Cabin Fever

With winter hanging on so long here in the upper Midwest, cabin fever is epidemic. My son Tom, 2 yr old grandson Lee, and I loaded up my pickup and headed to South Dakota to do some walleye fishing and snow goose hunting with our good friend Chad Schilling, owner of Oahe Wings and Walleyes guide service. Chad and Tom are partners on the Pro Walleye fishing circuits, and Chad was killing the eyes through the ice on Lake Oahe, so he mentioned that we should get our butts out there and join him. The 10 hour ride with a 2 yr old and a box of yellow lab puppies went smoothly, and we didn’t waste any time putting the walleyes on ice. Quickly limiting out on walleyes meant we had time to go after snow geese, and since there is no limit on snows we could be busy for a while. Chad has access to a lot of ground so we did the run and gun on snows. He’d drop a couple guys off on one side of a huge picked cropfield swarming with feeding snows, then drop a couple more of us off on the other side. We’d belly crawl as close as we could to the geese and open up on them as they flew in and out of the field. Eventually, the entire feeding flock would spook, get up and fly. It was bedlam for 15 minutes, geese flying everywhere, shotguns booming, snows coming down like it was a blizzard! Then it was on to the next field swarming with feeding snows and a repeat performance. I got some great pics but somewhere out there on the SD prairie is my camera, lost while belly-crawling in one of the fields. So no pics to share, only the ones etched in my memory.