Lost in the woods

It was just a routine call to check in with the hunter in the woods.
“Just calling to see how you are doing. Do you need anything?” his loved one back home asked.
“Do you want to come find me? I’m lost in the woods,” the experienced hunter asked.
“You are kidding me!” the homebody exclaimed.
“No. I’m not. The woods looks a lot different this year. The timber company came in and cut down a lot of trees in the summer. I’ve lost my four-wheeler and the deer stand on the trailer it was pulling.”
A moment of silence followed as she thought about the winding cow paths they traveled when she rode to the deer camp. His family had leased the camp from the timber company for decades.
“I can’t find the camp. I would not be any good finding you,” she said.
He sighed. “I called my cousin and asked him to come find me. He said, ‘I done the same thing. I got lost last weekend and didn’t know where I was at.’” He named another in the deer club and said, “He couldn’t find his way either; didn’t know where he was at.”
“We all three have been hunting over here for at least 50 years. That is what happens when they come in and change it up. You can’t find nothing,” the lost hunter said before hanging up.
The hunter looked around at the now unfamiliar land with tops of trees and logs laying every which way across his hunting grounds. He did know where to find the pipeline. He began heading for it.
This was not how he expected to spend the day when he climbed on a four-wheeler and pulled his deer stand into the woods to set it up in his shooting lane. From the top of the deer stand he would be able to look down the lane and see deer at his feeder. To prepare the feeder, he left the deer stand and four-wheeler, took a turn in the unfamiliar woods and quickly realized he was lost. In the maze of newly fallen trees. He could not find the four-wheeler, the tree stand or the feeder.
He began walking toward the pipeline and called his son, “Come down and help find me.”
Thank goodness for working cell phones. He soon had others shouting to direct him back safely to them. Now all they had to do was find his gear.
First, they looked for the four-wheeler with the deer stand. They tracked from the pipeline and the river, pushing their way through the confusion the timber company had left behind them. Back and forth, in and out, until they found the deer stand and lined it up with the shooting lane.
Only then did he realize, “I laid my gun down to move the corn into the feeder. I had walked off and left it.”
It too was lost in the newly cropped woods.
The search switched to finding the gun he had leaned up against a tree. All told it took a couple hours to relocate the hunter, his four-wheeler, deer stand and gun.
“I walked a few miles that day. It was hot and I didn’t have any water.”
Looking back on his experience, the hunter said, “If you go off in the woods you need to carry a bottle of water and a compass. That would be my suggestion to someone going in a freshly cut wood. It changed the whole outlook.”
Good advice when heading into the woods this fall. Be prepared. Be safe.