HUNTING MORNING DOVES OR, NAPALM SMELLS GOOD IN THE MORNING

By Mike Colin
The state of Michigan is a very pro-hunter state. You can hunt almost any creature imaginable and shoot them with any weapon you can find provided that you have the proper permits. Recently I decided to go hunting for morning doves. Now morning doves like to sit along gravel roads in small groups. Morning doves are a dangerous bird that attacks passersby’s with the voracity of a Big Foot monster. The only problem is that morning doves are not very big and are very hard to hit with even a shot gun shot. Of course another problem with morning doves is that because they are not so big you really need to get a mess of them at once if you are going to have them as a main course at dinner time.

I was able to solve my morning dove problems by visiting my grandpa. You see he is a collector of Viet Nam War era memorabilia. He has everything in his collection from machine guns to barrels of Agent Orange. Of course he can have all this neat stuff because he has the proper permits. My grandpa gets some of his stuff from other collectors but most of it he accumulated when he was in Viet Nam during the war. I guess he was one of those people you’d call a picker. You see he’d go around to military ammo dumps and pick out stuff he thought you could use back in the Michigan for hunting and fishing. He then sent the stuff back home through the mail. It cost my grandpa everything he earned just for postage. Just the cannon and rocket launcher he sent back was three months army pay.

Now when I went to see old grandpa he suggested that I use some land mines to hunt doves. He said the land mines he had were really sensitive. I told him that the only problem was that I intended to go hunting on state land and I wouldn’t want some hiker to get blown away. You see I was always taught to handle weapons in a responsible manner. My grandpa agreed and said that land mines might be overkill so he suggested that I use a mortar launcher. A mortar would be the perfect weapon to use against morning doves. You see not only would a mortar round eliminate several of the enemy doves at a time the doves would also be cleaned, feathers burned off and, cooked instantly. I’d have a meal ready to eat right there in the woods. My grandpa added that because doves had a reputation of being vicious if wounded the mortar would eliminate my trying to handle the nasty the little beasts up close.

Once I gout out in the woods on some state land I found a small opening in an old cedar swamp. There was an old partially graveled lumber trail road running through the center of the opening. I knew that was the perfect spot to hunt for morning doves. The next morning before daybreak I set up my mortar about 100 feet from the little opening. It wasn’t long before I spotted about a half dozen doves just sitting quietly out in the open. I dropped in my mortar round and fired. The only problem was I wasn’t use to setting the mortar cannons proper angle of projection so I overshot the morning doves by about 1000 feet.

Overshooting the doves would not have been much of a problem except that in Northern Michigan a lot of people don’t like to pay the liquor tax on whiskey so they set up their own still in the backwoods. Well, my mortar round happened to hit a still and suddenly there was a huge mushroom cloud rising up into the sky. I would have stood there looking at the mushroom cloud and all the trees that were vaporized but the shock wave knocked me to the ground and I laid there in a coma for three days.

After I got out of the hospital burn unit I decided I was not going to hunt morning doves anymore. Doves were just too difficult an animal to hunt especially when you consider the meager amount of meat on each morning dove. My soul is at peace with the nasty little dove. Instead, I can hardly wait to get some of my grandpa’s napalm to use when I go deer hunting next fall.

NEW ICE ROAD RULE HARMS OUTDOORS PEOPLE

By Tim Colin
Editor
I and everyone I know are extremely disturbed. It seems that the State of Michigan is going to be ticketing people who drive their vehicles out onto lakes and rivers when there is little if any ice to hold up said vehicles. It seems the government believes it is the driver’s responsibility to check to make sure that there is adequate ice on a lake to hold up your personal vehicle. What kind of nonsense is this? How in the world do you know if your vehicle can be supported by the ice unless you first test the ice by driving your vehicle out on it? Of course once you’re out on the lake you is either going to find that there is ice to support your vehicle or there is not; in which case you will go through the ice and have to pay a big fine.

In addition to the fact that sometimes it is hard to tell if the ice is thick enough to hold your vehicle sometimes, it is hard to know if there is any ice at all to drive on. For instance, just last summer my dad was driving along a lake late one night when he decided to try to take a detour home across the ice. Unfortunately it was really foggy that evening and my dad couldn't see that there was no ice to drive on so he ended up 40 ft. out from shore and 15 ft. under water. Luckily my dad equipped his truck with an automotive snorkel device or ASD.

An ASD is just a long tube tied to a balloon that you release from your car hood whenever you find yourself underwater. Most people I know use their ASD at least once a year. The state legislature is talking about making an ASD mandatory on every car sold in Michigan because we have so many lakes.

The automotive snorkel device certainly kept my dad from having to chance swimming to the surface and getting all wet and maybe catching a cold. It allowed the old guy to remain calm and collect his thoughts since the snorkel device would allow him to stay under water for several days even weeks if he could find a way to catch a couple of fish. Meanwhile there was an emergency kit that he used to help pass the time. In there emergency kit he had some dried peanut butter sandwiches and a package of prunes to stay regular.

My dad was actually rescued the next day after a fisherman trolling for crappies hooked upon my dad’s truck. Unfortunately for my dad he had found in the emergency kit a bottle of tequila and when the deputy divers smelled his breath it was away to the jail for dear old dad. He also lost his license and had to pay some heavy fines. Right about now he is just about done with his community service. It seems it didn’t matter that my dad had not been drinking before he went into the drink. The fact that he drank while in his truck while under the drink was all the judge needed to know.

Well, it kind of serves him right. He never treated me that good when I was a kid. He always paid a lot more attention to what my brothers were doing. Just because I wasn’t able to get into the marching band like my brothers, my father always ignored me. Of course I had a hard job trying out for the marching band because I couldn’t play an instrument. Playing the drums gave me a headache and playing any kind of wind instrument gave me nose bleeds. No, I just could never be a band jock like my old man wanted me to be and I’ve always felt he thought less of me for it.