THE SECOND WEEK (of the deer season) by Ralph Bice   November 28, 1973

There were still, in spite of the very poor hunting the first week, quite a number of hunters around for the second week. The weather was a bit on the cool side but there was snow and not a day where weather made hunters stay in. The results were the same as the first week. No deer. Some days there was a track to be seen but never a chase or any shooting. Perhaps it is as well for if there had been deer for the hounds to chase we would not have heard them above the noise of the trucks and other machinery that the gang was using to gravel that part of the road in McCraney. Seems a bit out of line when it was such a nice September and early October that the Department would move into the woods to do such work in deer season. Only the four camps that are right on the road were bothered. Not by the workers or the trucks but by the noise. As I said, with a scarcity of deer it did not matter too much but I must say someone goofed.

As I said once before I have my fifty-ninth deer license in my pocket. Fifty-four of those years I have hunted in McCraney Township. Too, I conducted a hunt camp since right after World War One, until the deer got so scarce a few years ago it was not worthwhile. And I must say, even with those years when we thought the deer had gone forever, I mean 1927 to 1932, the deer never in our area were so few.

There are a number of registered camps in McCraney. Since only the first fifteen lots are outside Algonquin Park it only has thirty-three miles of an area for hunters. It is also my trapping zone. There are I think eight or ten leased hunting camps and they have a total of between ninety and one hundred hunters. Then since the road was made so good we have load after load of transient hunters, so it is safe to say around 130 hunters hunt in McCraney. This year the total kill was three deer and two of these were shot by one man. The deer were does and one just a yearling.

The same story can be told all along the west boundary of the Park. Too, I did hear that further north they also had poor hunting. But I was in a large group last evening and I believe from what the hunters told me that there was better than average hunting on the west side. I talked to hunters from Novar who had had good success. Then in the Hunting and Fishing column of the Forester Bud Brazier is complaining about the poor hunting in some parts of Muskoka. So it looks like the deer were in spots and I am glad some hunters had some luck. But in our section there were camps of fifteen hunters who never had a shot or saw a fresh track.

One of the deer shot in McCraney would have to be rated almost a record for big does. I saw it when it had been skinned and the head off and it still weighed 135 pounds. Allowing that the head and hide would weigh at least twenty-five pounds that would mean that the animal would weigh if it had been shipped on a train, around 160 pounds. Not many does weigh as much as 130 pounds. In all the years we shipped our deer home by train we only had one that was larger than that and it weighed 133 pounds. Most of the does weighed less than 120 pounds. In fact 115 and 118 was the weight of most of them.

On that deer hunt in Algonquin Park in 1917 there were two large does killed. One by William Marshall of Emsdale, was shipped as weighing 168 pounds. The other I killed and it weighed about ten pounds less. I have never seen a doe as large until this one this fall.

There are some wolves around. One group of five, two pairs and one single. I have not seen any sign of a kill but then I hunted for two weeks and never saw a deer. Bears are still around, also raccoons, so perhaps winter is a bit in the district still. Nearly every hunter I talked to had seen lots of signs of moose. Last fall when there was a season we saw very few moose tracks.

The young loons are still here in Kearney. One in the lakes here, one in Beaver Lake. One day I was told there were a couple of adult loons as well. Yesterday morning there was a blue heron right at my back door and one was seen down in the woods. We have a black bird at camp eating beaver carcasses with the blue jays and the meat birds.

The weather for the rest of fall? Well, I do have an opinion but I will keep it to myself. But this type of weather is very easy on fuel.