Laurie Sever and a trophy even more impressive than Mountain Dew cans.

By KW

A Mountain Dew can.

That was the most exotic thing Laurie Sever had shot.

Before the elk, of course. The bull elk. The big bull elk.

The 48-year-old teacher at West Middle School in Rapid City bagged a 6-by-6 bull late on the afternoon of Oct. 13, from about 200 yards with her husband’s 30-06.

“This is the first thing I ever shot, other than about 25 years ago when I shot a Mountain Dew can,” Laurie says.  “And before this hunt, I did a little target practice.”

A little was enough, apparently. With her son, Tyler, scrunched up beneath her to help keep the rifle steady, Laurie got the elk with one shot. They were somewhere up in the Custer Crossing area, although she does’nt remember clearly.

What she does remember clearly is her son’s reaction when he hiked over to the spot and found the big bull down.

“He came running back shouting, ‘You got him! You got him!”, Laurie says. “After the shot, I sat there praying that either I missed him completely or killed him. I didn’t want to wound him.”

She didn’t. And now the Severs have more than 300 pounds of elk meat in the freezer and a big trophy mount in the works. Not bad for a woman who is slower and sorer than she was before surgery and related treatments and medications for breast cancer.

As a three-year cancer survivor, she celebrates each day. But she was especially grateful that she filled her first elk tag - after applying for 11 years - and also got to hunt with both her husband, Jeff, and her son.

“I would have been perfectly satisfied not to kill anything,” she says. “There’s no place a peanut butter sandwich tastes better than in the Black Hills, out hunting with your husband and son.”

And as for taking a trophy bull on her first try?

“It worked out perfectly for me,”  Laurie says. “I think it was divine intervention.”

A well-placed 30-06 round helped, too.

I was just filling out a schedule of Outdoors/Recreation stories for the print product when I realized that I do not have an idea to write for the Nov. 21 issue.

So, I thought I’d leave that to you. I would like to report on a unique hunting story from the past month as submitted by you. Send your story idea to joshua.russo@lee.net and I will take it into consideration over the next week.

So, if you have a memorable story that you would like to share, feel free to send me the details and all the journalistic necessities - the who, what, when, where and why - to my e-mail.

And as always,  if you have a picture of your animal that you would like to share, send it to the e-mail as well. Be sure to include some info on the animal, your name, the location of the hunt, and the date and time of the hunt.

Happy hunting.

- Russo

Just a heads up,

I am working on a story for the Saturday Outdoors/Recreation section on the upcoming deer season. So far in my interviews, I have heard that numbers are down this year.

- Joshua Russo

(Geez, I didn’t see Josh there in his camouflage. He means the outdoors-recreation section of the, uh, paper news product - long known as the Rapid City Journal.  On a personal anecdotal level, I’ve seen a significant reduction of deer in the meadows between here and Highway 385 along Rimrock Highway this year from 2008. K.W.)

A multi-faceted still life, from the camera of Cecil B. DeWintersteen.

By KW

First things first: SNAAAAAAAAAAKE!

They’re still out there, those rattlers. Or at least, they were, not that many days ago.

That first big blast of cold that brought snow and dropped temperatures down into the teens, single digits and even below zero in parts of the Black Hills  a couple weeks back should have put all rattlers to bed for the winter.

At least, that’s what I thought when I was creeping around in duck-hunting heaven in a foothills stream - where rattlers are common - a couple weeks back (You know, the place where I missed the bluewings landing in my decoys).

Snakes? We don’t got no stinkin’ snakes. I figured.

Then it warmed up a bit, and Wintersteen was snooping around the same creek a few days later, hunting ducks and - mostly - flyfishing for trout when he ran into the rattler.

Darn near stepped on it. Darn near went airborne.

A rattler. Still sassy enough to rattle.

Geez. Can’ t a guy rest easy - and hunt easy - after a barrage of winter type weather? Not then, apparently, But surely by now.

Or not. At least, not if it warms up again.

I told the story to Mike Kintigh of the GF&P the other day, and he offered these words of reassurance: “Well, I’ve seen rattlesnakes out in November.”

OK, on three: one…two..three: SNAAAAAAAAAKE!

By KW

It’s both charming and sad.

