OK, I am not an outdoors person. Never claimed to be. A city girl to the core, I have slowly learned to adapt to my husband's obsession with the woods. It's been difficult, though.
My husband hunts the public lands of Florida, mainly because he has never been lucky enough to score a private lease somewhere. If I ever won the Lottery, that would be my first purchase -- private land for my husband to hunt.
He usually hunts the same public wildlife management area, but one weekend he decided to try a new place in the northern part of the state. He made me promise not to reveal on this blog where we went for fear the rangers would remember us and his hunting buddies would laugh at us.
I agreed to go with him. He said it was a weekend away. I was thinking romantic camp in the woods. I was wrong.
The area itself was pretty, lots of woods and places to see wild animals. We drove along a dirt road until we got to a desolate area reserved for camping. There was only one other group camping there, and they were packing up to go. I guess the hunting wasn't that good.
I thought it would be really great when the other group left -- we would have the entire place to ourselves. Kind of like pioneers. But then night came. And it got quiet. Really quiet. Until -- something or someone screamed. (And it wasn't me.)
"What was that?" I asked my husband.
"I don't know. Probably a coyote," he shrugged, unconcerned.
I heard the scream again. Followed by what I heard as laughter. By more than one person. OK, I was officially freaked out then. I was scared. Images of every horror movie I had ever seen flashed through my mind. Scenes from "Deliverence" popped into my head. (If you've never seen that movie, just ask your husband or boyfriend. He'll explain it to you. I think it's mandatory that every male watch that movie by a certain age.) I suggested to my husband that maybe there was a group of teenagers roaming around that were going to attack us.
He asked if I was serious. That wasn't possible. He reminded me we had our faithful Rottweiler. And no one would think to attack a hunter knowing he most likely was storing plenty of loaded firearms inside the tent, he reasoned.
But the more I heard the screaming, the more scared I got. The final straw was when my husband, the one I was depending on to keep my fears at bay, admitted the possibility the sounds could be from a group of people in the woods screaming and laughing.
I wanted to leave. Right. Then.
I shoved supplies into the truck. I couldn't leave fast enough, even making him leave the tent and everything else in the camp. My heart kept pounding in my chest.
Our troubles then really started. It was about 10 p.m. by this point. And we were in the middle of nowhere in this part of north Florida. We started driving looking for a hotel or motel or someplace close to stay so my husband could finish his hunt the next day. The only place we found was about 10 miles away. It was dirtier than the camping area, and had plenty of bugs to keep us company. I think the woods would have been better.
We returned to the camping area the next day, of course finding nothing disturbed. When we talked with the ranger, he assured us that there were no other people in the woods or the area the night before. And most likely the noises we heard were coyotes. But they wouldn't have come close to our camp. They were more afraid of us than we were of them.
Somehow, I doubt that. But it didn't matter at that point. It was time to go home. My husband's hunt was ruined. Our weekend was ruined.
Coyotes: 1
Hunting Widow: 0
We never went back again so I could have a rematch.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
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That's funny. There are a lot of coyotes around my boyfriend's house. They're sort of a nuisance. My boyfriend owns an old farmhouse surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland. Some of it is wooded. His dad lives right across the road and he raises chickens. My boyfriend often sets traps for them because they go after his dad's chickens. One time he caught a really big coyote though. He trapped it in the woods by one of his friends who lives around the corner from him. His friend thought it was a wolf because it was so big. He was afraid to go near it to shoot it and by the time my boyfriend got there, it had gotten out of the trap. My boyfriend said that sometimes they get so scared when they're trapped, they'll actually chew their own leg off. They do sound kinda funny though. We often sit in the back yard in the summer just to listen to them. There's a lot of guys around here who hunt them too. We see their trucks along the road alot. We call them the coyote chasers. They chased a whole pack of them right through my boyfriend's yard across the road to his dad's farm.
ReplyDeleteJust an afterthought. Thought you might like to check out my mother's blogspot. She's a wildlife artist. She paints on old saw blades, or whatever. She mostly does custom work now. People give her photos of what they want painted, (picture of their dog, the old family farm, their cottage up north, etc.) and she paints it. Sometimes she paints on slab wood. Other times she paints on masonite and frames it with her own homemade barnboard frames. Her site is at sawsnsuch.blogspot.com. Recently she's been really into wood carving. She has some of that on display too.
ReplyDeleteHi!
ReplyDeleteYes, those coyotes sounded really strange. I probably wouldn't be so afraid of them now, but that sound just scared me. I had visions of a group of people attacking us. Your boyfriend's house sounds really cool -- I love old farmhouses, and to be surrounded by lots of land (and no people) sounds so nice and peaceful.
I looked at your mother's site. She does a fabulous job with her paintings. I'll add it to my list of "sites I like to visit." Does she go to any craft shows in Florida? My mom and I used to go to a lot of craft shows here, and I think your mother's work is as good, if not better, than anything I've ever seen at the craft shows.