Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are lost or have no access to communication — GPS, cellphones, maps?
When I was a young teenager, my father and I accompanied a friend on a deer hunt during Missouri’s firearms portion of the season.
My father and I had never been to this particular site that we would be hunting and to make matters worse, that morning’s plan was for our friend to drop us off at a certain location an hour before sunrise.
After being dropped off, our friend told us to walk a couple of hundred yards into the wooded area. He assured us we would come to a pond, and once we found the pond we were instructed to go directly 90 degrees to the right (approximately 50 to 60 yards) and we would find a tree stand that we could hunt from that morning.
As we walked through the timber with our flashlight we finally came to a pond. We followed the directions and took an immediate right. We spent the next 20 to 30 minutes searching for the tree stand.
With no luck, we decided to sit down on the ground next to a tree and wait for the sun to come up so that we could find the tree stand in the daylight as well as be quiet in case a deer was to approach us.
We spent most of the morning hunting from the ground because we didn’t want to spook any wildlife that might be close. Around 10 a.m. we decided to get up and stretch our legs and try to find this mysterious tree stand. This is where things took a turn for the worse (you have to remember this was before cell phones).
