Of time, tine and talisman

Someone said if you’re not bumping into trees, or getting scratched and poked by brush and branches, you might not be shed antler hunting.

People in my neighborhood call it horn hunting because it has always been called that.

I knew I was shed hunting when my glasses fogged. Then the stocking cap covering my ears, a University of Idaho hat missing a tassel that my son purchased with savings a few years ago at a Vandals game, was pulled by a sassy limb from my head.

I got poked in the eye by a forlorn sprig of ocean spray, and then bumped headlong into a fir pole because nearby tines jabbing through the snow foretold a whitetail shed:

It looked like a four pointer. Psych!

It turned out however to be a barkless, basket-shaped limb with sticker points lying on the ground under the snow. Not an antler at all. Good luck with that, pal.

Animals don’t hang around ocean spray, I told myself, so I am probably looking in the wrong place.

It’s OK to talk to yourself while horn hunting, because no one’s the wiser, and the only one arguing with yourself is yours truly.

Let’s face it. Other horn hunters go where antlers lie in the snow like fluffy, barking puppies. Big as rodeo barrels.

You tell yourself this as hours pass, and in disjointed paragraphs interrupted by wild interjections:

Here we go! Bingo! Five-pointer!

Dangit.

Another ponderosa pine limb.

And by periods of silence you navigate blowdown, slip between standing trees, gracelessly, humphing through brush or barbed wire, following tracks maybe, or just intuition.

And often, if you’re like me, you eye what is surely a branched antler, and then just as surely, it is not. This happens a lot, and you start to wonder about the shape of antlers. Why do they look so much like tree limbs? You recall the genetics you learned in the 10th grade that had something to do with moths the color of bark that did not get eaten by birds because, camo. And what about those finches with different kinds of beaks found on an island where a guy named Darwin traveled in a boat called the HMS Beagle? And before you know it, you are rummaging through your memory drawer of “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, which you really can’t remember from that era of sitcoms that included Archie Bunker, Mr. Kotter, Arthur Fonzarelli. Ehhh.

Your eyes scan a radius of 10 feet at a time in a field overrun by pine and buckbrush, when, Bang! You smack headlong into another tree, and a limb snags the hat from your head, and you get eye-poked because your glasses have fogged and ride in a pocket.

I wear the Vandals hat for luck.

And I wear caulk-soled boots glued together at Hoffman’s in Kellogg, and I carry a Buck knife. It’s the hometown accoutrements that can tip the scale and help you become a horn hunter who gathers tine.

I once took a friend scavenging the hills and forests for antlers and after a day, he wondered dejectedly what he was doing out there, taking occasional bites from a protein bar, and bumping into trees.

I had managed to stumble upon a couple small deer sheds, but he wasn’t impressed with the antlers.

He longingly eyed the paddle in my hand, while blowing warmth into his own chafed and frozen paws.

So, I gave it to him. The moose paddle.

I have a picture of him with the shed in the parking lot of a Coeur d’Alene grub pub where I thought he would barter it for beer, but he refrained and I’m glad he did. Antlers should not be besmirched with licentiousness, or traded for anything but reverence before they are stored away in boxes in the garage.

The paddle was the last moose antler I found, even though I have been looking. More people — 40-some percent — who put in a modicum of time trudging around the woods late winter and spring find between one and five antlers a year, according to a survey that also reported 16 percent of antler hunters find nothing, and 13 percent find fewer than 10 sheds annually. The other 29 percent find more than 10 antlers a year.

Over the past decades, I have fine-tuned my antler-sensing skills, and stand firm in my belief that local, good luck juju is key to turning tine.

That’s why I plan to carry a jar of Litehouse dressing in my pack to shoehorn me into the top 29 percent.

Blue cheese. Chunky. It should complement the protein bars.

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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached by email to rbartholdt@cdapress.com.