My cousin Gene is almost done building his garage in Hayden, Idaho, just next to Coeur d’Alene. Needless to say, it’s huge. Gargantuan – damn near the size of his house! Anyway, we put some boards up on his roof the other day to prepare it for the final roofing this week.
Of course, we had more fun with my camera than his nail-gun. Here’s Gene on the roof (I love the sun):
Now that I only have a few days left until my return to Coeur d’Alene, I’m chomping at the bit just waiting to go hunting. If anything, I look forward to being outdoors more than anything else.
Truth be told, I have no problem just camping, target shooting and drinking a few beers each night, while my cousin Gene is embodied by the notion of killing. Indeed, it’s quite exhilarating stalking a deer or herd of elk, but the hunt is what drives me more than the actual kill.
Needless to say, it’s an empowering adventure either way. And since my move to Oregon, I’ll only get a few days this year as opposed to the countless weekends when residing in Coeur d’Alene.
Thus I plan to seriously take advantage.
That being said, in keeping with our archived hunting article history of years’ past, I now present my final sports column from North Idaho College’s paper, The Sentinel.
BOING: DEATH TO BAMBI
By Jake Donahue | The Sentinel
Originally published Nov. 20, 2006AH, THE FRAGRANCE of death is permeating throughout North Idaho. It seems the further you get from downtown Coeur d’Alene it feels more and more like the bad side of Detroit.
Gunshots, killings – and that’s just in the mountains past Lake Fernan.
It is deer season, baby, and I’m getting ready to assassinate the kingpin of the forest. Bambi, once my childhood friend, is about to meet his maker (and I’m not talking about Walt Disney).
Oh how I yearn to bathe in the blood of the dead.
Sure, I have shot a grouse, caught a salmon and dropkicked a squirrel, but to bring down a beast as big as myself makes me shudder just imagining the sheer possibilities – the gallons of blood, yards of entrails and unholy smells are worth the 22-year wait.
I got my first deer tag this year, and I’ll be dammed if I chalk up a goose egg.
ON SATURDAY MORNING, I made a decision: I called in sick to work because I was going to hunt. I was unwavering in my mission (though I did watch the first half of the Michigan-Ohio State game), and prepared for the hunt of a lifetime.
Rifle? Check.
Camo jacket and Carhartts? Check.
Lawn chair, pillow to sit on, peanut butter sandwich and deer call? Check, check, check and check.
Indeed, it was to be a glorious day.
I nestled into my lawn chair under my Grandparent’s deck, tossed a few marshmallows into my hot cocoa and leaned back as gunshots echoed throughout the mountain like Independence Day. I’m the first one to admit that some people don’t call what I do “hunting.”
These are the same people who don’t shoot grouse from moving vehicles or hunt by the light of the moon. They also follow the “laws.”
But my hunting guide (my cousin Geno) told me long ago that we write the rule book as we go. So what if we sat in lawn chairs next to the dryer vent at our grandparent’s house? At least we keep warm.
WE SET UP a decoy up on the hill, complete with a two-way radio next to it. We sprayed deer piss liberally across the meadow. Then we sat under the deck.
Most people wait hours, sometimes days before seeing a deer on their hunt. We waited 15 minutes. But as a massive buck approached and we grabbed our guns, an ear-splitting screech pierced the still air – it was the sliding door to the deck.
We like to consider ourselves great hunters – real men of the wild – yet we often times forget we are sitting next to a house; it was time for Grandpa’s cigarette.
Thus, the deer ran for its life.
So between the door sliding open and close every so often, the occasional sound of cars driving by and the ever-present noise from the washer and dryer on the other side of the wall, we simply waited.
This time, unlike numerous other hunting trips under the deck, we had a radio next to the decoy. That enabled us to use a deer call from the house, through the radio, and it sounded like it came from the decoy!
Illegal? Most likely. But that’s the only way to get the big deer.
After watching one tiny buck cower away from our daunting decoy (the rut was approaching, and thus bucks will attack each other for first dibs at the most beautiful babes of the backcountry), we waited a little while longer.
Being the impatient imbecile I’ve been dubbed, I decided to no longer wait. I’m not missing out on a deer this year, so as it got darker I concluded the next deer to walk out was going …
Boom-shakka-lakka!
