Chicken Fishing

By Dennis Doyon

There are many strange and unexpected events that happen during a day of hunting and three of us experienced one that I think will be hard to top.

It was the middle of December; the last day of Maine’s muzzleloader hunting season. At five a.m. the temperature was hovering around ten degrees and the sun was yet to come up. My son Joel and I headed to camp and fired up the wood cook stove in anticipation of a breakfast of bacon and eggs as soon as our last hunting party member arrived. Milt Inman is not only the owner of Albany camp and elder statesman but also someone who was born ready to hunt. He arrived about six a.m. with the breakfast fixings and a plan or two for hunting in mind. Joel and I had stoked the fire in the wood cook stove and brought the temperature in camp to a toasty sixty degrees. After an extended meal and watching the sun come up, we started to plan the morning’s hunt. We decided it was still a little chilly so we had another cup of tea and hot chocolate before we started.

We left camp around seven-thirty with Milt taking Joel one way while I made a large swing around to see where the deer might be traveling. Two days before it had snowed a few inches and there hadn’t been another vehicle in the area to spoil the hunt. After a couple of hours and not cutting a single track, I figured Milt and Joel would be getting cold so I started back toward camp. As I walked the woods road in search of my hunting partners, I started to hear what I thought were barnyard noises. Now my hearing isn’t great but I swore I heard chickens but we were a mile and a half from the nearest neighbor and several miles from the nearest farm. I turned the corner and found six chickens and a rooster huddled under a small hemlock shrub trying to stay warm. Knowing now that Joel and Milt were not far away, I called for them to come and see what I had found. Needless to say we had no idea who these critters belonged to or how they ended up out in the woods but if we didn’t get them out of there the coyote’s would find them and have a feast. Our initial plan was to lure them back to camp by breaking the peanuts off our Payday candy bars. These birds liked the peanuts but there was no way they were going to leave the comfort of the hemlock bush and follow three guys with guns in hopes of surviving. Deciding we needed some lunch and time to review the situation, we headed back to camp.

After a cup of tea, some cheese and crackers, red hotdogs and beans, we decided the only way to save the barnyard animals would be to catch them. Milt instructed Joel to cut a ten-foot sapling and tie his dragging rope onto the end and make a noose. He thought we could lure them into the noose with pieces of English muffin and Joel could snare them by their feet. We drove to the scene with Milts truck and some grain bags and proceeded with the plan.

Joel was instructed to set the noose on the ground, fill it with crumbs from an english muffin and give the pole a yank when a chicken worked its way into the noose. The first chicken went for one hell of a ride as Joel was figuring out how much of a yank he needed to apply for the noose to close around their feet. After watching the first four chickens and the rooster get hung upside down and placed into a grain bag, the last two chickens decided to vacate the premises. We decided it would be best to let the riled up fowl calm down and then perhaps they would return to the hemlock bush. Meanwhile, we went back to look for deer. An hour or so later we returned to find the two chickens back under the bush. Milt and I herded them through the rocks and trees until Joel managed to snare them and put them in the sack with the others. After several hours of this episode, the six chickens and the rooster were now in grain sacks in the back of Milt’s truck, but there were still more barnyard animals left out in the woods.

We noticed a couple of baby rabbits under a bush and several more running around the rocks and stumps trying to find a place to hide. After catching two that were just too cold to hop away and coaxing two others that just wanted something to eat, we now had four of the five bunnies in a grain bag. The last one, the only white rabbit with pink eyes, proved more elusive than the others. He found a place under the road to hide amongst the rocks, stumps and debris that were used to build the woods road years ago. Not to be deterred from catching our final prey, we spent the next hour excavating a hole large enough for Joel to climb into and poke around with a stick until he got the rabbit headed out the only other escape hole. Milt and I laid in wait. Eventually the rabbit headed for what he thought would be a clean getaway but we caught him and added him into the grain bag with the others. It didn’t seem fair, three against one, but then the alternative was for Peter Rabbit to become dinner for the coyotes.

So, at the end of the last day of hunting season, we had literally bagged six chickens, a rooster and five domestic rabbits without firing a single shot. Since there was no way to explain to the local warden our unusual hunt, we decided to take the rabbits to the local pet store where we were promised they would go to good homes. The chickens and rooster went to the hen house at the Inch-by-Inch farm not far from Milt’s home where they would be warm and earn their keep laying eggs.

Bringing home a deer would have been nice but we brought home a story that we’ll be able to talk about for the rest of our lives.

Submitted by: Dennis Doyon Bethel, ME and Albany hunting camp.