I have a report card from third grade on which the teacher wrote a note to my mother telling her that I spent too much time reading and that she should discourage me.
Discounting the stupidity of that so called “educator,” I will note that reading is how I got here today. I learned more by reading than I ever did in any formal education situation. I hated school, but I loved to learn. I still do.
remember at that time I would read anything I could on the outdoors. Too young and broke to buy my own reading material, I spent a lot of time in my grandfather’s gun room poring over his magazines and books. I clearly remember one recurring outdoor theme that has long been forgotten and abandoned in today’s focused, purpose-driven outdoor world.
Woods loafing was a common theme then. No “target bucks” or species-specific focus, just hanging around in the woods and letting it all happen. You could be hunting, fishing, trapping, scouting, hiking, camping or, I suppose, just loafing. You took it as it came and enjoyed the outdoors without the pressure of focused expectations.
For most of my adult hunting life I have been caught up in the “modern” approach of singular focus for each trip and day. I never let a morning pass where I didn’t have a plan for the day. As I enter the “golden” years, this woods loafing is on my mind, perhaps as a reminder of my youth, or as a question of what I may have missed all these hard-core, driven years.
I think we found the perfect place to reacquaint with the idea in October 2023. The Boundary Waters is a region of wilderness straddling the Canada and United States border between Ontario and Minnesota. It is best known as a canoe path in the wilderness, carrying on the tradition of the voyagers who first explored this land.
What is not as well known is that parts of the Boundary Waters are not restricted to canoes only and are open to boats with motors. (I love my canoe, but my old, worn-out shoulders will not take paddling it all day, day after day.) So we brought to the region a 14-foot aluminum boat with an underpowered 9.9-horse motor. With our heavy load it couldn’t reach plane and plowed along like a displacement hull on a lobster boat. This was fine because it gave us time to enjoy the adventure and really see this place.
This all started when my son, Nathan, who lives in Minnesota, called me about bear hunting in the Boundary Waters area. We applied for the tags and were lucky enough to draw them. Researching further, we found that this area also had ruffed grouse and a decent waterfowl population.
So, I flew to Minnesota and we dragged his boat north to a remote boat launch on Crane Lake. Neither of us has ever mastered the art of packing light, so we took the overloaded boat as far as we could that night and camped on the shore.
I sleep best under canvas. I know it’s technically nylon, but that term does not connote the same romance as canvas. The point is, I sleep great in a tent. For a person who suffers from insomnia it’s like a vacation from all those nights of trying to sleep, to one when I actually do. My plan was to sleep in a bit. Dawn found me deep into a dream that I can’t recall, but I know it was good … then the roar of a big outboard motor at full throttle woke me. It seems we were camped on a well-known crappie spot and for the next two hours boat after boat came in with a roar. The guys aboard fished with intensity for 30 minutes or so, thrashing the water with focus and intent, before slamming the throttle forward to get to the next place as fast as possible.
It was looking like maybe we had made a mistake. We were seeking wilderness and solitude, but instead found a circus. A bit dejected, we cooked the fish I caught from shore that morning for our breakfast, broke camp and went looking for that solitude.
We found it by working our way deeper and deeper in the chain of lakes. We camped each night on the shore, often cooking what we caught or shot that day for dinner. Soon after dark we drifted off to sleep with the call of a loon as a lullaby.
I was still recovering from a major medical event (man, it sucks getting old!) and in truth I have never been a morning person anyway. So, I slept in most mornings. That’s the wonderful thing about bear hunting: it happens in the evening. You morning people, you who are “up and at ’em” at first light bouncing with excitement, can go suck an egg. I was finally sleeping and I intended to cash in on that.
I was deep in another dream when I woke to the distant sound of a shotgun. I looked out of the open tent door and across the small bay we were camped on and Nathan emerged on the far side, holding up a ruffed grouse. Things were moving in the right direction. This kind of alarm clock I like.
Depending on your outlook the weather was either good or bad. For woods loafing, it was good. For hunting, not so much. It rained the first day, and then even late in the season there were blue skies and extremely high temperatures most remaining days. For the long ride back that last day, it was raining. No happy medium. Several days temperatures would make it into the mid to high90s. Wonderful weather for a swim, but it kept the bear activity pretty low.
Still, without realizing it, we eased into this woods loafing thing. We fished sometimes, hunted grouse others and in the evenings we hunted for bears. One afternoon we hunted wood ducks. I can’t say any of it was spectacular as a standalone, but collectively I had slipped into a place of great enjoyment.
We found just enough grouse while prowling the trails and old woods roads to keep us interested. The brush was very thick and most of the leaves were still on the trees, so getting a shot was challenging. Hitting a hard-charging grouse was even more challenging. Still, we managed to take enough for a dinner now and then.