I dropped that monster of a doe so quick I heard the valley shake when she hit the mud. So what if it didn’t have antlers, it was a big deer and it was now dead – by my own hands
Nevertheless, my cousin was the one who gutted, skinned and hung the bloody carcass from the rafters in our garage. Long story short, I basically just pulled the trigger and then watched Geno slaughter the slain beast.
But already, I cannot wait until next season. I have the urge to ungulate anther, a passion to kill again. There is a dead deer in my grandpa’s garage right now waiting to be cut up, but I’m already contemplating my next kill.
I may not have butchered Bambi, but I murdered his mom.
The infamous “Geno,” my cousin.
In keeping with the tradition of the season – hunting season, that is – I’ve decided to pull a few “Boing” articles out of the dusty archives.
So, here is part two of the series (part 1 should be just below this post). Coming up next will be the third sports column I wrote about the adventures of Geno and myself, and don’t be surprised if I throw up a “Best of” post featuring my favorite hunting photos from years past.
Enjoy!
BOING: THEY CALL ME TNT, DYN-O-MITE
By Jake Donahue | The Sentinel
Originally published Nov. 21, 2005Breaking up the monotony of my newly-dawned 21-year-old life may seem challenging until you realize that my life is far from that.
Amidst the madness that makes up me, lies the most important aspect that I feel I truly represent: Surrounding myself with those who match my maturity level – thus explaining why I love coaching third grade basketball for Coeur d’Alene Park and Rec.
Indeed, this age group is solely playing for the sheer enjoyment of the game. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself after respective losing scores of 17-3, 16-4 and 20-0. And true, while all is fun, I must gloat about our sole W on the score sheet: a 4-2 romping we barely held on to in the final minutes.
For, to say the least, that’s all I can hold on to. Until my cousin Geno calls me up, of course.
That’s when I set aside my copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Coaching Youth Basketball,” which I really do own, and absorb all that Geno has to offer.
(By the way, this is the same dude who got me hooked on North Idaho’s claim to fame: That redneck’s national pastime of the ever-amazing sport known as road hunting. He taught me that few things rival the feeling an exploding grouse leaves you with. Especially when you shot with one hand from a moving truck, while not spilling your beer in the other.)
But today, he just got done watching Rob Zombie’s movie “Devil’s Rejecets,” and enlightened me with some of his self-proclaimed wisdom he boisterously dubs ‘Geneglish.’
“Even though Rob Zombie’s wife kills people in the movie, I think I’d still date her,” he said. “She’s so freaking hot; I guess I’m just a sucker for danger!”
And this is the guy I’m supposed to hunt big game with the next morning. The same guy who asked me to hunt with him that night (illegal) from his truck (illegal) on private property (also illegal).
“Didn’t you know that a full moon is God’s natural spot light?”
May God have mercy on my virgin-hunting soul.
True, I once vowed to kill Bambi, and while I didn’t share Geno’s gut-wrenching, mind-bending, twisted enthusiasm, I was going to get a deer in my first season, that much is certain.
So before leaving the house last Wednesday morning, I grabbed my boots, Carhartts, hand warmers and camo jacket – no safe hunter’s orange for us, apparently that stuff’s for “pansies.”
“Those deer are just frolicking down there and eating their morning grub,” Geno said. “Little do they know, there is gonna be bloodshed in theat peaceful little village.”
Once in the truck, I felt it necessary to call a friend back in Oregon about my upcoming experience, and share with him my love for deer hunting (lackluster at this point, to say the least). After cussing me out for waking him up at 5 a.m., I was belittled once more: “You’re hunting!?” he blasted. “Since when do they sell Carhartts at the Gap, you preppy little mountain-man wannabe.”
Screw him, I had deer on the mind, and deer piss on my clothes. Welcome to Idaho, where the men are men and the deer are scared, where buttering yourself up in deer urine and huddling around other men in the woods is considered bonding – not bondage!
However, one major problem surfaced during our first legal outing: We both re-learned how big of a klutz I am.
“From now on, Jake, I’m going to call you TNT,” he said. “Because when you walk through the woods it sounds like a bomb is going off.”
