Ross Bielema
Submitted for your approval: one sweating fat guy trying to put up a ground blind in the dark while holding a small flashlight and hungry mosquitoes biting him.
Rod Serling made such an introduction famous on “The Twilight Zone,” or at least the first part of the sentence. I’m not sure he could have kept his usual straight face (were he still alive) if he had seen me Wednesday night as I struggled for a good 30 minutes to put up a “quick pop-up” hunting blind.
Preparations before the archery deer season are taking place across the state as hunters gather their equipment and stuff their backpacks like winter-frenzied chipmunks stuff their cheeks.
There are bow sights to fine-tune, crossbows or bows to practice with, tree stands to dust off and, unfortunately for some of us, hub blinds to Sumo wrestle with.
Hub blinds, to you rookie ground-level hunters out there, are a relatively modern invention not unlike GPS and smart phones, but without the batteries. When they work as designed, they are as handy as a thumb stud on a pocketknife blade.
But when they won’t open, they are as handy as a pocketknife blade stuck in your thumb.
In fact, a few years back, I read the warning label to not put my hand on the hub — after my thumb was gushing blood because I did that! Warning labels can be hard to read an hour before sunrise inside a blackened blind.
Hubs are essentially metal domes with hinged spokes, similar in design to the center of an umbrella, with the arms of the umbrella as the fabric legs (spokes) of the blind. The idea is to pop open one or more hubs like umbrellas to quickly bing-bang-boom open the blind in a matter of seconds! Yes, it can be done. Sometimes, it even works as the company videos show.
The Ameristep Bone Collector blind I’d thrown in the back of my 6x6 Polaris ATV and drove to my deer hunting woods that night had been used once before. I recall erecting it early one morning a few years ago, shortly after buying it but without the benefit of a practice set-up. I was impressed with the sturdiness and wind-resistant design. It has strong nylon side loops at the outside center of each hub (each of four sides plus the top has hubs) so that it can be roped to trees so the wind won’t buffet it like most square-shaped blinds.
But I was bowhunting that morning and this is not a bowhunting blind. I moved my chair outside the blind and used it as a windbreak. The windows are too small and irregular shaped for bow shots. But it will work fine for my crossbow, and certainly for any rifle. The presumed-worthless bowhunting blind suddenly had a new life since crossbows were legalized for everyone last year. I prefer to leave my ground blinds up all season, since the deer become used to them. I hunt from the same blind for the archery and gun seasons.
I’d cleverly stowed the printed instructions inside the ground blind’s case, and followed the initial instructions on how to line up the “top” and “bottom” of the blind (sort of), but I had one big problem: determining which of the many hubs was the top! After many attempts to pop open what I thought was the top and holding this camouflage-colored Gordian knot in 20 different positions (only to realize that the blind will not fully deploy unless opened in the proper order), I realized that there was a colorful embroidered logo on the blind. This was the whole key to opening it. The logo had to be in an upright position to read, so that helped me determine the top!
After collapsing it back to its original form (a good 25 minutes after taking it out of the case in almost exactly the same form), I quickly popped open the top, then the sides! The door had to be closed to maintain the right tension on the blind so it would open (if that makes sense to you mechanical engineers out there), and yes, I had the door closed! Or so I thought, since it finally looked like a blind.
My last problem? Finding the door.
Most blinds have rectangular doors with visible zippers. This clever design has a hidden zipper in a half-triangle shape on the top and another half-triangle on the bottom. In a dark forest with a little flashlight, it’s basically invisible.
Staking and tying down the blind was a snap. The humidity was brutal and my glasses kept steaming up as I worked to get the task done before my wife sent out the search party.
Once I got home, I already looked at the adventure as just that.
Why do we put up with all these hassles? Why do we hunters expend so much effort on this crazy sport?
If you are an archery-deer hunter, you already know why.
If you aren’t, give it a try and you’ll discover that going crazy a few times a year makes the rest of the year bearable.