Ain’t October wonderful!

It’s the best month of the year for fishing and hunting, except maybe for November and April, and possibly May and December.

I was born in October and I once spent my birthdays in Canada, fishing for walleye, crappie and smallmouth, and hunting ruffed grouse and ducks and geese. We would start on the Lake of the Woods in northwest Ontario and then move over into Manitoba’s prairie pothole country where ducks and geese numbered in the millions.

One October evening, I caught a 10-pound walleye in Manitoba after hunting geese all morning. I recall a time in deep woods around Lake of the Woods when I shot a limit of grouse late in the evening after catching two four-pound smallmouth out in the far reaches of that beautiful lake, and a limit of crappie and walleye before noon.

That evening, a big beautiful grey timber wolf eyed up my Labrador and I on a little wilderness trail miles from my pickup. Old Rambunctious and I covered more ground that evening than usual, and there wasn’t a hair on either one of us that wasn’t standing straight up. You have no idea how big a timber wolf looks at dusk in the wilderness, pondering Labrador for dinner.

Last year, I got to spend the best of October in the mountains of Colorado, where I killed a bull elk, camped so high and so deep that I felt like a Blackfoot Indian might be looking over my shoulder. There might be a writer somewhere that could describe the lonely beauty of that distant peak, but I can’t.

A writer has to describe the way a place feels more than how it looks. You have to feel the way aspen leaves float down to the ground in a shower of yellow rain when there isn’t even a breeze. You have to feel the first light of day where you are 10,000 or 11,000 feet closer to God, and feel the sound of a bull elk bugling in a stand of green fir trees along a cold mountain ridge. It isn’t something you just entirely hear and see.

The sight and sound of ringneck ducks across your decoys in a little bay of wild rice growing from dark water in the back of a Canadian bay, the sight and sound of a thousand geese on the horizon, winging low over a Manitoba cropfield, the sight and sound of a huge northern pike coming up from the edge of his lily pad domain to smash a topwater lure ... that’s something you also feel, and I wish I could pass on the feeling, because it is addictive.

It is something October is responsible for. I don’t know where I would rather be. I’d also like to go one more time to the Sand Hills of Nebraska and see those old ranchers where we once hunted ducks in little potholes where green reeds towered over your head, and there were widgeon and gadwall and teal and mallards and redheads, all in the last stages of summer plumage. We stood out there in the reeds up to our waist on solid sand, and never, ever felt a soft mud bottom.

We’d put little leather boots on our Labradors about noon and head out into those Sand Hills to hunt prairie chickens and sharptail grouse, and from a distance it looked like there wasn’t enough cover there to hide a cottontail, but it was a hodgepodge of cactus and prairie grasses and little crevices high in the hills filled with multi-colored shrubs and bushes where there were antelope and jackrabbits and mule deer as well as the flocks of grouse and chickens.

What great beauty there was in that harsh land in October where nothing grew more than six feet high. And believe me, I can still feel those little cactus balls, and I can still taste that sweet water at the windmills, when the sand hill winds had you so dry you’d just about drink from a mudhole.

Next year, I am going to be there in those sand hills again, I don’t care what gasoline costs. But this year, I guess I’ll go float an Ozark river and see if I can kill a wild turkey or two, and catch a really big smallmouth. And toward the end of it I will break out my old bow and see if I might be able to bring down a deer on the back of my place, where there are some persimmons and white oak acorns to attract them.

My trouble is, I sit there in that tree stand waiting for a deer and I get to feeling those far-away places, every time I close my eyes. But the Ozarks is a wonderful place in October too, if you get far enough away.

Hunting October turkeys too often consists of calling in young broods and settling for half the turkey you went after. It is a rare occasion when you get a young or old gobbler to actually gobble and come to a call, like my friend Rich Abdoler did this past week.

He said a tom gobbled three or four times and came to him like one might do in the spring. It was a young gobbler from the spring of 2007, with a four- or five-inch beard and short spurs not a half-inch long. Jakes from this past spring have little nubbins for beards, an inch or so long usually, and bumps where spurs might someday be found.