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
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• Bathing
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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…
