According to the popular saying, March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb. This year, it only got it half right. It roared in like a lion, but at month end, I was wondering what the hell happened to the lamb. Maybe the lion ate it.
Okay, March officially ends today, and with cloudy mid-60 weather, today might have been called lambish. But for all practical purposes (i.e. hunting), March ended Sunday, with rain and cold wind, cancelling the last weekend of this hunt season.
Maybe the lamb just got confused, and showed up too early. A couple of weeks ago, with temperatures breaking the 70 mark, I was complaining about it being too stinking hot. I hope my complaining wasn’t the cause of the sudden return of winter.
Looking back, I realize I haven’t said much about hunting this season. Actually, I haven’t said much about anything. So here’s a quick summary. Crossbo was awesome. We had some wonderful days. Crappy weather and scheduling conflicts interfered more than I would have liked. In other words, a fairly typical season, but the number of hunts was somewhat worse than normal. If my calendar is correct, I only hunted 17 times this season. I think that might be a record low. Looking farther back, I see that I hunted 19 times last season, which wasn’t much better. But in the 2006-2007 season, I managed to hunt 31 times, and in 2005-2006, I hunted 35 times. I like those numbers better. But what’s really frightening is that I’m looking at a steady downward trend for the last four years.
Part of the problem has been weather. January and February are often washouts, but then we usually manage to rebound in March with some very pleasant weather. But the last two Marches haven’t been good. And this year, I didn’t do nearly as well as usual the first half of the season (Oct-Dec). I’m not sure why. I’m just looking at a sparse calendar. When I get the fixture card indicating the dates and locations of each hunt, I enter the information on my calendar to have it handy. Then I delete the ones I miss, so that at the end of the season, I can look back and see how often I hunted. But there’s nothing to remind me why so many of those days are blank now. Note to self – maybe I’ll keep track of the reasons next season so I’ll know whether to blame my job, or the weather, or my farrier. And I hope the numbers start going back up.
But at least the days that I did manage to hunt were enjoyable. We managed to end the season with a couple of fantastic ones. In spite of not getting any regular exercise during all the downtime, Crossbo managed to keep himself fit enough to keep up on some long hard runs. Have I ever mentioned that I love my horse?