The Pine Island Incident by Jeff Harding

Author:Jeff Harding [Harding, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hangar 1 Publishing

12

A HIGH-VALUE TARGET

After spending decades guiding hunters in remote areas, I was enjoying the time I spent in northern Minnesota. The summers were fun on the lake, fishing, swimming, kayaking, and watching the kids enjoy lake life. The winters aren’t for everybody. It gets very cold for about four months a year. All the lakes freeze over with several feet of ice. Everything turns white and it snows often. I love to ice fish and snowmobile. I take a snowmachine out often in remote areas. There’s something about the solace and aloneness that amplifies when it's all covered in snow. Running a trail or up a snow-covered frozen river until you are in the middle of a forest and just shutting off the machine. That’s a kind of quiet and alone that many never get to experience.

Two years ago, on a day in January, I found myself doing just that. In the middle of the Pine Island Forest after running up the Clearwater River and through the densely forested landscape I stopped in a clearing. The clearing seemed almost misplaced. It was about the size of a football field and surrounded by tall Pines, Poplars, and Birch trees. After traveling through the trees and zigzagging around all the deadfall trees, it was weird to ride into a void of all of that. I was intrigued enough to grab my phone and pull up google maps and look at the area in detail. I identified other seemingly open isolated areas like this one. I pinpointed six of them on the GPS map. I spent the afternoon traveling to all of them. They were within a four-mile range of each other. Little open clearings in the middle of dense forest.

The initial reason I marked these areas was that I am always looking for new areas to hang tree stands for archery hunting deer. I like to archery hunt over a deer decoy during pre-rut and rut and deer seem to be more susceptible to coming to a decoy when they can visually see it from a distance. The small open areas made for perfect stand locations. During the coming weeks, I had met a fellow hunting guide who I had known for years. He shared with me an experience he had in the Pine Island Forest near the Red Lake Reservation border. As he was telling me of this experience, I could see that he was visibly shaken while recounting it. This was a friend I had known to be very trustworthy and what I would describe as a straight shooter. He wasn’t the type to seek attention or embellish things.

The story he shared with me for almost an hour wasn’t just a story. You could tell by his face, his expressions, and his breathing that he was in duress not only while experiencing it but also in its retelling. The account involved a time when he had hung a tree stand about 3 miles into the forest after accessing the area from a UTV trail.

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