Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I was sitting in a double-wide deer blind with my friends Trapper and Calon in the pre-dawn Saturday morning above Boysen Reservoir. It was the opening day of the special late-season whitetail buck hunt in Area 157.
My son Brian had the blind set up a few days before. We parked our trucks and walked the quarter mile or so with the dim glow of red lights guiding us over the ruts of center pivot tracks in a harvested alfalfa field.
There is something special about the outdoors in the pitch blackness of night. I’ve been in the situation many times. One memorable evening, I took Ranger sports editor James Coco on a raccoon hunt with my friends Joe and Dwayne. As we cut across a field near Five Mile Creek between Riverton and Shoshoni, I could hear large animal sounds in the dark. Sure enough, a herd of inquisitive horses came out of the blackness and stood just a few feet from us. It scared Jamie, a city boy from Boston, almost to death. It was awesome.
Last Saturday morning, we settled into the blind, then waited an hour or so for the dawn to arrive. It was eerily quiet at first. No wind that morning, and a crisp 22 degrees.
As the eastern sky began to glow, the birds began their eternal symphony. Not a melodic one since these weren’t meadowlarks but something much larger.
It started with the cackling of crows, a few, then a dozen or so, with a crescendo worthy of the New York Philharmonic building into hundreds, then thousands of crow voices. The noise was so impressive that I recorded it on my phone.
I was laughing quietly, though even the best whitetail hearing could not have discerned a human voice over that noise.
The crows took flight, followed by the primitive, almost Jurassic song of sandhill cranes. These monsters of flight created a mix of cackles all their own, but with much more resonance and volume than the crows had.
They flew off as well, and it was silent again.
Below the blind, about 150 yards away, was a slough filled with shallow water. As cold as the night had been, the water was frozen an inch or so. We could hear the ice breaking as a herd of something crossed over it in the dark. It was undoubtedly a small group of does and fawns, with perhaps some immature bucks in tow.
Two separate series of crunches a few minutes apart told us they had crossed somewhere nearby.
The final song of the morning wasn’t a song at all, but the muffled, distant roar of shotguns a mile or so away along the lakeshore. Someone had a semi-automatic and was peppering the sky with three rapid shots.
On the first series, a cloud of ducks, barely visible against the pinkish-purple sky, flew by at Mach one. They were headed out to the southwest and a likely morning date with a harvested grain or cornfield.
The triplet notes of the shotgun returned five or six more times. Either there were at least four hunters, or this guy was the worst shot to ever set up over a string of decoys.
The final sounds were the honks, calls, and chirping noises of Canada geese as they took flight. It was light enough to legally shoot when the honkers flew over just before 7:30 a.m.
We spotted many does at almost a mile away, and three small bucks. That was it for the morning. No luck on opening day, but a memorable outing nonetheless.
We usually spot a coyote or two in this area, but none that morning, and not a single plaintive howl of a coyote filled the air. A coyote’s cry is a step back in time to a wilder, simpler existence.
There is magic in the wee hours before dawn.
I hated the early morning hours as a kid. Not many teenagers enjoy early morning. When you’re a kid, it usually means work. You’re stacking hay, irrigating, or, as a late teen and early 20-something, running the chute, raking, pulling the screed, working the jitterbug, or the bull float on a concrete pour. Good money, but not an ideal situation for a kid who would sleep until noon if allowed.
There is a chill that descends just before dawn. It’s most notable in the autumn and spring. It can be bone-chilling in winter and often a false hope of a mild day in the depths of summer heat in July and August.
It was there Saturday morning, a perceptible drop of 10 or 15 degrees just before the sun popped up behind Shoshoni.
If you’ve ever baled hay in the middle of the night, you’ve experienced something similar when the dew comes in.
I’ve tried to catch the exact second the dew drops a dozen or more times between 3 and 4 a.m., and I’ve never managed to capture it.
When you bale, you spend most of your time turning around, watching the baler do its work, with an occasional glance ahead to make sure you’re centered on the windrow and not about to hit a ditch.
Every time I tried to catch the dew, I missed. I’d look ahead to a clear windshield, turn around briefly to check the baler, and when I looked back, the glass was wet with dew. Maybe you have better timing than me.
The final thrill of the early morning isn’t visual or auditory but wafts in the air.
When I was coaching football in Lusk, Shoshoni, and Riverton, the smell of dinner on the stove emanating from the homes near the field was tantalizing. Mix it with the darkening skies of early evening and you had a little sense of heaven on earth. There was nothing in my educational career that I enjoyed more than the sound of pads popping, whistles blowing, a gentle breeze from the northwest, the field lights coming on in an October practice, and the smell of onions or beef cooking on the grill.
The morning is even better. The smell of pancakes, coffee, and bacon cooking in the limited light just before dawn is both alluring and tormenting.
Early morning has a growing appeal as we age. A few people who remember black-and-white television and just three channels can sleep in, but not most of our generation.
Many times it’s the most magical time of the day.