When our alarm finally did go off, I was already in the bathroom in most of my camo clothes and a toothbrush in my mouth, before my brain actually bothered to start recording. I thought about doing my treatments, but decided that I didn't need them that day. My treatments would be running around outside for the next 14 hours. I just took my morning pills with a few sips of Mountain Dew and a bag of beef jerky, and a half hour after the alarm went off, my guide was at our hotel door. My grandpa opted to go with me that day, while my grandma stayed at the hotel and slept in. My grandpa Lyle is no hunter, but he's getting there.
When I stepped outside, I was immediately hit with a massive gust of frozen wind that pushed me back a step and felt like a punch to the face. It was more or less God's way of saying, "Wake up! You've got a turkey to hunt!", which, to be honest, was a good wake-up call. But a wind like that just made me want to retreat back into the room and curl up under my warm bed covers for eternity. I was already shivering by the time I got in the truck, which was about 30 seconds from the door of my hotel room to the heated backseat. I warmed up pretty well as I wrestled with the wind for a good minute to get my door shut. As soon as I shut the door, Tom glanced over his shoulder at me and said, "Don't worry, it's completely calm at the hunting grounds. The wind is just rushing off the leeside of the mountains here."
I guess he somehow read my thoughts at that moment, which were something along the lines of, "Nope! Screw it! I'm not dealing with this! I'm just gonna go back to bed until 2 PM, and the wilderness can keep its turkey!". I expected rough weather, but I did not expect to be turned into a popsicle and deprived of any breathable air within just a few seconds of going outside. That's just ridiculous!
But, Tom was right. The wind was only that strong in Meeker because the town's in a flat valley several miles away from the steep slopes of the western mountains. Our hunting grounds were about 20 miles into the forested mountains to the east, so it was very sheltered. The wind warnings that were posted that day didn't really apply to us.
I sat in silence in the backseat, sipping the rest of my Mountain Dew and watching as the bright lights of Meeker, Colorado faded away in the rear-view mirrors behind us. Pretty soon, it was just me, Tom, and my grandpa, on a pitch dark stretch of highway in a huge, warm pickup truck. Tom and my grandpa engaged in small-talk, and I let my mind wander once more. I wondered if I would be successful that day, how well I'd weather the weather, what to do if I actually encountered a predator, how my grandpa would do in all of this, if my aim was accurate enough to do the job right, and other stuff like that.
Hunting is more genetic than not, and my grandpa wasn't born with that irresistible urge to hunt. The only game my grandpa ever hunted was a pheasant he ran over when he was my age. He threw the pheasant in the back of his pickup and his mom cooked it for dinner. My grandpa's always been a good fisherman, but hunting is much different than fishing.
He left hunting up to his brothers, which really just fell on my great uncle Delton, because my great uncle Gary was more interested in studying physics and mathematics in a pretentious university so he could work for Boeing, than shooting anything in the wild to eat it. Even today, he's spent most of his life by now living in the hippie city of Seattle, and has a soft heart for wildlife. So I don't expect to see uncle Gary hunting anything anytime soon. My uncle Delton's a different story though. He still goes deer hunting on his 800 acres of pastureland in North Dakota every fall, and is very proud of his hunting adventures.
