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What beautiful day today. Light clouds in a beautiful blue sky and virtually no wind today. It's 45 degrees right now. Very nice.

I have been having knee problems for a couple of year and had total knee replacement surgery February 2 so I haven't been getting out like ai normally would. I got up this morning with no physical therapy on the agenda.

I was feeling pretty good except for my back which has been bothering me for a couple of days. Decided to ignore it and get on with it. I hung a new flourescent light in the laundry room for the wife. Then since some people seem to be unable to go down 2nd AV SW and find number 226 even though the numbers are over the door, I decided to put up my old Double D Gopher Ranch gate sign on the front fence, so people can find the place. Hope they can see that!

This knee deal has kept me physically inactive since just after deer season. I could not believe how tired I was after this little bit of home improvement activity. So while I relaxed a bit the wife fixed lunch.

After lunch we drove north to the gopher fields. The wind was blowing a bit so it was cool. I started with a run of 5--5 straight shots,five straight hits. Then I had another 5 run--5 straight shots, 5 straight misses. Well I was using my 17 Hornday Mach 2 in my Martini and that little 17 grain bullet is so wind sensitive, and I'm sure the wind came up, yes that's it the wind came up.

I am not allowed to drive right now so the wife was driving. She drove to fast, hit every gopher hole and always lined the gophers up on her side of the truck. When I brought this to here attention, she told me that she was only doing it the way I did it when I drove. So not true!

We came to a flooded section of the two track and I told her to drive below it where it was dry. She drove above it on the side hill where I could see the grass was soaked. Half way through, the rear of the truck started sliding down hill to the left. She punched the gas and cranked the wheel hard right. That instantly threw up a rooster tail of mud and the truck snapped 90 degrees to our line of travel. She stopped and then punched it again. I firmly but quietly said STOP! and ask what in the heck did she think was doing. She said getting out of the mud. I told her we weren't bogged, we just didn't have traction and I told her to roll down the hill backwards and off the wet grass.

After she did that she said "gee that was fun." I reminded her that she would get very upset when I did this sort of the thing...She laughed and said its so different when you are behind wheel.

We spent another hour or so driving around and poked a few more gophers. The dogs got out and ran around a bit but they didn't seem to catch on that we were hunting. They still seemed to enjoy themselves getting out and running.

On the way out we bumped 4 big fat Mulie does. We found that interesting. In the 12 years we have hunted this ranch we have never ever seen a deer, ever.

Further down the road we saw a big golden eagle sitting on a power pole. We stopped and looked at it from perhaps 30 yards and it was not the least concerned. What a big bird! We drove on down the road and another golden eagle flew up out of the field. As we watched, it almost flew into our windshield.

Little further down we saw what we thought was a fox out in a field. It stopped and hunkered down as we got closer...we saw that it was a coyote that had already shed its winter coat all except for its tail. It was a lucky coyote as we had already put the guns away.

As you can see despite all my whining and moaning from being laid up with a healing knee, the wife and I still had a great spring day in Montana!!!

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DD, Ret.