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About Vernonia's voice. (Vernonia, OR) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (June 28, 2011)
8 in other words june28 2011 Bull Stories: Hunting Bulls Back in the Good Old Days By Don Webb One year, around 1960 I was hunting on the upper end of Deep Creek, with Gene Weller, Don Wantland, Bert Fleskis, Homer Fuller, Owen East and Doc Hobart. Homer and I were on the north side of the creek about a quarter mile up from the road. We topped over a sharp little hog back ridge, and found a few cows and two bulls moving towards the point of the ridge. It looked like they would be swinging back on the other side. I dropped the spike and the herd came around the end of the ridge and was now right below us and Homer dropped the five point. Both bulls were about twenty feet apart. We dressed the bulls out and found our partners and had them packed out a little after dark. We picked up several more bulls that year. Two years later Homer and I were hunting the same area and were on that same hog back ridge when I spotted a five point bull feeding about twenty feet be- low me. It was to close to use my scope so I just pointed behind the shoulders and shot; he ran towards the point of the ridge and dropped. I got on the CB and told Owen I just put down a five point, he said that he would come across the canyon and give us a hand. Homer and I went to work dressing the bull out, unloading our guns and leaning them against a tree. We just got started gut- ting when I heard Owen shoot, turned on my radio and Owen said, “I won’t be over to help, I just got a spike.” I said we would finish mine and come over and give him a hand. Well it didn’t work out that way, we just got back to work when I heard a noise, looked up and here comes another five point bull walking right towards us. I thought, “Oh no, we don’t need three bulls to pack out tonight;” the next day was Monday and we have to go to work. But this was the last day of the season, and this bull would make number seven and fill all of our tags. Homer picked up his gun, put in a couple of rounds, hoping the bull would get spooked and take off out of there. Some times I wonder about these bulls, one time you can’t get within a mile of them, and the next time they will run over you. Any way, the bull just kept coming and about twenty feet away, Homer dropped him. (These two bulls were lying within a few feet of where the two bulls we got two years earlier had been.) Owen comes on the radio and asks what’s going on up there? “Well Owen,” I say, “Homer just got his bull.” Now we real- ly had to go to work with two bulls to dress out between Homer and me. When we were done, we went over to help the other guys pack out; when we got there I found my pack board all loaded with a quarter on it. We got all of Owen’s bull out and had to drive about five miles around to get closer to the other two bulls. With the help of a fifth of Black Velvet and flash- lights we got the bulls packed out. We arrived home with all three bulls around midnight. We gave about half of our meat to friends and elderly people that year. Voices From the Crowd: The New Normal By Nick Galaday USAF Meteorologist-ret. My Arkansas brother-in-law said it well when he observed that this spring’s weather (increased frequency and intensity of tornados) is giving us a glimpse of the “new normal”. Yes, Virginia, we are in a period of population induced ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’ or whatever you want to call it, regardless of what the oil & gas and coal interests (and Oklahoma Senators) would have us believe. And alas (thanks to every president since Reagan), it is a little too late to do much about it in the short term. That said, it’s true we really can’t point to any one storm or flood and attribute it directly to “global warming”. But we can say that with climate change come weather changes. We’re seeing an unusually strong, intense, La Niña this year. That is resulting in an unusual number of unusually strong storms where this unusually cold air we here in Oregon are complaining about, meets the warm moist air moving north from the Gulf of Mexico. Next year it might be an unusually strong El Niño, or some other unusual aberration. How soon we forget. Two summers ago over 12,000 people died in Western Europe from heat related causes. There are better locations to dispose of paint than a land ll. Last summer it was Western Russia that suffered from an unusually hot summer. Last winter we had “snowmageddon” along the east coast of the US and even London, and floods that displaced literally millions in Pakistan. So not to confuse “climate” with “weather”, one thing we can know for sure is that we can expect the “unusual” to become normal. So to my Buckeye son-in-law, sure you’ve only seen two deadly tornados in the greater Cleveland area in the past 20 years. That’s the old normal. And to my Razorback brother- in-law, sure tornados didn’t ‘usually’ go into hilly terrain. That’s the old normal. I would not be surprised to see more super-storms here in the Pacific 291 A Street call Kim Recycling your old paint is simple ple and something that everyone e can do. More importantly, y, protecting our environment ent is something we should d all want to do. That’s s why the PaintCare d program was created to make it easy for everyone to recycle and properly dispose of every can of unused paint. Vernonia Hardware and Supply 1026 Bridge St. Vernonia, OR Mon.-Thurs. 9-6, Fri.-Sat. 9-7, Sun. 12-5 Here’s how it works. Purchase paint, pay a small recovery fee h with purchase, then with whatever paint you want to recycle, simply drop it off at the ge. collection site for no extra charge. re You’re done. We’ll take it from there. To learn more, visit us at www.paintcare.org buy right. reuse. recycle. Lovable service at a reasonable price • Bathing • Haircuts • Nail Clipping • Nail Polishing • Specialty Shampoos Northwest much like the “once in a hundred years” Columbus Day Storm of 1962 (it was a class III hurricane for those who missed that one) and crazy winters like ‘95-‘96. Why do we care? We need to be prepared. Simply, we can no longer trust history as a guide for predicting tomorrow’s weather. It’s a new ball game. Expect the unusual: temperatures, rainfall, winds, water levels/floods, droughts, crop failures (food prices), freeze-ups, tides and waves. And they’re not always going to be in some other hemisphere. Even animals (especially insects and reptiles) as well as invasive weeds will be moving north. (We don’t normally see Rattlesnakes here in Eugene do we Ethel?) And if that’s not enough, consider: Solids (like rock) expand when heated. So we can expect more tectonic plate stresses and movement. We’ve already seen the Pacific “Ring of Fire” come unhinged at three corners in the past year with unusually large earthquakes in: Chile, New Zealand, Samoa and Japan. Guess who’s next? Ever hear of the Cascadia Fault? http://www.livescience.com/3775- tsunami-generating-earthquake- possibly-imminent.html http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ earthquakes/eqinthenews/ No, the sky’s not falling… But it is, well, becoming ever more unusual…
