As happens every year, we were fooled by three days of sixty plus degrees, forgetting ourselves and forgetting also nature's proclivity for a last gasp cold snap or two before releasing us all in a headlong rush to Spring. Years ago, when we lived in Warrenton and the Casanova Hunt Point to Point races were still held at Spring Hill Farm, we could count on a balmy short sleeved weekend for the races two or three years out of five. The first of the Virginia hunt series, Casanova was, and I suppose still is, held in early February, weeks before even the boldest bloodroot or crocus pokes its greens above the earth. The flowers, smarter than we, somehow understand that we will endure yet a few weeks of bitter cold alternating with deceptively warm spells......flu weather....pneumonia weather.
So now it's cold again, and nature's just reminded us of how fickle she is with ten inches of snow to begin March. Meanwhile, rabbit season has ended with February, and hunters throughout Virginia turn indoors for the mundane tasks of putting away all that is the flotsam of hunting gear in the basement. Slightly befuddled at the notion of no hunting until Spring gobbler season, we awake at Four A.M. on Saturdays subconsciously aware we should be doing something but finding nothing on the calendar to justify our sitting in the kitchen silently drinking coffee from a camo thermos while waiting for sunlight and the rest of the house to stir. It's actually a pretty discomforting time for hunters, this dead time of no hunting...too cold to fish, too early to drink.
At our monthly card game last week, fellow Benellian Cris reminded me that 2009 is an odd year, meaning that we need to clean our shotguns. Never one to argue with Cris' expertise in all things organizational, I took the old blunderbuss apart this weekend past, and, finding the action and receiver full of debris as disparate as September dove hunts' feathers to January's mud caked twigs and leaves from when the gun was jammed into the creek to break my fall on a late season duck hunt, I ambled across the basement for the shop-vac. Confused as to whether to use the discharge or intake port on the machine for initial gun cleaning, I set it aside for a moment and hung some bibs, waders, and camo coats from the joists in the "dead animal room."
My distraction from the task complete, I spent a few hours going through all the stuff accumulated over the past months. Shotgun shells were classified, organized, and put away in the ammo cans by the workbench, duck calls untangled and put up in the big miscellany tub, robo ducks and robo doves were rehung on the wall, fishing reels got new grease, and the reloaders were cleaned in anticipation of spring skeet shoots. The benelli, now a pile of parts, plugs, springs, and stuff, remains on the cleaning table today. It will get its cleaning finished soon, but no rush; won't need it for a while, and it seemed to cycle fine for five months with no cleaning. Now, where was that turkey decoy.........?
