Some whipped Chiffon snow is covering the bog today. Might be the last good one of the winter season. From here out we usually get the heavy wet stuff. Leather leaf and Labrador tea look like a powdered sugar commercial. My bog is rimmed recklessly in short denuded tamaracks almost looking like thumb tacks on an empty cork board. The towering black spruce stops my eyes from a further gaze. I like walking in these spongy moraines in winter. I detest trying to cross em in the summer. The cotton grasses in clumps are landmines for my legs especially in chest waders and in minutes I'm sweating. So I'm hot, sweaty, crabby, and I often wonder why God puts brook trout in the most uninhabitable inhospitable places on earth. Today I get even. Today I just bump along through the humps feeling my feet get steered by the mounded clumps. It's kinda fun. It's also fun because I won't flush a grouse, this aint there kinda turf. No heart attacks. There are no rabbit runways, again not their romp or pasture so I aint bunny hunting. So Nothing to deter my efforts or distract me from my goal. Last fall I watched a whopper buck tuck his brown carpet into this little bug infested wetland nare to return. I think his hide was saved do to this bailiwick of bottomlessness. Well all winter I walked what I thought was his trail, his route. He has a path that looks like a white gray rope that meanders through the midst of the bog and finally splits off over by the big spruce. Once he leaves the bog it's much harder to follow him because he doesn't allows stay the course. In the bog he has a set stride pace and road. This snow will cover tracks I want to check. It could also cover what I'm looking for. The buck didn't grow old being lazy or careless. I've bumped him during this past winter only once. Again in a settling snow that drowned out my footfalls. The season of melting freezing snow underneath is far too crunchy. I won't be walking up on him today that's for sure even with this duff of fluff. I'm on what I think is his trail looking for at least a piece of him. I'd been hunting his horns when they were attached for almost two months on and off and today after an hour I have the left side, minus the meat. It's a little victory. The trout whisperer http://flyrod58.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/februarys-deer-hunting/