Thursday May 12, 2022 Water, Woods, Expressive Skies.

 

May 11, 2022   A calm and beautiful morning on Mikinaak Creek

      For several days, I had wanted to go across the creek and look for ‘sheds’ (whitetail deer antlers that have fallen off) in the woods. My slow foray into its woods and sunlit places just after snowmelt, is typically one of visual wonder. Heavy winter snow crushed the leaves and grass down atop the undulating landscape. Ponds of snowmelt encourages flowers and herbs to break through the matted gray mass and their florescent green stems and tiny white flowers to awaken the forest floor.

    It's through this maze of blown down and standing trees that deer trails wind through groves of century-old poplar, fifty-five year old white spruce, bur oak, birch, alder, red willow, and all their assorted kin that I keep my eyes open for sheds. Sometimes I find animal bones, bits and pieces, mostly deer that have been killed by wolves or coyotes; anything smaller, rabbits and the like, are consumed whole, and what’s leftover isn’t in a recognizable form unless you see fur or hair ingrained feces, then you can make a wild guess.

"... almost directly across from the house."

"Upstream across the yard ..."

    So I decided to go look on Wednesday; I had to use the jon boat as the Mikinaak is 125-yards wide here now with all the rain we've been getting and rapidly flowing north. I took the four-wheeler and pulled the boat from downstream of the house, upstream across the yard, then pushed off into the current to arrive where I wanted to go almost directly across from our house. 

Heading home in the jon boat.

  Whitetail deer/bucks shed their antlers in late fall or early spring. Bucks grow antlers. Female whitetail deer or ’does,’ do not. Antlers are prized by some hunters as proof of acquisition or hunting skill; or mounted in commemoration of a particular year or individual. The Riverfront Station in Wannaska has an impressive array of antler mounts in their convenience store, including the Palmville 30+ pointer, a high ranking Minnesota buck taken in the 1960s.

    People use the antlers in various ways; maybe as chandelier-like ornamentation or cultural applications as physical adornment. One of my neighbors has a specially trained dog that hunts only for sheds; I don’t doubt him, having read about dogs who hunt for mushrooms too. I have a set of antlers in my office, one of three similar-sized bucks I shot many years ago, and has a 60-inch dried Bull snake skin coiled around its ten tines.

    My wife has found several small to medium-sized sheds on our field walks over the years; me, not so many. However, the complete rack and skull I found six years ago made up for all the years in which she scored high and I did not. I wasn’t looking for sheds that day, but I recognized what I was looking at immediately; how could I not?

Minnesotans call this an eight-point buck for its four-pointed tine antler on either side of its head.

   How it was killed is speculative. Maybe it was shot or mortally wounded in an altercation with some animal or vehicle. Although its nose and lower jaw had been consumed, the antlers were in almost perfect shape with no teeth or gnaw marks on them. The rest of the body was gone; dragged away, or consumed in a matter of days by a host of coyotes, eagles, ravens, crows, and if there was anything at all left, cleaned up by a bear as a snack. Whole dead deer don’t last long around here.