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There aren’t many things in the outdoors that I haven’t tried, including scuba diving, bear hunting, predator calling, antelope, trapping and so much more.

As I mentioned in my column on snow-shoeing, there’re times that some strange things have happened to me.

Take for example what happened on an archery deer hunt a few years back, one of those deals where you think, this could never happen to me.

I was bow hunting along a creek, over two trails merged, in an old stand that I had to upgrade to make it safe.

This was an early season hunt, so the trees hadn’t lost all of their leaves, in fact they were so many leaves it was hard to see much that I had to hunker down in the stand to see the direction of numerous trails coming together.

With all the sign, I figured it wouldn’t be long before the buck that I’d seen on my game cameras, came through.

I’d was given permission from the landowner to archery hunt, if ‘d trap the beaver out of the creek and in the sand pit.

After I trapped six beavers for the landowner, I saw a lot of signs, unfortunately they weren’t deer tracks, they were raccoon, muskrat, mink, skunk, fox and coyote, but no beaver sign to speak of, so I thoughts since I’d hadn’t seen much, if any beaver sign, that I thought I’d eliminated beavers.

It started out as a very quiet morning, but as the sun rose higher to the east, I could hear the landowners chain saw off in the distance, as well as the traffic going along the south road.

I continued hearing these strange noises along the creek near the sandpit, and not sure what it was, could be a buck, I was ready.

I generally don’t stay in a stand more than a couple of hours, but this hunt was different, as I was thinking that the noise I was hearing, might be a buck working a rub (where a buck rubs against a tree to remove the velvet, that fed its antlers while they were growing and at the same time marking the tree with scent from its forehead, and between their toes glands.

It may be deer working a scrape, marking their territory, pawing the ground, removing vegetation, where it will mark the spot with their scent from those on their forehead, those between its toes and by urinating on the scrape, letting it to run down their legs to their tarsal glands and then on the ground.

Something wasn’t right, the sounds continued and since deer don’t generally hang around that much time before they move onto their next locations.

I was thinking wild critters don’t hang around that long, during the day, was pretty sure it wasn’t a deer making the weird sounds I was hearing.

I hunkered down so I could see below the canopy, as two small beavers appeared up on the bank, when I heard a splitting noise, looking west, I saw the top of the tree as moving around and if it fell it looked as if it would be falling my way.

My only chance was to find a spot on the tree where the falling tree wasn’t going to hit, unfortunately there was no place I could hide, I let out a scream, as the tree took out the right side of my stand, as I was thrown to the ground.

The landowner heard me scream and the tree coming down, he came to see if I was ok, when I told him what happened, a smile came across his face, he said “It’s the way the beavers are paying young back for the beavers you took out of here.”

Oh well, I didn’t get hurt, just a couple of arrows bent and a a few bruises, it could have been worse.

The guys that were working for me, met this artist at a boat show who drew up the picture of what happened, it’s special to me, but I’m being careful, not to mess with beavers anymore.