By Kevin Woster

 Well, not quite.

But you can feel the coming of the ice-fishing season in the morning chill. Last I heard from the folks at The Rooster, Stockade Lake had four inches of ice in some parts, and a few brave souls were ready to dig holes and drop lines.

Deerfield isn’t there, yet. But single-digit lows this weekend could give it a boost.

Anybody got a better ice report, here in the hills or out on the prairie?

As the last light fades in the west, the Nemec home offers a warm glow against the gathering night.

By Kevin Woster

Leaving the Nemecs early Sunday night, I paused in the open doorway of my pickup for a long look back at the house.

If every abandoned farmhouse tells its own sad story of what was, every living one speaks of what is, and what could be.

The Nemec place does that, sitting bright and secure against the darkening blues and purples of dusk - and against the daily challenges of farm living.

The Waltons? No, even better - a real-life farm family still out there on the land, feeding themselves and the world.

If that doesn’t send you off into the night with a warm sense of hope, nothing will.

 Just prior to the Blogmore-TIO Invitational, hunt homeland security coordinator Lee Schoenbeck explains to his faithful Labradors - Sibby and Powers - that they won’t be allowed out of detention until they promise not to fight.

By Kevin Woster

Actually, those aren’t their names. But they are two of Schoenbeck’s, uh, extensive pack ofLabradors, relaxing in their Chevy condominium until it’s time to pick up some birds.

The dogs did great, by the way. Schoenbeck, a regular commentator here on TIO and, less regularly, way up on Mount Blogmore, wasn’t half bad either. I know he shot a sharp-tailed grouse because I was crouching under his gun barrel when he fired.

 What did you say? Huh? I can’t hear you.

Actually, it was a much safer situation than it sounds. In fact, the whole day was safe. I never saw a muzzle - on a gun at least - pointed in the wrong direction.

After four hours of thrashing about at the Nick and Mary Jo Nemec place, the invited pack of bloggers (see Mount Blogmore for details) packed out nine rooster pheasants, three sharp-tailed grouse and one gray partridge.

Then we packed in plenty of Mary Jo’s chili, as well as a great selection of desserts - including a Doug Wiken specialty carted up special delivery from rural Winner.

Jon Lauck managed a trifecta - one pheasant, one sharptail, one partridge. And his golden retriever, Jack, earned my admiration by locating a rooster I winged in a stubble field.

Nick was a gracious host who showed remarkable spirit in inviting us back again next year.

I’m wondering if he checked with Mary Jo first?

Maybe the following will help her decide….

Farmer, former legislator and blogger Nick Nemec communes with guest bloggers Steve Sibson and Bill Fleming.

With Bill Fleming pondering another bowl of chili, Mary Jo seems to distrust the cameraman.

Jon Lauck and the golden boy Jack with their rooster, sharptail and partridge.

Lauck’s golden, Jack, after rooting out my rooster.

Dan O’Brien, Schoenbeck, Tony Dean and Jon Schaff make hunt plans with Nick Nemec, while Jeremiah Murphy peeks in.

Nemec and O’Brien help HogHouseBlog huntress Denise Ross disembark from O’Brien’s truck after the ride from way out west.

Jeremiah Murphy and Matt and Todd Epp prepare to go all Pulp Fiction on the pheasant crowd.

Top Guv Mike Rounds shows off an obviously expired rooster he bagged during the governor’s invitational hunt last month.

By Kevin Woster

When Gov. Bill Janklow ran the governor’s hunt, he cruised around in an SUV and talked on the radio. I was in there once, with Judge Steve Zinter and other passengers.

It was a pretty comfortable place to watch the hunt. And Janklow always made it entertaining.
Gov. Mike Rounds gets a bit more involved in the hunt itself, as the photo shows. He and his yellow labs, Brandy and Baby (Wait, didn’t they dance at the Silver Spur back in 1977. No, that was another pair) hit the thick stuff along with all the other hunt participants.

Like the Argus Leader, I have some reservations about keeping the invitational hunt list private. But I don’t have any reservations about an official fall celebration of the pheasant season, or a governor who hunts.

