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Scenes in the wild are not always of dead bucks. This old mountain coon was a nightly visitor while my buddy Mike and I were camped-out bowhunting in the mountains of northern PA. some years ago. As the week passed, he became very brazen and eventually accepted food from our hands. Near the end of the week he showed up with another smaller coon and they got into everything.
This gal was just plain nosey. I had just purchased some land on a mountain in the middle of two thousand acres of woodland and cleared a camp-site for my tent. I went trout fishing in the morning and returned to camp, built a fire and was getting ready to eat lunch. She came down through a thickett and stayed within ten yards of my camp-site while checking me out. A year later I built my cabin and discovered that my previous camp-site was on the edge of a bedding area, right in the middle of a travel route to a feeding area in the alfalfa fields at the foot of the mountain.
The View From My Cabin Seven years after selling my home in the mountains of Pennsylvania I finally got around to putting a cabin on a sixteen acre parcel that I kept for a hunting spot. This is what I see as I exit the front door on a fall morning.
If you are unfamiliar with Montana it will be hard for you to visualize the experience of spending a week camped on top of a mountain in the Whitefish Range of North West Montana. I have done this a couple of times and each time I go, I don't want to leave. My buddy and host John Bartlett is a somewhat famous Viet Nam Vet (read the book "Appache Sunrise") who has settled into a wonderful life of driving locomotives and putting arrows into trophy bucks in the area around his home in Whitefish. John's more important attributes are a wonderful family and a well-developed style for telling funny stories (Corbra pilots are required to be able to B.S.)---is that one about the dead horse really true John?
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