It’s charming to see the faces of children when they feed the ducks and geese at Canyon Lake.

And it’s sad to see waterfowl that are supposed to be wild, waddling around in their own feces, begging for Cheerios and stale white bread.

So I always have mixed emotions when I watch the feeding of the birds, which often occurs within a few feet of informational signs encouraging people not to feed.

The Rapid City Council has been fussing with this issue for months. Or is it years? The council still hasn’t figured out what to do. Members would like to reduce the waterfowl population at the lake. But they were told by GF&P officials that the agency won’t issue kill permits unless the city imposes a feeding ban.

Based on what the commission has done so far, I don’t expect that feeding ban to happen anytime soon.

So the charming, sad feeding spectacle is likely to continue.

Any suggestions?

By KW

He shot a pheasant. Then he shot her.

She died Saturday.

We don’t know the shooter, or the victim. Not yet. Details are few. We only know that it was one of those horrible hunting accidents that happens once or twice most years in South Dakota.

Authorities in Gregory County say the guy got out and shot a pheasant. He was getting back in the vehicle when his shotgun discharged and hit a 26-year-old passenger in the chest.

The sheriff’s office is calling it an accidental shooting. But it’s always more than that. It’s also almost certainly a fatal absence of safety measures that could have prevented such a gruesome accident. And it’s a burden of loss and guilt that will last a lifetime.

Be careful out there.

Guns kill.

Don’t let them kill you or someone else.

If you’re a deer or elk, or other ungulate,  you can’t see this new GORE OPTIFADE camo gear out at Scheels. The rest of  you, check it out.

By KW

I didn’t do so hot on the “spot the hunter game” on the OPTIFADE Web site.

I made it to 17 out of 30, which means - when it comes to identifying  concealed hunters who might want to do me harm - I have the skills of a respectable satellite bull.

Here’s what the OPTIFADE folks had to say about that: “You never really got the attention of the cows in the herd (which was the story of my college dating experience), but you did get the attention of a hunter (uh-oh).”

But enough about my melancholy collegiate love life and failure to properly launch in the “spot the hunter” game. Check out the newest thing in “the science of concealment” from GORE OPTIFADE.

It’s a different kind of camo, based on digital patterns and the science of an ungulate’s eyes rather than replication of cattails and tree limbs and shrubs in the camouflaged pattern on your pants or shirt of cap.

It comes out of the military, with clear applications in sport hunting.

The new camo is plenty pricey, but worth checkin’g out. And the game is a gas.

Give it a try. I’ll be orbiting out there with the other satellite bulls, if you care to join me.

“Hunting becomes with time - if you love hunting - less a way of gaining distance from our lives than it does immersion into life. Attempting to understand completely what is essentially a visceral experience seems to cheapen the act. To me, carrying a clunky automatic or pump seems to cheapen it even more.”  — Robin Lacy

By KW

Wow, pretty hard on us common folks, huh?

In an otherwise nicely crafted essay about his love of double-barrels in a recent Gray’s Sporting Journal, Robin Lacy lumps those of us who carry auto-loaders and pumps into a lower class of hunters. Even more, he says we’re bad for the sport.

Well, shucks,  I’ve been carrying “clunky automatics” for most of my hunting life. Never knew I was doing so much damage.

I’ve been at it about 48 years now, ever since I started with that new Stevens single and moved on, within a year or two, to the 20 gauge Remington Model 1148 that had been given to our family as a thank-you gift from a group of Sioux Falls hunters.

It was a good-looking gun at the start, if you are the type of lower-class clod who tolerates guns with single barrrels and shell-ejection mechanics. I do. So did my dad, whose favorite was an old, too-heavy Remington Model 11 that he shot like a double, by rarely loading more than two shells.

But he liked the heft of it, the way it swung and the hard, heavy “ka-da-chunk” of the auto-loader mechanism. I still shoot that old Model 11 sometimes, to hear that familiar sound and feel the solid buck of the past against my shoulder.

And while I’ve played around with side-by-sides and shoot a Ruger over-under sometimes, my consistent scattergun of choice is the 1148. It’s a beat-up version of its former self, after half a century of hard use. But it works, always, and it shoots where I point it, reliably.