The woods were fairly homogeneous and no one thing seemed to concentrate the birds, they just appeared at random. That meant a lot of slow, methodical walking, while staying cocked, locked and ready to rock. This is exactly the way I grew up grouse hunting and it’s something I love to do.
Back when Vermont was full of ruffed grouse (we call them partridge) I was obsessed with hunting them. I never had or wanted a dog. I would simply move through the coverts, ready to shoot at the first hint of a flush. You never knew where the bird was going to be or where it was going to go, so this became a game of fast reflexes and good gun work. The anticipation of a flush builds until the adrenaline dump when it happens drives your shotgun without even time for a full thought to form. I loved it. I still do.
In recent years poor management of both forest and predators has put the Vermont grouse population at dismally low levels, to the point where many of us have stopped hunting them. This return to one of the hunting adventures I have always loved was enough to make this trip to Minnesota a success.
It wasn’t a focused, success-driven way of hunting as were those intense days of the past, and I didn’t need to fill my limit every day. It seems that I had adapted well to this woods loafing thing and I enjoyed the exploration, the much needed exercise and the hunting in equal measures that when combined created a pretty satisfying day in the woods. While limiting out was important in my younger years, here we just needed a few birds for dinner. It became the adventure that drove things and we took the time to check out the view.
At one point we spent a few hours prowling the ruins of the “St. Paul Club.” This was a remote camp owned by Minneapolis gangster Thomas Filben, who purchased a cabin from another outlaw buddy who got sent to jail and didn’t need it anymore.
Filben partnered with Tom Brown, the corrupt chief of the St. Paul Police Department at the time. For the right price they would hide gangsters on the lam at the camp until the heat was off. This approach to a protection racket made Filben and Brown important figures in the Twin Cities underworld.
They were associated with guys like “Babyface Nelson” and “Shotgun George Ziegler,” one of Al Capone’s hitmen. The most famous of all their pals was John Dillinger. It’s said that it was not uncommon to see their “clients” hunting deer with Tommy guns. The foundation and grounds remain and it was an interesting diversion one afternoon.
Another interesting encounter miles away was the Loon Falls portage. It has a narrow railroad track over a high ridge that separates two lakes. A sled is lowered to the water and the boat is floated over top of it. An old flathead, four-cylinder engine in a hut on top of the ridge powers the thing as the sled rises to haul the boat to the top and lowers it to the other side and the next lake.
Charlie Cowden spends his days isolated here through the entire season, moving boats of all shapes and sizes from lake to lake.
He is a reader of American Hunter magazine and recognized me from the photos, although at first he thought I was Bill Bryson, who had written the book A Walk in the Woods. That book was a huge bestseller and was made into a movie starring Robert Redford, so in some ways I regret I wasn’t. The payday must have been pretty good.
Watching our boat run up the mountain on a train track was an experience I won’t soon forget. Portaging is part of the Boundary Waters voyageur experience, and this is the same portage that earlier explorers used to move from lake to lake. Except back then they had only the power of their legs to get over the hill. Interestingly enough, Charlie told us that often the canoers are focused on the purity of their quest and won’t use the portage, preferring to carry their boats on their shoulders.
Once floating again, we cast our lines into the waters holding a unique species of trout found only in Mukooda LakeThese trout have been isolated for thousands of years. The name Mukooda is an English rendering of the Ojibwe name for “Trout Lake,” Ga-namegosikag-zag. We didn’t catch one, but how many folks can say they have fished for Mukooda Lake trout?
During our exploratory walks while grouse hunting we discovered a remote beaver pond that was full of wood ducks. We returned with different chokes in our shotguns and some of the new Remington Bismuth, government-approved ammo. There were a lot of ducks and even after being flushed off the pond, they returned to give us some challenging pass shooting.
Of course nothing can ever be perfect. We didn’t discover the flaw in our plan until the end of the day. The trouble was in retrieving the ducks. The pond was too deep for our hip boots. With no dog or even a canoe, it fell on us to become retrievers. The only viable retrieval method was to swim in a cold, slimy, green goop-filled pond. Trust me, that will dampen your duck-hunting enthusiasm pretty quickly. It’s a damn shame because for the lack of a good dog, this could have been a great wood duck hunting experience.
After that, our focus returned to grouse and bears along with a little fishing. The fishing was a bit disappointing, probably due to the weird weather, but still produced enough small northern pike and smallmouth bass to keep it interesting. I hoped for a walleye dinner, but it never happened, even with our best efforts.
It was all a diversion though, as hunting bears was to have been our primary goal. The trouble is that fall bears with thick winter coats don’t move much when it’s 95 degrees.
