Pennsylvania Game News - August 2009 - 49

too. I put the pedometer in my pocket, to use later. That’s my most recent find. I didn’t lose anything of my own while turkey hunting this spring. I think that’s because I’ve gotten better at checking the area around my calling location before moving off. Do I have both calls? My gloves? The head net I just took off? My ThermaCell mosquito and blackfly-repelling unit? My (replacement) seat pad? I stuff it all in my daypack and jacket pockets, take a couple of steps and turn around and look again. Nothing there that I left, that I can see. With so much of today’s hunting gear produced in camouflage patterns, it’s easier than ever to lose things. This may help sales, but not hunters’ wallets. Items that are fluorescent orange or other bright colors are not as easy to lose in the woods, which may be why I seldom find them, the neon-blue pedometer excepted. My favorite deer hunting gloves are fire engine red fleece. I bought them in the ladies clothing section in a department store, but they have leather palms, cozy fleece inside and out, and Thinsulate insulation. They fit me, something that hunting gloves in men’s sizes do not. My red fleece gloves keep my digits toasty in the winter deer woods. Which is why, during a day in the regular firearms season several years ago, I was crushed to find my gloves gone. I had gotten them damp by pushing aside snowy branches, and I remembered tucking them inside my coveralls, against my chest, to dry. The sun was out, I was walking hard, and I recalled unzipping a bit to cool off. My gloves must have dropped somewhere in the thicket. They were lost. I backtracked but knew they could have fallen anywhere in the deep snow. I was about to give up when I met another hunter coming along my line of boot prints. He was carrying a pair of red fleece gloves. “These yours?” he asked. “They look like ladies’ size.” Against the odds, my favorite gloves and I were reunited. AUGUST 2009 I’m not always a loser. I’ve found several hunting knives in the woods. I didn’t find them until months to a year after their loss, so they were usually too rusted to use. How could these knives have been left behind? The ones I’ve found have browntone wood handles. They likely “disappeared” in the dry leaves the knives had been laid on, their owners not able to locate them after field-dressing game. Finding those knives has made me extra conscious of where I place my own knife during field-dressing. Once or twice I’ve had to search the immediate area, because my knives have brown-tone wood handles, too. I now spread my brightly colored hunting handkerchief and place the knife on that during field-dressing, so it doesn’t join the ranks of the lost. I’ve thought about spray-painting the handle a bright shade, so the knife is easier to find, but I don’t want to deface it. A piece of colorful tape might suffice and be removable. Besides knives, I’ve found compasses, gloves and mittens, hunting hats, another hunter’s seat pad (but not the kind I like) and a fleece jacket well-chewed by mice and squirrels. I can’t help but wonder about the circumstances of each loss. I hope the hunter made his way back safely, without the direction-finding help of the compass. I can imagine a hunter taking off his hat or extra jacket when he rested from the effort of dragging out a deer. Then he got up, leaned into the drag rope and left the item behind. Finding spent rifle casings and shotgun shells doesn’t count, because they weren’t “lost,” just ejected and discarded in the normal course of shooting. The live rounds I’ve occasionally found were undoubtedly mistakenly dropped during loading or unloading. The hunter certainly regretted losing them later. The hunting arrows I’ve found could either have been shot and missed their mark or were dropped from a quiver, perhaps snagged by a tree limb or brush. I believe most were shot and not recovered, 49

Pennsylvania Game News - August 2009

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