Tasty Turnips

I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to the weather forecast last night. The morning paper predicted conditions that were marginal for hunting, considering the frozen state of the ground. I hadn’t been on a horse since New Year’s Day, and I didn’t want to pass up what might be the best chance for who knows how long, so I decided the weather sounded good enough to me. When I called my brother last night to tell him he was going, he sounded somewhat dubious, but said he’d try to get all his farm chores done early enough to go.

When I got up in the morning, the ground was a little worse than I expected, and obviously going to get worse as it warmed up. “Grease on concrete” is an expression frequently used to describe the kind of footing I was walking on: frozen solid ground with the top layer just beginning to thaw. When I picked up bro, I mentioned the footing, and he agreed that it was bad and said he was actually surprised that I wanted to go. I said it looked like it had gotten a little colder overnight than the predicted 31, and he said “Oh … they changed that .. it was 20.” In fact, he said that when I called him, he thought the call was going to be from his hunt calling committee person telling him today was cancelled.

But there we were, all dressed and ready to go hunting (actually, he was still in coveralls, running late as usual), and it apparently hadn’t been cancelled, so he got dressed and off we went. I’m glad I didn’t hear the forecast that he heard.

The footing was about as bad as we expected, and staff wisely decided to avoid jumping as much as possible. We only took one jump all day, in a place where we had no alternative. At one point, as we were galloping towards the ditch that Arthur dumped me in a couple of years ago, I noticed it was full of water, presumably very cold water. I vowed that we weren’t going to repeat that performance; actually we couldn’t have repeated the entire incident since we were running the other direction. But it was the dumping/dunking that I was mainly concerned about, and we avoided that as Arthur sailed gracefully over the ditch.

We had a fairly nice hunt, considering our pace was interrupted by opening gates instead of jumping. We managed to scare up a couple of coyotes, get a good view, and watch some good houndwork.

And, as frequently happens, our hack back to the trailers was as pleasant as the hunt. After a couple hours of good hunting, as we were continuing to get farther and farther from the trailers, bro and I decided our horses had had enough. As we turned to head in, three more people decided that was a wise choice, and joined us. We had flasks that needed to be emptied, so we had a nice leisurely stroll in, giving the horses a chance to cool out a little, much better than running like hell for another hour or so, and then turning and galloping back to the trailers with hot tired horses.

Along the way, we passed a garden that looked like it had been forgotten for the winter, and I spotted some turnips poking out of the ground . (Were you beginning to wonder about that title?) As bro and I had had no lunch, I pointed out the turnips to him. I was really sort of joking, but he dismounted and pulled a few out of the ground. Two of our companions were also cosmopolitan enough to appreciate the exquisite taste of fresh raw turnips, although we all agreed that a little bit of salt would have made them even better. One of our party even declared that it was the best turnip she’d ever eaten, although I think that might have been partially due to the open-air ambience, and possibly the alcohol. One uncivilized philistine refused to indulge, labelling us a “bunch of turnip-eating rednecks.” I told her that we’ll have the last laugh when we’re all on Survivor 27 – Boone Valley living off the land, and she’s starving as the rest of us are pigging out.

And, as I think I’ve said here before, being out in the open today on horseback with good friends sure beat the hell out of going to work. And there will be no guilt feelings about being a couch potato as I watch West Wing tonight. (Have I ever mentioned I love Wednesdays?)