That meant only thing, we were back in the old Toyota and headed further into the wilderness, where I couldn’t scare the deer away and Gene could stun them with the brights. Why use deer decoys when the front headlights of a pickup will stop any deer in its tracks.
Illegal? I thought so, too.
“If we go down,” he says, “we go down hard.”
Long story short, day one was filled everything but deer. So the next morning after we camped atop a local mountain, we barreled through the snow-encrusted hills with a ferocious fervor – the first legitimately legal outing we had experienced together.
We used a deer decoy, with no luck. We tried deer urine all over the place, with nothing to show but a God-awful-smelling tent, and then we even tried deer calls.
You guessed it, nadda.
“I think I use the deer call too much,” Geno said. “Just like with women, I call so much I scare them away."
Two more days went the exact same. Sure, I heard deer in the brush, but I’m sure they were bouncing around back there making fun of me, saying to other deer how funny I smelled.
I know I wouldn’t go anywhere near a deer covered in human piss.
The experience as a whole turned bittersweet. While hunting, legally, leaves a morally clean slate, I think I may stick to the warmer climates offered by an elementary school gym. Indeed, there is no greater joy than coaching youth sports, but I’ve still got a vengeance for venison.
Bambi is still numero uno on my list, but we’ll see if I tag him.
As we left the camp, I came to the conclusion I may never hunt with Geno again, for the sole reason he mentioned this demented musing after, noticeably, much thought: “I wonder how bad a deer’s butt stinks when it’s in heat.”
Mother of God.
I’ve got good news and bad news.
The Good News: I’m going back to Coeur d’Alene at the end of this month to fly from Spokane to Austin, Tex., for a design award (thanks to NIC for paying!).
The Bad News: Well, it’s mostly bad for the deer and moose running around Fernan Mountain. My cousin Gene and our buddy Todd will be spending the 3 days following my return from Texas hunting. It will be glorious. Todd has a moose tag, Gene and I both deer, while tree stands are setup already. A few days camping on the top of a mountain in early November, with temperatures (hopefully) in the single digits and snow hammering down, might just possibly be as close to perfection as my young life will experience.
Boom shakka lakka!
Anyway, in the spirit of the season (and because I’m literally counting down the hours until my trip!), I’ve decided to share my four favorite hunting articles – written by me, of course – that I penned whilst editing Sports for The Sentinel.
So, here is the first column I wrote about hunting, while the next three will come in the next few days. From the bowels of Boing (my old sports column), I give you:
BOING: BIRDS, BEER CANS AND BULLETS
By Jake Donahue | The Sentinel
Originally published Sept. 19, 2005I recently experienced the most North Idahoan tradition that I am sure exists: road hunting. Because of this truly redneck ritual, I have ultimately realized how skewed my interpretation of this sport was – nay, how skewed was my perspective of all sports.
Indeed, I may have once deemed any “sport” boasting the use of animals or wheels (such as rodeo and big game hunting, or NASCAR and BMX racing) was as far away from the wide world of sports as one could reach. If baseball was the sun in our solar system of sports, NASCAR was a black hole in a different universe.
I even proclaimed they were simply reasons for rednecks to congregate and drink themselves into oblivion – much like St. Patrick’s Day for us Irish folk, or college for guys like me.
However, after a close friend of mine took me on this life-altering journey through the woods, with a rifle in one hand, a Natty Light in the other, and his knees on the steering wheel, I now understand why rednecks road hunt: It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been around hunters my whole life: my dad, my grandpa, my uncles and my cousins. Oh sure, I went camping and fishing and I’ll be the last one to turn down a venison dinner; I even work for Black Sheep Sporting Goods – the leading vendor of all things fishing- and hunting-related in the Northwest.
But let’s face it: I’m a city kid. While my cousin wears camouflage, I shop at the Gap; when they’re up four in the morning before daylight, I wake up in time for the 1 p.m. Seahawks’ game. While I’m at parties chasing tail, they’re in the woods chasing whitetail.
Needless to say, I’m the last one you’d expect with a gun. Yet all it took was $30.50 at the mighty ‘Sheep, and now I’m an official card-carrying resident hunter/fisher.
