What a difference a couple of days can make!  Sunday was the opener for Montana’s general big game season, and all a lot of hunters got was sunburned.   Not to complain, as it was a gorgeous day to be afield, but very little to no snow and bluebird conditions don’t generally lead to hunting success.  My son and I had a great trip; making an after-school, nighttime ride/hike (hiking for me, since we’re suddenly short one horse, may he RIP) into our hunting camp Friday.  Saturday we went exploring/scouting, and spiked out that night in the backpack tent way up high.  Elk sign was scarce, although we did see a reasonable number of mule deer (no shooters), a bunch of mountain goats, and a plethora of predator sign; wolf, bear, and lion.  This set of black bear tracks we saw repeatedly were particularly noteworthy.  I really should have put a tape to them, as they were the biggest I believe I’ve ever encountered, and we were pretty sure it was a grizzly until we found a clear imprint showing the shorter claws. 

Initial reports, just from guys I know personally and other hunters we encountered indicate our experience was pretty common.   The game, particularly elk, are still up high and quite scattered.  They have literally 100% of their habitat available to them, and not being stupid, they’re generally off in the remotest or otherwise secure parts of it.  Still, opening day finds a whole lot of people afield, and somebody’s gonna run into something.

Initial reports from the Gallatin Check Station indicate 391 hunters checked through on Sunday.  They collected 12 bull elk, ten cows, six mule deer bucks, and one black bear.   One of those bull elk is credited to a friend of mine, who shot it in Sage Creek.  He saw next to no elk sign, although he did also see a cow and calf.  This 4 X 5 bull though, gave him a standing shot at about 100 yards.  Clearly a sign from God, although I won’t speculate as to what it means….  Larry is a clean living, exemplary kind of guy, and he deserves it!

We passed through the Ennis Check Station, where I was able to further pick the brain of one of my favorite FWP biologists.   No stunning insights were gleaned, just a re-affirmation that my personal observations match what they see in their population surveys, and that while elk populations and bull percentages are at all-time highs; that doesn’t mean there are big bull elk everywhere.  At any rate, 281 hunters checked through that station harvested eight bull elk, ten cows and one calf, one whitetail buck, two mule deer bucks, and muley doe, one antelope buck, and one black bear.

Suddenly, though, it is looking a lot like winter!  The forecast is for eight to ten inches of snow in the mountains, and about half that in the valleys by tomorrow evening.  Temperatures are plummeting, with lows below zero forecast for tomorrow night. 

That’s going to get the elk moving!  I believe I’ll probably be pulling a horse trailer down a very slick and curvy Gallatin Canyon at a frighteningly early hour tomorrow morning.

At least I shouldn’t need sunscreen.

Anyway, I had the mixed grille, which was antelope and salmon. The irony of ordering antelope wasn't lost on me, since we just got done cutting up our own. My standard line on antelope is that they are either great or inedible, and ours seem fine this year.
I was pretty curious what kind of antelope Chico would serve up, though, and kind of assumed they'd be some kind of exotic raised on a game farm. The waitress was right on the spot with an answer when I half jokingly inquired if these were pronghorns or just what. "They're West Texas Antelope".
Well, OK. She chuckled when I again only half jokingly asked if they had any pictures of 'em.
Well, whatever they do with those West Texas antelope, they are just exquisitely good eating.... And the salmon, man... it was literally the best food I've eaten in years. That antelope was SO tender and flavorful; it just put any beef I've had lately way in the shade.
So anyway, when the waitress came back to clear the table, after we'd raved about the food a bit, I couldn't resist asking if they keep these antelope picketed or just what down there in West Texas. I suspect she's pulled picket pins before, either that or knows tips improve when you laugh at the customer's jokes, but either way we all found the resulting mental image pretty amusing for a few seconds there.
Or maybe this is something I'd be better off not knowing about, and there's these horrible antelope confinement facilities where they never get to run a day in their lives.
Or are these actually free range pronghorn? Nah, can't be.....

p.s.   I got answers to my queries, and it appears they're actually Black Buck.  Fine enough....

I’m no guitar slut; I’ve really only owned a handful of guitars, and not even played that many of friend’s & dealers in comparison to a lot of you, I’m sure.  My main axe for a long time was a Strat, though, a ’72 with a natural finish.  Still got it, but it’s kind of fallen out of favor.  The sucker is just kind of dead sounding, or at least lacks that classic Fender sparkle, especially since my main amp is a Twin Reverb of about the same vintage.  Anymore my main electric is an Epiphone (hey, quit snickering, you sons' a …).  It’s an LP clone that I bought for my daughter a few years back.  I know there was a thread about those some time back that I didn’t respond to either, but that Epi is a damn nice guitar.  Has Grovers, and is slated for electronics upgrades at some point, but even with the shitty stock pups & pots it sounds WAY better than my Strat.  So yeah, something is wrong with that Strat, and Rhytm Earl’s superb set-up instructions didn’t help it.  It’s also on the slate for different pups, & I like the idea of the master volume, master tone, & bridge blend knob setup I saw mentioned here recently.  I’ll be bugging youse for wiring schematics for that setup at some point.

However, I DO have a guitar that speaks to me and can at least occasionally elevate even an admittedly mediocre guitarist like me into a realm beyond my normal abilities, yea verily, to the point of bringing tears to people’s eyes, if only my own ;-).

It’s my acoustic, a Guild F-50.  

