Some choose to capture alive, hold in a cage and wait for new skin. That what the leather makers love.

Few things better than to take an unsuspecting paid hunter or friend through a dark barn and bump that cage when he is ready to go by it.

Some of the snake hunters start saving the live ones for the various rattlesnake roundups, those guys start hunting them as soon as they snakes start moving. Several years ago one person here got caught with a few in town, the local PD confiscated them.

Anyone have anything to tell?

Back in the early 70's, found a neighbor that had died while walking from his house down a trail to his mailbox. It was August and he had been there a couple of days.
Adios,
Gary

Up for deer season 2020

Found a the team aims of a pistol looked to be a style that was a break open single shot smaller caliber with the barrel split in 4 directions at the muzzle . Been there along time. Not sure what I ever done with it. No wood left on it just solid rust and pitted pretty bad. It was just the barrel piece no handle

Many years ago I was climbing around on some low hills on private land and found several low areas that had obviously been dug out and naturally filled in over the years. I thought maybe I had found an old cavalry and Indian battle site. Looking around further I started finding some shell casings. I cleaned one off enough to see what it was and unfortunately they were a little newer that I had hoped.....30-06 blank cases. It looks like there were some machine guns set up there for training.

I picked up brass there several times and each time got at least a bucket full. I sold the brass to a scrap dealer and kept myself in beer money for a while, ha!

Cass

Found an old turn of the century small cemetery while scouting for a location to move a cell trap last night. About 3/4mile from nearest county road on now private property. It’s on find a grave.

The kids always get me. People quoted a lot more poetry back then, both during a funeral service and on headstones. Folks were much more accustomed to grief back then I think.

bump

You should work with the property owner and clean it up. Or maybe have a local history group reach out.

I’ve found all kinds of things but a pair of panties and a bra hanging in a tree a mile from the nearest road was the most unusual that made me wonder WTH Somebody left in a hurry evidently,

This isn't too exciting, but it was kind of cool at the time.

When I was in high school, I went out squirrel hunting in a unit of the Lyndon B. Johnson grasslands with a good stand of decently productive oaks. I wasn't having much luck in one particular spot, and it was getting dark, so I decided to still hunt back to my truck for the last few minutes of light I had. On the ground, I noticed something very bright and blue. Thinking it was a piece of trash, I set my shotgun against a tree, went to pick it up, and noticed it was a feather. I looked around and locked eyes with a very large peacock. I was able to get my shotgun before it ran off, but I decided against killing it, in case it escaped from a nearby property, and someone would miss it. Since then, I always kind of kicked myself for not shooting it... I think it may have been pretty tasty.

These grasslands are also a great place to look at old gravesites. There's a few little cemeteries off some of the FM and county roads, as well as a few isolated markers in the units themselves.

Not so much hunting, but being a Hollywood Marine, I spent a year or two training on Camp Pendleton for a few different obligations.

It remember finding a few en-bloc clips and casings from the old m1 rifles. Never kept any though. It feels really odd to share a title and uniform with the warfighters who carried those, and makes you think twice when you think your little plastic M-16 is getting heavy. On a side note, we had to call our machine gun range cold one day as a few buffalo had managed to find their way into the range's lateral limits. Being the dumb Marines they were, a few of our instructors tried to go chase them off.

I picked up some M1 clips from one of the many piles of them we came across on foot patrols in Guantanamo Bay.

I remember the buffalo wandering onto our range at Pendleton while I was at SOI. The instructors threatened us with jail time if we were to harm one... Then they go out to run them off the range and get chased while they're yelling at us to shoot it with the 40mm. We were laughing and yelling back that we couldn't do that or risk jail time. They ran us up and down one of the mountains next to the range most of the rest of the day for that.

Love this thread. I lost an old Barlow pocket knife when I was maybe 13 or 14, in the late '70s. Did everything with that knife and was sick to have lost it. Looked everywhere for it for days but no luck. While at the estate auction of the home place after my Mom died in '08, around 30 years later, I went around behind the woodshed to pee. That was where I always kept a worm bed, cleaned squirrels and rabbits, and took a leak when I was kid. Old habits die hard, even very old habits. Standing there peeing I looked at the back wall of the shed in front if me and there was my old Barlow. I must have stuck it in the wall when I finished cleaning a squirrel or something 30 years earlier.

Going through an old barn on one of the lease we used to have. I found Two Silver Dollars in the dirt one from 1923 and the other from 1921. I still have them to this day. Locked in my safe.

Back in the 1970s I was trapping south of Edmonton.

One day I decided to follow a stream I had seen but never explored, to see if there was any Beaver activity along it.
A mile or so down I came across a large building built next to the stream. It was obviously very old and trees had grown up all around it making it impossible to see until one was only a few yards from it.

It was about 60 feet long by 20 feet wide. The floor was terraced and covered with overlapping concrete plates with an oval hole in the middle of each plate.
There was nothing else to indicate what it may have been built for. No stanchions or rails such as one would see in a barn. No rooms or windows to suggest humans worked inside it.
There was only that floor to suggest it had a special purpose, but what purpose was it?

I never did find anyone who knew anything about that building. Perhaps because of it's location and because it had been unused for so long those who would have know what it was about had all died.

The only thing I could think of that it might have been made for was some sort of water treatment but how it would have worked I have no idea.


My BIL and sister bought a property west of town several years ago. While exploring the property they found a shotgun leaning against a tree.
It was very old and very badly weathered. It was a break action and the action was seized and any markings were unreadable.

They wanted to have it as a wall hanger so they brought it to me to restore as much as possible. I was able to determine it was a early smokeless powder shotgun of low value so I cleaned it up, got the action working and returned it to them. It is hanging over their fireplace now.

This is what they found.


Disassembled and rust removal started


Markings


Finished

NOW THAT IS A COOL STORY!

Great job on that shotgun Hogwart.

Another season gone. What did y’all find?

Love this thread! Friend of ours found this guy right in the middle of our ranch - a couple thousand yards from any house or former homestead. Heard of other folks in the area finding similar types of rounds. Practice rounds?
In Dimmit County




Headstamp dates it 1943, St. Louis

I have been to that crash site. The planes still fly through the hills there. Scared the crap out of me a couple of times.

If Buzz was "around" Van Horn, he was only hours away from the site of the B1 bomber crash. Pretty sure you get there through Presidio.

So far what I found were

Old beer, Coca-cola and medicine glass bottles.
abandoned duck blind
condoms
parts of old wire fences out in the middle of nowhere