left the way it came.
It was surreal and more than a little unsettling to say the least smokepole, as the first thought that struck me was "Death rides a Pale Horse" and that Death must have got bucked off somewhere back there.
I'll also admit that I walked over to where the horse was and checked that it left tracks - I went there smoke!!!
Anyways, the day got weirder from there as my hunting partner who was my father's buddy, so a senior, got lost and didn't show up at the pickup until about 1:00PM..
All that time I was sitting in the pickup trying to figure out how I was going to tell his wife that I'd managed to lose her husband - when she'd specifically asked me not to.
That's the story of the Pale Horse and the Kootenay elk hunt smokepole, I hope it gave you or someone out in the ether space a wee laugh on this Halloween.
Thanks again and good hunting.
Dwayne
