Well, with gobbler season just days ahead, the icy temperatures, sleet and freezing rain persist. So what about a  look back and final salute to one of our coldest winter hunting seasons. One can do some uncluttered thinking while huddled inside a deer shoot house bundled in 20 pounds of layered clothes, gloves, boots and face mask under a pullover hood, a virtual fusillade against record cold. One day my thoughts were uninterrupted by deer, that were obviously wandering in places other than the vicinity of my stand.

    While you are freezing, a trick you can play on your mind, and your body too if your imagination is flexible enough, is to think of times when you were in weather that was colder. So as I sat watching a landscape void of deer I returned to some of those places in my mind.

    I must hasten to note that I rarely get cold enough to really suffer, as many claim they do. I much prefer cold to hot and there is a resulting psychology I suppose that protects me somewhat from the pain of cold. I can get very cold and it still doesn’t hurt. When I do hurt from cold, I know I am in a dangerous situation.

    As I beheld the frozen landscape from my perch, I recalled the days of the 1950s when every deer hunting day in January seemed to begin with a 12 to 18 degree morning. Clothed in mostly moisture holding cotton, non-breathable plastic orange hat and those plain black rubber boots, I would venture forth from the camp house fueled with enough greasy eggs, bacon and grits to get me far into the forest where I would wait for hours for the one or two bucks per square mile to somehow find me.

    If today’s scientists were to create a boot that would transfer external cold the quickest to you feet, they need only to resurrect the old floppy black rubber slip-on boots that we bought from the I.M. Dumont store or Sears or Nunnery Hardware. These boots were the staple of us on schoolboy budgets who needed to at least keep our feet dry as we cracked the skim ice and tracked up the white frosted field grass. The cold back then hurt.

    In the stand I thought of my very first elk hunt when the elk country was not only covered in snow but was neck deep in it. Luckily, repeated snowfalls pack the previous ones and the hundred inches or so I trudged around in let my boots sink only to my knees. Each day the temperature was 20 degrees below zero measured in town where I slept, but up on the mountain where I climbed each day it was colder.

    Happily, I can report that that cold did not hurt; noticeable yes, but without inflicting significant pain. The reason is that the Swedish fishnet underwear had come along as well as goose down jackets complete with hoods. Maine style pac boots with felt liners were also coming into their own. The dry air made a huge difference. And walking or snowshoeing all day helped generate body heat and I faired quite well in a freezing environment.

    Some of my very coldest times have been on February and March days in an open jon boat on the big Texas reservoirs. With a six horse Johnson cranked up to full throttle and a half mile to go to the downed timber where the big sow bass were moving in to bed, my jacket for the day was never enough to keep out the icy wind. If a wave caused a spray of water to slap my face, a sledge hammer could not have hurt more.

    Crossing my mind on the stand was a typical quick thunderstorm that came one afternoon of an October elk hunt. The relatively warm days before winter hits the Rockies can catch you unprepared, and what appears in the distance to be a simple shower that a Southerner would deem harmless can envelop you in swirling rain, sleet and/or snow propelled by biting wind.

    I have been in many of these, but on this day I wore light clothing and took along only my camouflaged umbrella which serves me well in light rain while waiting for a southern gobbler or getting to and from deer stands. Before you accuse me of violating my rule of total preparedness in the mountains, this hunt was actually in a broad, flat valley at only 8,000 feet elevation and I was sitting on a fence line that led back to camp. I could see the camp from my stand.

    The little rainstorm proved to be a David in his face off with Goliath. By the time I made it to the nearest juniper tree, the umbrella had turned wrong side out and I couldn’t tell the speeding raindrops from sleet. Each freezing droplet stung like a BB and the downpour tore through the juniper needles and every opening in my jacket from neck to tail.

    Remember;  when you are at just 8,000 feet, the rain came from 14,000 feet or more where the word cold originated. As usual, the shower was brief but left me feeling like newly ground and frozen hamburger. There is cold that is uncomfortable and cold that hurts. This one hurt.