I find it hard to imagine that the simple act of shooting a gun I know and believe in, one full of personal history and memorable shots, could be bad for hunting.

And I can’t imagine that somebody out there tromping around with a venerable old Model 12 is doing much damage to the sport, either.

Can you?

“It was hardly a casual thing, picking a pup. Here was a creature with whom I would share the next fifth of my life: a housemate, family member, hunting partner, friend. One does not pick children. One is given them. But with dogs one assumes the burden of choice.” - Charles Fergus.

By KW

The burden of choice.

Most of us who frequent this switchgrass ridge of ideas on the Journal’s Web site have at one time or another assumed the burden of choice that author Charles Fergus writes about in the opening pages of his wonderful book, “A Rough-Shooting Dog.”

For Fergus, in this instance, the choice was a female springer spaniel named Jenny. And the book follows the growth - in physical and spiritual ways - of a hunting dog and the man who chose her.

After most of a decade without a hunting dog, I’m edging my way back toward that meaningful burden of selection. Not surprisingly, I’m focusing on springer spaniels, the dogs that served me well during the years when ring-necked pheasant hunting was my unsurpassed outdoor addiction.

I lived in Sioux Falls and Pierre during those years, and had my springers on rooster scent two to four days week during the pheasant season. It’s different out here, farther from ringneck country, and now there’s this fly fishing obsession to deal with.

But I miss those birdy days.

Dogless and without a nose that matters in the field, I rarely hunt upland birds anymore. And I long for that autumn ritual enough that I’m thinking, again, about assuming the substantial burden and costs of finding, buying, “fixing,” training and caring for a hunting dog.

With me, the search starts with springers. And, most likely, that’s where the search will end. But  German wirehairs keep nosing their way into my consideration as well.

What the heck is a guy to do?

Well, Bill Dithmer suggests in a comment down below that we should have another dog discussion. (Really, can you have too many of those?) Which kind is your favorite? Why? What are you hunting with these days?

I know Bill’s ready to talk dogs. And if the discussion gets good, we might even coax a former regular and widely-regarded Caucasian Labrador herder, Lee Schoenbeck, back onto the scene.

To get things started, let me settle one issue: The best pheasant breed on earth?

Springer spaniel, hands down.

A great spot for duck hunting? Yes.  Duck shooting? Not so much.

By KW

It must have been quite a sight when the flock of teal dropped into my decoys.

I couldn’t tell you, since I missed it.

During my first trip to a favorite duck-hunting spot in the foothills, I’d given the Vit Glodo a test blow or two, rearranged the decoys a few times and settled into relative concealment along the creek.

I’d been vigilant for a while, crouching low and calling out to  a few distant greenheads. But at the time  the teal dropped by I was busy scrutinizing a kingfisher that had skimmed my hiding spot before landing on a limb not far away, to commence a generalized scolding.

I was smiling at the kingfisher’s tirade and listening to the stream music when I perceived a dabbling sound nearby. It was a gradual coming of awareness, like you have when you’re sitting in the living room and suddenly realize that background noise is actually the sprinkler you left on outside.

I listened to the dabbling for a minute, then got on my hands and knees and pushed my head through the slough grass far enough to see eight or ten bluewings on the water. They were skittering around among my decoys like icons in a video game, picking at bugs and buds and whatever else looked good.

The teal were 10 yards away. If I’d jumped up with the 20 gauge ready I’d probably have killed a couple. But I”m always uneasy about shooting birds that have already landed in the decoys. It’s just not the same as catching them as the turn and drop with feet descending toward the fake ducks you’ve set bobbing on the water.

And, really, shouldn’t sliding into the decoys unseen be a sort of get-out-of-gunning-free ticket for a duck?

I was working through my conflicted feelings over jump-shooting the birds when they sensed my presence and departed, on nimble wings and with nervous squeaks and whistles.

And I was left to giggle at my missed opportunity and return to my daydreaming, as the kingfisher gave one last squawk, dropped off its limb and, in a casual collection of air, made its dimpled flight down the creek.

One duckless hour and a couple kingfisher sightings later, I bagged the decoys and headed for home.

All told, not a bad duck hunt.

The Vit Glodo and the Remington at rest… with their owner.