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Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Advertisement Email Story to a Friend October 6, 2005 Tales from opening weekend By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune PROSPECT — The morning rain and shivering winds finally gave Greg Schaffer the opening weekend weather he had dreamt of sharing with his 13-year-old stepson, Connor Sanders. For once, the 43-year-old Schaffer found the forest damp and the outlook bright for Saturday’s opening day of general black-tailed buck season. Good buck numbers and no tinder-dry, 90-degree forest conditions. Enough to keep the conversation in the pickup truck buzzing as Schaffer and Connor crept past a downed log on a forest skid road. Then the buzz took a decidedly different turn. Within seconds, Connor could say that hunting with Schaffer really bites. Seven bites, actually, along with a dozen stings and a hand swollen like an Incredible Hulk glove. "All of a sudden, the whole cab of the truck filled with yellow jackets," Schaffer says. "They were coming through the open window, even crawling up the air conditioning vents. Advertisement "There had to be more than 100 in there, biting and stinging like crazy," Schaffer says. "It really wrecked the day." And it even wrecked his truck. "It’s one of those deals," he laughs. "Stuff happens." It’s the stuff of opening weekend, rifle hunting’s equivalent of the tragicomedy in which all the forest’s a stage and all the hunters merely players. It started when Prospect logger Cliff Chapman got into the act, hiking through the snows of the Hershberger Peak area and finding the forest soft enough to sneak up on a four-by-four-point buck. And the opportunity to telephone his daughter Pamela and ask for a Band-Aid, a code word in the Chapman family that Dad got his buck. "There’s some deer around and it’s cold," says Chapman, 62. "It worked out good. It’s nice to get one." Then there was the over-the-top weather conditions that brought heavy rain, stiff high-elevation winds and regular dustings of snow as low as 3,500 feet. Normally, early October hunters curse the searing heat and dust in the high-elevation woods of Jackson County. This time, they cursed the off-season purchases of cheap boots and not-so-weatherproof clothes. "It was so extreme out there that a lot of hunters weren’t prepared for that kind of opening weekend weather," says Mark Vargas, the district wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Central Point office. "There were a lot of guys who stopped hunting early. "There were probably a lot of rip-roaring campfires at 10 in the morning," he says. And among the dramas and melodramas that accompany every hunt, Dean Combs of White City provided the farce. Combs, 39, found that at least one of the blacktails in the Huckleberry Campground area was a bit of a cross-dresser. Combs shot a forked-horned deer that turned out to be a female with antlers — a somewhat rare genetic mix-up present in the occasional blacktail. "When I went to gut it out, I looked down there and something was wrong," Combs says. "She had boobies, too, but they weren’t very big. "It’s kind of weird," he says. But Combs still entered this proverbial doe-named-Buck in the Big R Stores’ Lucky Buck Contest, where store officials considered the deer close enough to qualify. "I considered it pretty lucky that it was (called) a buck," Combs says. But luck wasn’t in Schaffer’s lexicon Saturday as he and Connor headed from home to the woods early Saturday. The pair had hunted a different area at daybreak without luck, and decided to try the Blue Rock area. They came upon a log across the roadway, but someone had sawed out a section for vehicle passage. Halfway through the passage, Schaffer felt his 1998 Silverado pickup scrape innocuously against the log. It would not fit. Schaffer started backing up while Connor poked his head out the window checking the clearance. "I felt something tingling on my finger," Connor says. "I looked down and saw this big swarm." The pair rolled up their windows quickly, but it was too late. Swatting became futile. And jumping out into the swarm was worse than the battle inside. "I goosed it, trying to get the pickup out of there," Schaffer says. "But I goosed it too much and hit a rock." The impact slammed Connor backward, breaking his seat. His can of Mountain Dew popped out of the cupholder and landed in place, but upside down. "That," Connor says, "was weird." Eventually, the pair dashed from the pickup into the rain. "We were running down the skid road, peeling our clothes off to get rid of the yellow jackets." Connor had seven bites and 12 stings over his hands, abdomen and head. Schaffer took stingers to his arm and knee. "It took about a half-hour for them to calm down enough that I could go reclaim my truck," Schaffer says. They packed Connor’s wounds with ice and headed back afield. "After a while, we started getting kind of itchy and thought we better get some Benadryl," Schaffer says. The swelling in Connor’s head and hand have since subsided enough that the pair intend to go deer hunting again this weekend. But they’ve got one stop to make on their way. "We’ll probably go kill that bee’s nest," Connor says. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail Tales from opening weekend ">[email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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