TOUGH DRAGS

TOUGH DRAGS
By: Ray Hansen

As I write this piece I’m preparing to head out into the woods again tomorrow with a muzzleloader. By the time you read this I will have hiked out a mile or so in the frigid pre-dawn weather, picked a good spot, and have been sitting for a number of hours waiting for an eight-point buck to slip by in range (that is what I have tags for). And I’m going to love every second of it! The following paragraphs detail some challenges I’ve in the past getting deer out of the woods after the shot.

“I’m getting too old for this” I told myself as I pulled the big doe along using a rope attached to a shoulder harness. Dry, snowless ground made this part of the hunt a real challenge. Four or five steep ridges and a lot of flat ground stood between me and where I parked. On the steepest parts I could only manage ten feet at a time before resting. Even downhill sections were tough after a while. Several hours passed before I was able to load the large animal into my pickup. This deer was taken on a hunt in Illinois where walking in and dragging your deer out was the only option.

Of course getting the animal out of the woods is part of the hunt. I might gripe about it a little, but secretly, I’m glad I can still do it.

Sometimes the chore is made simpler with machinery. I keep an old 1981 Honda All-Terrain Vehicle in a friend’s shed here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I hunt each year. What a great piece of engineering! It always starts (with a pull rope), gets me out into the woods quickly, and does a workhorse of a job when pulling deer out of the swamp.

My friend Duane Deno of Gladstone, Michigan also keeps an old (1978) Honda handy when we hunt. It is a very small – 90 c.c. – machine, but therein lies its utility. It can get in and out of spots that larger ATV’s can’t access.

One year I arrowed a deer on a bow-hunt in which we had to cross a one-hundred yard stretch of flooded swamp using hip boots. The footing was treacherous, and we dreaded trying to drag the deer across that beaver-flooded, marshy pot-hole.

Using some “Yooper” ingenuity however, Duane and I devised a solution. He rode his machine back into the woods to the last of the high ground before it dropped into the swamp. Using several odd lengths of rope we scrounged, we managed to create a piece long enough to span the worst part of the waterway. I am not exaggerating when I say the rope we pieced together was all of three hundred feet long. Tying one end to the Honda and the other end to the deer, he took off, skidding the doe across the water like it was water-skiing. We’ve had many good laughs about that incident over the years, and it will always be a good story to tell around the campfire.
Copyright Ray Hansen, 2008