And that’s all it took for my cousin to throw me in the pickup with a rifle and 12-pack. The walking, talking, human quote-machine of a cousin of mine has been like my big brother; so if he says it’s legal, I simply assume it is.
“Laws? What laws?” he once said. “I write the rule book as I go.”
We embarked on our journey slowly but steady, a stop for gas, a stop for beer, and a quick pep talk before heading up the mountain to slay the bird locals know as “grouse.”
“In town I may be the biggest loser around,” he said, staring off into the wilderness. After a momentary pause, as a devilish grin slowly spread across his face and the twinkle all but vanished from his eyes, he added: “But up here on the mountain, out in the woods, I am God – I decide what lives and what dies.”
He reared his head back, bellowed a satanic chuckle and peeled up the swerving dirt roads.
I have no other worldly experiences to justly compare the following two hours of my life. In short, I flat-out don’t remember the most of it, simply quick images of the sky clouding up for a rainstorm (“If this weather was a pizza,” said Gene, “than it would be extra-saucey!”).
I remember answering a phone call from my girlfriend – to his complete and utter disgust, as women apparently do not belong in the world of hunting, or even on the minds of men in the “hunting zone.” Yet as quickly as he was to denounce my answering of the call, he yielded one more bit of advice from his ever-growing repertoire: “Tell her that she has the body of a supermodel and the brains of an astronaut.”
At one point, I’m pretty sure we were knee-deep in elk feces searching for a fallen grouse carcass.
All in all, we didn’t end up with a single bird in the bag. In fact, the journey in which I speak of lasted only 25 minutes – that’s all it took before we reached the real hunter’s plateau: a monstrous grass field where grouse are aplenty, the deer and the elk roam, and beer cans and shotgun shells can be seen for miles.
It was indeed a true redneck’s paradise; worse yet, I found myself awe-struck when I quietly muttered one solitary word in this land of animal solitude: “Glorious.”
Apparently road-hunting is illegal, some rule about being 200 feet or so from any roadway. Yet what I considered road-hunting was actually legal: riding to the prairie with guns behind the seat.
Consequently, I have now budged from a position that many felt was impossible: I will be the first to admit hunting is a sport. The adrenaline rush you get when ending the life of another living creature is simply unparalleled.
I’ve never scored the winning touchdown in a football game, but I have played co-ed recreational softball. I’ve coached two Little League teams and I’ve sunk a hole-in-one on the third hole of Seattle’s most notorious mini-golf course.
Yet all those pale in comparison to shooting a grouse. Worst yet, I bought a deer tag this year, too. If they’re at all like shooting a grouse, than may God have mercy on the whitetails of North Idaho.
Bambi, prepare to die.
Yesterday my cousin Gene told me about a 70-foot tall ranger station way out past Fernan Mountain. So, he took off from work early and we spent two hours driving up to the rickety old station, which hasn’t been used since the ‘70s. They’re going to tear the thing down in the near future because of the liability it poses (it’s old as hell and ready to break – but I still felt safe … for the most part).
Anyway, we got some cool photos of it, not to mention a moose sighting right off the bat. We chased it in the truck for about a quarter mile trying to get alongside it for a cool photo, but a truck came barreling in the opposite direction and spooked it up the hill.
And lastly, but definitely not least, this little Idaho-shaped rock:
I’ve had a bunch of people recently ask me who all the groomsmen and bridesmaids are in my wedding with Holly. While we have yet to pick a date, location, time or pretty much any other detail, we have picked all of the wedding party.
So, without further adieu, here they are (all photos thanks to Facebook, since my external hard drive full of good photos is out of commission at the moment).
There’s 7 groomsman, 7 bridesmaids, 2 ring-bearers and a flower girl.
HOMETOWN: Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
WHY: December 2008 pretty much sums it all up: Absinthe, raw oysters, gorilla mask and a wheelchair.
On Sunday afternoon, Gene and I decided to head up the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. It was awesome to begin, fishing was OK (we only caught four but skunked on Crawdads) but then the storm set in. We got to our spot around 4:30 and the lightning, thunder and pouring rain hit around 11.
Even though, we took some cool photos, as the length of river we camped on was gorgeous and completely hidden from everyone else – as far as we were up the river, only a few 4-wheelers broke the noise.
That’s me in the bottom right
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