I didn’t really care. Bear hunting is a great way to spend a fall evening, but once you pull the trigger the fun is over. Dealing with a dead bear is a lot of work. We thought we were prepared, bringing coolers and ice, but this weather laughed at that notion. We had also planned on cool northern Minnesota autumn temps while it was more like South Texas in summer. Hungry as we were, it would have been tough to eat an entire bear before it spoiled. So we didn’t have many options with the meat.
Does it sound like I am making excuses for not shooting a bear? I suppose I am, but I have shot a lot of bears over the years and one more was not all that important. In truth, I was there to hunt bears as much as I was to shoot one. Would I have liked to fill that tag? Of course. Still, it was one of those rare times in my life when the disappointment of not doing that was less than overwhelming.
We talked with some folks with experience on the lakes and they suggested scouting around the multiple campsites for bear sign. “Look for where past campers cleaned their fish and there should be bear sign,” they all said. Great theory, but we never found a thing. No tracks, no droppings, no indication that any bears retained their U.S. citizenship. I think they all headed north to escape the heat.
We tend to build up our expectations in our minds and I fully planned to see bears along the shoreline during our travels. My thoughts were to beach the boat and put a stalk on them, just as I have done in Alaska and other places. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Sightings were zero. At first I blamed all the other boats, but after the weekend the boat traffic disappeared and we had this wilderness to ourselves. The excuse that the fishermen were scaring them off was lost. The truth is simply that it was just too damn hot. We were expecting 50 degrees, brought gear for 20 and endured 90. My down jacket and insulated boots never left the dry bag in the boat. T-shirts and sneakers were the garb of this hunt. I spent most evenings waiting and watching for bears while shirtless. (Maybe that’s what scared them off.)
The approach we used was a unique adaptation to the circumstances. We would find a narrow bay that looked good. The shores were mostly bedrock and we would place a honey bun across the bay on the rocks. Then we went to the opposite shore and set up to wait. I know honey buns can be effective and I have seen them work in the past. But no bears appeared. I suspect they had all died of heat stroke.
Nathan’s rifle was a complete contrast to my modern synthetic and carbon-fiber wonder gun. He had an old pre-war Mauser Sporter in .30-06. It’s a marvel of German engineering with a half octagon barrel that includes an integral rib and sight ramp all milled from a single piece of steel. The classic style rifle is fitted with a fine walnut stock and carries a deep blue finish on the steel. True to its roots, it has double-set triggers. It was my grandfather’s rifle and the pride of his collection. It disappeared for some time after he died and his guns were sold. My uncle Butch found the rifle for sale a decade later and bought it from the current owner. He later gave it to my son. One hundred plus years and multiple owners had taken a toll and the rifle needed some loving care. Nathan repaired and restored the rifle, fitted a peep sight and worked out a good bear load. While it doesn’t have the long-range reach of my ultra-modern super-rifle, it has a lot more soul.
Twilight is my favorite time of any hunting day. There is something special in watching night take over and seeing the last of the day turn to memory. During that time, if we listened just right while quietly sitting in the fading light, the rifle would whisper tales of hunts from long ago.
We were technically waiting for bears, but we found something different: peace, solitude and harmony with the wilderness. They are the essence of woods loafing and are some of the things that have been missing from the frenzied hunts of recent years.
What’s better than that?
Of course the weather changed the last day so we spent all day motoring through a cold downpour. When our soggy carcasses arrived at the rain-drenched, empty, cold and deserted boat launch, the battery in our truck was dead.
Loafers’ Guns
Our cross-bay hunting approach meant the shots might be on the long side compared to most bear hunts. I was well prepared with the latest and greatest technology for a hunting rifle.
I carried a Savage Impulse Mountain Hunter rifle in 7mm PRC. This cutting-edge, straight-pull rifle has a carbon-fiber wrapped barrel and is extremely accurate. I fitted it with a Tract Toric 2.5-15X scope, and I fed the rifle Hornady 175-grain ELD-X ammo. This setup was perfect for shooting across a bay to anchor a bruin. savagearms.com; tractoptics.com; hornady.com
If I had only been hunting in something other than a bear free zone.
I also carried the new Stevens 560 semi-auto shotgun, above. This Turkish-made shotgun retails for less than 500 bucks. It performed flawlessly on grouse and ducks in Minnesota and on both again later that fall in Vermont. It fits me well, runs without drama and is very affordable. You would have to be an intolerant shotgun snob to not like this gun. savagearms.com
I used a Tract 10x40 binocular to watch for the phantom bears and to watch the loons. The clarity of this glass is as good as anything I have tried at any price. tractoptics.com
We navigated and found trails to walk for grouse with maps from McKenzie Maps. They specialize in maps of the Boundary Waters and the northern Midwest. We bought ours at a bait shop near Loon Lake, but you can find them at bwcamaps.com.