As bird-hunting expert Martha Stewart says, it’s a good thing.

 

During an interview process for assistant chief of staff, Gov. Mike Rounds prepares to send a canine applicant out to retrieve a staffer dressed up like federal game warden Bob Prieksat. Either that, or the gov is just enjoying himself at his annual invitational hunt. You decide.

By Kevin Woster

With Rob Skjonsberg headed to the green fields of private enterprise, you have to wonder if Gov. Mike Rounds is concerned about finding an adequate replacement.

Oh sure, Neil Fulton is the new COS. And Neil’s a bright, engaging, hard-working guy. That part’s no problem. But you have to wonder if he’ll be junk-yard tough when it comes time to handle some of the edgy affairs of the office, such as flushing and retrieving federal game wardens.

Well, we wonder, at least. We wonder about a lot of things here at Take It Outside - the Rapid City Journal’s best outdoors blog. So we tailed the governor across the central South Dakota hills and dales until we managed to catch him field testing a little  canine muscle for the executive branch.

Good nose. Hard-working. Relentless. And they never come back empty handed when the boss sends them out on a retrieve.

This might work out, as long as Fulton has room in his office for a couple of portable kennels.

By Kevin Woster

My picture of POP (Poor Old Polovich - so named because he’s obviously having such a miserable time in his retirement) down below inspired Bill Harlan to set aside his compound bow, climb down from his tree stand up on Mount Blogmore and pose a question:

What’s the deal with orange camo?

If hunters can see the orange, can’t deer? And if they can, what’s the point of the tree-branch artwork, beyond a feeble effort to convince the deer that you’re a really just a colorful clump of buck brush?

My hazy recollection on the subject is that deer perceive orange poorly, so that the blaze-orange doesn’t stand out for them as it does for us. Obviously, even standing out a little is trouble if you’re a bowhunter, hoping to get a skittish whitetail to within 10 or 15 yards.

But for rifle hunters, who operate at much greater distances from their prey, a properly configured blaze-orange camo outfit can provide a reasonable degree of concealment and a great degree of safety.

But what do I know? I’m a bird hunter.

 

Appropriatedly attired for the November flyfishing-hunting season, Don Polovich doesn’t mind celebrating the mild weather and cooperative trout. 

By Kevin Woster

 So I said to Polovich: “I thought fly fishers were supposed to wear clothing to blend into their environment? What’s with the blaze orange?”

So Polovich said to me: “Deer season.”

No, he’s not hunting while he’s fishing. He’s making sure the rifle  hunters in the Black Hill can tell a deer from a Don.

Made me so nervous, I pulled out my blaze orange cap.

Didn’t seem to hurt the fishing much, however, as Don proved up on Rapid Creek.

By Kevin Woster

It’s possible I’ve been unfair in my criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting style.

He might have learned something since 2003, when he took part - along with former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach - in a game-preserve shoot in Pennsylvania that downed more than 400 pen-raised pheasants.

Cheney himself was credited with 70 or so. But that was just the morning shoot. He snuffed an unknown number of pen-raised ducks during the afternoon blast.

I guess it’s no big deal. These birds were hatched and reared to get shot. They’re basically pen poultry produced as targets for the wealthy shotgunners. Hammering a few hundred doesn’t make a bit of different to the wildlife population around the hunt club.

Still, it seems hoggish. And tacky. And hardly hunting. In fact, it seems bad for the future of hunting. Real hunting, that is.

I’m not aware that the vice president has ever said he regrets that instance of scattergun excess, or that he has decided he really wants more out of a hunting experience than just pulling the trigger. But maybe I’ve missed some thoughtful explanation of personal growth on his part.

Most of us have had them. I overbagged a number of times in my younger years of hunting. For a time, I was a bird hog. I learned to regret those mistakes, and tried to become a better hunter. I hope I have.

My excesses were in many ways more offensive than what the vice president has done. First, they broke the law. Next, even though I never killed anything like 70 birds in a day, I was killing “real” game birds, not the sad imitations that exist at that Pennsylvania shooting club, and others like it around the country.

