re: Weirdest thing you've seen in the woods that nobody believes you about.

as many times as i drive up there....every once in a while i will sit and watch fromthe overlook and still havent seen them.

im impatient though.

A bobcat took down a buck?

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Surely the deer saw and smelled him??

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I have gotten pictures through the years of several buck feeding with a coyote in the pic. Always big bucks. I don’t know if it bothers old deer.

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I'm thinking a projectile did.

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Yes I wasn’t very clear. I was actually filming the bobcat stalk and noticed in the background the buck standing there watching it. When the rabbit took off I put down the phone and harvested the buck.

My current lab is a big bodied English Lab and probably the last duck dog I ever own. She is too old to hunt now but when she was in her prime she was a pheasant busting machine....she has to have some chessie in her, despite her pedigree not mentioning it, because she is hard headed as hell and has some slight curl in her coat at her arse end. Not much but between being hard headed to the point that a good 3 foot 2X4 was part of her training kit and that curl makes me think there was an armorous chessie somewhere in the woodpile. She comes from pointing lab stock and does good on bobs (pen raised) and pheasants and huns and grouse but she was VERY good at flushing pheasant out of THICK cover.

As I said she is very hard headed....and I think bling or nearly so because she can not stand a fricking road runner. HATES the damn things. I know she has never seen a pheasant run, or at least not over any distance, because the only places I ever hunted pheasants with her big lumbering arse was in cover where even pheasants would struggle to pick up a head of steam. Road runners PROBABLY smell sort of like a pheasant, and they could, if you squint you eyes just right and it was doing what road runners do most of their lives, which is running like a bat out of hell, I guess they could look like a pheasant if you suffered from poor eyesight anyhow. I don't know if she though they were pheasants or not but I know without any doubt that she hates the damned things and can't tolerate knowing they share what she obviously feels is her planet. She has always been hard headed but she was always very disciplined in the field...thanks to that 2X4 when who was young.....but she couldn't be strapped to the ground with a tugging rope if she caught sight of a road runner zipping along minding its own business. For a big girl she always had a second gear when birds were about....but she would put on the afterburners chasing road runners...and there wasn't a thing in the world other than the heat and her fat arse that would slow her down once she got started. Roadrunners being what they are they are thick as fleas and running everywhere where they exist...I am convinced the thought there was always one when there were a dozen and she never got close to catching a single one....to the point very few road runners ever knew they were being chased, they were just doing road runner shite. I have no idea what her vendetta was against road runners but after giving chase to about 20 of the damned things, thinking it was the same one, she would always come limping back, worn out, begging for water and talking about how she had finally caught the thing but I was too far away to see...lying arse dog. When I would ask why she didn't bring it back with her, since retriever is right in her name, she would change the subject to lunch.

She never acted this way with cottontop quail. I think she thought they were doves and if we didn't get them right now we would directly. She hated damned road runners though. I won't mention what she did to a Rio Grande Turkey once because i ain't sure the statute of limitations on that would be but she did admit that she mistook it for the biggest damned quail she had ever seen and knowing how I shot I would almost certainly let the damned thing get away and she'd have hated that for us.....

Saw a deer standing completely still, staring directly at me for what felt like five minutes.

The craziest thing I’ve ever seen that I still can’t identify happened in my backyard when I was about 12 or so years old.
It was flooding like crazy. The whole backyard was about a foot to a foot and a half deep. Our house was near Airline Highway, and there was a storm drain in the backyard that I assume connected to the bigger one under the highway. The water was at least two feet deep at the drain.

I was catching crawfish in the backyard with some fishing string and roast beef, having a blast. I walked by the drain—the water was up around my waist—and what I thought was a giant snake was stretched out, taking a breather from the grate. I was mortified. Its head was way bigger than my fist, and the rest of its body was still behind the grate.

I ran away and it went back under. After a couple minutes I crept back over, and it came back up to breathe. It was dark purple with blotchy gray. It saw me again and vanished for good. I never saw it again, and no one ever believed me.

It definitely wasn’t a snake. It looked more like an eel or a giant salamander or something. I have no idea what it was, but the thing was absolutely massive—and it was freaking purple. Still the craziest thing I’ve ever seen that I can’t identify.


Second crazy thing that still kinda freaks me out about the ocean.

I was out fishing with my uncle in the Pacific off Humboldt, smashing bluefin tuna in around 2,300 feet of water. We were landing some big ones. That year the El Niño was strong, and we even got two mahi—the first grand slam of anyone I’d met down there in as long as I’d been fishing. It was unheard of then, and still is to this day, though I’m sure it’s happened somewhere.

Anyway, I get hit really hard easily the biggest tuna of the day. I’m into the fight maybe 10 minutes, and then the tuna gets absolutely smashed. I almost go overboard. The drag was definitely too tight. My uncle yells at me to be careful while helping me back on my feet. Then the line goes slack. I reel it up, and there’s obviously still something on the line, but no fight.
I reel it in and it’s a tuna head that easily weighed 50+ pounds—massive, broader than my shoulders. I assumed I’d gotten sharked, but while my uncle and I are checking out the head there are no teeth marks, no grooves, nothing. It looked like someone had taken a cleaver about two feet long and chopped the thing clean right below the gill plate.
No fricking idea what is that big. A great white would’ve left teeth marks—I’ve had that happen to me before. The only thing I can think of is a giant squid or something like that with a beak.
Scared the shite out of me the rest of the trip. I didn’t let my uncle know, but he was weirded out too. After the tuna bite dried up we left the deep water, went and got our lim of halibut, then gunned for the grand slam and landed a limit of salmon outside the pass. Fantastic fishing trip overall.


Ever since then I’ve been way more open-minded about anything being possible in the ocean. I mean, you never really know what’s out there.

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Orbs everywhere. I saw a 12 or so dancing in a tree top, changing colors and bouncing around. They looked like fairies playing in tree top almost, it was really cool and I just watched them for 4 or 5 minutes before I realized they in the tree next to my truck. Then it was fricking terrifying.

I didn’t know they were harmless back then. I have had them escort me out of woods 6 feet of the ground, sit over the food plot, race into the sky etc

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My great grandmother claimed this phenomenon would visit her driveway in the country woods occasionally, she called them sprites. She would regularly tell us when they visited. Never witnessed it myself but the accounts i've heard all describe the same thing. Same woman asked my mother to bring her to church for the first time in 50 years, informed my mother to tell an old friend she made it to church afterward, and died the same night. I heard her tell my mother to pass it along, she absolutely knew she would die that night.

Harmless? That’s a big Nope from me hoss.
Some ancient Indian mojo or something.