Back in the day when I was gigging at least on some sort of semi-regular basis, my main acoustic was another Guild.   I forget the model #, but the regular dreadnaught size body.  It was an OK guitar, but it sure didn’t send chills down my spine or anything.  So when I got married, my wife’s gift to me was to be a new acoustic (incidentally, today is our 20^th anniversary!).  I was keen on the idea of a Gibson 200, the jumbo body, or something similar.  Well, on our honeymoon we went to San Francisco, & I played a shitpile of guitars there and everywhere along the way.  I’m a small-town Montana boy, you know, and thought for certain I would find a multitude of guitars that I would just be drooling all over in someplace like Frisco.  Imagine my disbelief when that turned out to not be the case.  Oh, there were plenty of nice ones, but certainly none that took possession of my soul on the spot.  And hey, even back then they wanted a darn pretty penny for those Gibsons, and if I was going to shell out that kind of coin the guitar had better reach out & grab me.  None did.

So a year or so went by.  I kept my eye out, and played different acoustics when the opportunity presented itself, but was kind of resigned to playing my old one for the foreseeable future, which was not at all a disagreeable concept.  Against all odds, at that time there was a pretty darn good music store in Shelby, MT; Mark’s Music.  Now Shelby would never be mistaken for Nashville, in fact my favorite quote about that place is from the Northern Pacific executive after whom the town was named; “I don’t know what Manvel was thinking when he named that God-forsaken mudhole after me, it will never amount to a damn!”  Talk about an ingrate, but he was right ;-).

I was in Mark’s one day, and lo and behold, there’s a Guild jumbo hanging on the wall, just traded in the day before.   I sat down with it, and at the risk of sounding maudlin, from the very first strum I just KNEW.  To my ears at least, that guitar just rings with incredible beauty.  It’ll boom hella loud for an acoustic, but even as soft as I can play it just SPARKLES with these rich, complex tones.  It was love at first strum, and that feeling hasn’t diminished even slightly in the years since, and has only grown deeper, much like my feelings for my wife, (I’ll have to get her to read this, call it an anniversary present!).

So what kind of brought all this to mind was playing it last night.  It’d been a real emotional roller coaster of a day, with some real highs (which I won’t go into or this will turn into a 5000 word essay), and some not-devastating but still bad enough lows.   While I was gone antelope hunting with our son & his bud over the weekend, my best horse had to be put down.  He was getting old, and it was his time, I guess, but none of us expected to lose him anytime soon.  My kids requested I get some of his mane hair for a memento, and so I’d gone to the vet hospital where his corpse still lay and collected some.  It was not a happy moment.

So I was feeling a tad melancholy over that, and decided to play guitar for a bit to unwind late last evening.  The Guild was the clear choice, & so I sat down on the hearth & started picking.  My 16 year old daughter was baking cookies in the kitchen, which adjoins & more or less makes one big room, so it was just me & her and kind of turned into a private concert for her, in my mind at least.  It was one of those times when the music just flows out of you like a broken down dam; you know what I’m saying?

When I picked it up it was tuned to whatever that tuning is the Rain Song is in, so I ran through that first.  But what had actually most recently been going through my head was Mr. Bojangles, mainly the line about how his dog died and “after twenty years he still grieved”, so it was back to standard tuning & Jerry Jeff.  So I was kind of in what passes for country mode for me, and next played one of my all-time favorites and IMO the best truck-driving song ever written, Lowell George’s Willin’ (which incidentally a long-lost guitar partner somehow had learned the right chords to and showed me, and I’ve NEVER seen anyone else use ‘em,).  I have to be really dejected to play country for long, though ;-), no offense to Pickatele, Mark & Missy, or others of that persuasion, so next I hit the opening licks to one of my songs.  I’ve written a fair number of shitty songs ;-), and IMO two pretty good ones.  This one in particular was inspired by life on Montana’s Hi-Line, where the wind can scream mercilessly for weeks on end, and is called Windy Blues.  More times than not, when I play the opening riff, people will go “what IS that song?”, so I take that as a positive sign!

So anyway, a game I play with my kids is “name that tune”, when I hear a noteworthy intro to a song.  I sprung that on my daughter after the opening licks of Windy Blues, and she guessed “the Who?”  She kind of snickered and said that was the most common correct answer.  So of course, that led into Behind Blue Eyes, followed by a mini-discourse on how the Who was the prototype punk band.  She’s kind of into punk history at the moment.  Well, my punk repertoire is very limited indeed, but the Pretenders were kinda edgy back in the day, so next was Back on the Chain Gang. 

This was turning into a really quality interaction with her, in my mind anyway, and I could see she was digging it too.  A real father-daughter kinda deal, you know?  We’re very much alike in a lot of ways, and sometimes I worry that she feels neglected in comparison to her brother, who goes on outdoor adventures with me all the time; not a big area of interest with her.  But anyway, there was some real connection going on between us last night, and I’m sure any parent (or child, which I guess means all of us) will agree moments like that are priceless.  The Guild was ringing like it always does, my voice was passable, subdued lighting, and it was magical, I tell ya….

You know how sometimes you’ll sit down and can’t think of hardly shit to play?  Well, maybe you don’t have that problem, but I sometimes do, particularly if I’m stressed or distracted.  Other times the songs just flow out like the set list had been put together by George Martin himself, and last night was one of those times.  I’m probably forgetting a couple of songs, but I sort of slipped back into a more country mode at some point, with John Hiatt’s Drive South, Desperado, and wound up with Leon Russell’s Song for You.

God, I prit’ near cried, I tell you…. 

You know how it ends; “and when my life is over, remember when we were together, we were alone and I was singing my songs for you”.

I bet she does.