Paul Nelson’s place isn’t like most of those clubs. Like the best of South Dakota’s hunting preserves, it’s a high-quality establishment, with well established habitat,exceptional accomodations and top-notch pen-raised birds that do a reasonable imitation of the wild thing.

Nelson’s a good guy, from what little I know, who understands how to produce a quality preserve hunt. As I understand it, he manages a healthy population of wild pheasants on his place as well, although any sizable hunting preserve must rely mainly on pen-raised birds to handle the sheer number of kills required.

Nelson understands pheasants and pheasant hunting. That’s why his guests don’t have to. I’ll admit that I’m making an assumption when I say the vice president doesn’t know much at all about pheasant hunting, or think much about the fabled ringneck except as a target.

That seems to be his history.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cheney is more engaged with the mangement issues, the beauty of the Nelson place and the sport of the hunt than I’m giving him credit for.

Maybe he doesn’t just come to South Dakota to pull the trigger. Maybe he only kills a handful of birds a day - or even just one preserve limit of 15 - at Nelsons, and enjoys the visit for the more important qualities it provides. Maybe he really hunts.

 If that’s true, I’d be happy to retract my earlier comments and apologize.

All it’ll take is a phone call, or an e-mail - from Cheney, one of his staffers, Nelson, or one of his staffers.

 I’d love to know what goes on, from the inside.

 

California Congressman Mike Thompson, left, holds part of the birds bagged Nov. 3 during a pheasant hunt on the Lars Herseth farm near Houghton. South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and her husband, Max, a former congressman from Texas, invited Thompson to the hunt. 

By Kevin Woster

Like many South Dakotans - 80,000 or 90,000 these days, I think - Rep. Stepanie Herseth Sandlin comes home each year for a ringneck hunt.

“Home” to Herseth will always be the farm/ranch hear Houghton, along the boundaries of the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve been there. It’s a nice place.

 I’ve never hunted there, though. In that, I’m behind California Congressman Mike Thompson, a guest for the Nov. 3 hunt that also included Herseth Sandlin’s husband, Max, and the hunt host and family patriarch, former state Sen. Lars Herseth.

Herseth hunts, by the way, with a Browning Citori 20 gauge.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, I hope to watch her use it.

(That’s a hint, Lars…)

By Kevin Woster

Here’s the thing about VP Dick Cheney: He doesn’t know much about South Dakota pheasant hunting.

I’m sure he thinks he does. And he kills plenty of pheasants.

In fact, my guess is he’ll kill a couple dozen a day this week while he’s at the Paul Nelson hunting preserve near Gettysburg.

I won’t kill a couple dozen this year. But I’ll do more pheasant hunting than he will.

That’s because most of the birds Cheney kills at Nelson’s place are pen-raised. Nothing wrong with that. These days, pen-raised ringnecks are admirable birds: good tails, decent flyers, taste mighty good.

Heck, I’d be happy to shoot some myself.

But they’re not wild pheasants. They aren’t those creeping, sneaking, early-flying rascals that have survived the early guns of autumn to understand the meaning of tires on gravel, the slam of a pickup door, the far-off rumble of a 12 gauge or, worst of all, the snuffling approach of a wild-eyed springer spaniel.

Those birds are top-of-the-line crafty and quick.

Most of what Cheney kills are a lot less than that. And he doesn’t have to do any work to figure them out, locate their haunts, tease them to flush.

He just shows up and pulls the trigger.

That’s OK. Lots of people do that. Most pay a hefty price to do it. I’m guessing Cheney hunts for free. And I”m guessing he shoots more than the maximum daily limit of 15 roosters allowed on licensed game preserves.

(Compared to the paltry regular limit of three, that I’m still thrilled to get once in a while, after 46 years of hunting wild ringnecks…)

Almost certainly, other hunters in his party will allow him to shoot their limits, too.

I’d be surprised if he doesn’t shoot 20 or 30 pheasants a day. Probably more.

That’s OK, too, I guess, if that’s your thing. Apparently it’s his.

I just hope he doesn’t leave thinking he understands South Dakota pheasant hunting. Because he doesn’t.

My guess is, he never will.