“Not every hunt ends in a kill, but the hunter always comes home with a story. Some are short, others epic – like this one. But those stories are all special because they remind us what we really are, at heart, predators.” -Genuine Spunkybong Quote

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I usually don’t sleep over at Cedric’s, but in season I do. It is easier, since the hunt always begins very early. Regulations allow you to be at your tree stand a half hour before sunrise and leave a half hour after sunset, max. Hunting is prohibited at night for safety reasons. You could kill another hunter, mistaking him for game.

There is another reason you can’t hunt at night – fairness toward the prey. It takes the edge off the feeling of guilt and makes you feel less like a cold blooded killer. In the hunter’s convoluted mind, killing a whitetail while it is snoozing is considered the lowliest form of hunting sin.

It is paramount that you settle in at your station as early as possible, so that by the time the whitetail are out and about, you are already an indistinguishable part of the landscape and the whitetail won’t notice your presence when they appear for breakfast. Unless the winds have changed and you find yourself upwind, in which case you might as well pack up, shimmy down the ladder and go look for some cover downwind, that you can crouch behind. Whitetail are notoriously sensitive to smell and if they smell you, man, they are gone.

Cedric couldn’t make it that Sunday because an aunt in Trois Rivierès had suddenly been hospitalized and she had nobody, so he had to go be with her. The night prior, Gina had let me into the outhouse after dinner and I spent the better part of an hour checking out my gear. It is essential that nothing malfunctions out there in the open.

I had already cleaned the Lapua Magnum but even so, I broke it apart and rechecked that everything was where it was supposed ta be. I stuffed the pockets of my Fanatic Hoody jacket with ammo, as well as dry munchies like O’Henry bars and cashew nuts and filled my water bottle. It could be a long day. I cleaned the scope, put my Iphone on the charger, rechecked and updated GPS coordinates online and tried out the IHunt app to see if the doe-in-heat call worked. It did.

I turned to my heavy duty back pack. More ammo, paper towels, extra batteries, Iphone charger pack, my Zeiss Victory binoculars, a tiny first-aid box with sterile gauze, adhesive tape, waterproof bandages, antiseptic wipes, scissors and a tiny bottle of Advil for inflammations and headaches. Sundry stuff like the 20W speaker for my IHunt deer call and the bottle of doe-in-heat pee (its actual doe pee) went in next. And chap sticks for my lips. You have no idea how dry it can get sometimes, in the chill.

And alcohol. Alcohol warms you up, sure, but it dehydrates you, compromises your immune system and attacks your power of logic and reasoning. If you want to make it outa the woods in one piece, leave the bottle of vodka behind.

For hunting wear, I go with Sitka. If you want ta keep warm and dry, Sitka is unbeatable. Expensive, yes – a head to toe Sitka gear will set you back by a grand easily, but hey, its your health and well-being. Why feel frozen and miserable when you are supposed ta be having the time of your life? October can get awful wet and chilly. You might not get frostbite but you sure could come down with pneumonia.

I laid out my gear on the spare bed in the exact order I would put them on : Gore-Tex thermal long johns and a Merino crew neck thermal undershirt. Over my long johns I would pull on my Incinerator Bib, an ultra-heavy duty coverall that feels as if it weighs a ton. Next came the Sitka neck gaiter – it would protect me from the chill, from the bridge of my nose down to my shoulders. Beside the gaiter, I placed the Gore-Tex camouflage balaclava, through which only my eyes and lips were going ta be visible. The Fanatic Hoody jacket came next – thermally sealed and waterproof, it would keep me at room temp even at -40℃.

Now for the extremities – for gloves, I went for the best : UnderArmour Scent Control 2.0. Solidly thermal and bone dry, they trap 100% body heat. My Gore-Tex thermal socks came next.

I wasn’t done yet. The most important part of my gear – my MuckBoots rubberized fabric knee high hunting boots – came last. I got the boots two years back when I went hunting for caribou in the Tundra. They are deceptively lightweight but capable of keeping your toes warm even at -65℃.

The MuckBoots are life saving in more ways than one. The deadly massasauga rattlesnake has yet to sink its fangs through them and believe me, you’ll find the wriggly vermin in the unlikeliest places. Itself a hunter, the massasauga knows when hunting season is on and it packs a bite that can kill within minutes. The venom of masssauga, a cytotoxic venom, destroys tissue. It has digestive enzymes that disrupt blood flow and prevent blood clotting. Severe internal bleeding causes the death in minutes. In the wilderness, the massasauga is a death knell.

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The reason why you go in for the best in hunting gear is that it has got to be scent and odor cancelling. Suppose you are up on your tree stand and the wind changes. You can’t just climb down, carry your tree stand on your back and go set it up some place else.

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A tree stand is a permanent fixture, fixed to the tree with solid bolts, straps and lattices for your own safety and it remains in place through the year, right up until the next season. With the ladder and foot rests, it can weigh upwards of 80 lbs . Dismantling that, taking it off the tree and setting it up again at another spot is a half-day job for at least two hunky guys. The only time you remove a tree stand is when the prey have moved away from that region for good or if the stand has rusted and grown unsafe or the tree has weakened somehow. Moving a tree stand every time the wind changes is something only a certified schmuck will think of doing.

However, in spite of all scent cancelling gear, it is still a good idea ta station yourself downwind, because you will always expose scent-emitting parts of your anatomy, like your eyes, cheeks, lips or other stuff like the steam from your coffee mug. Or maybe you’ll want ta remove your balaclava for a while because it suddenly feels hot and stuffy or you’ll remove your gloves ta scratch a sudden itch under your armpit.

Remember, a whitetail can smell you from great distances, though given the location and ambient conditions, the distance can vary widely. I hunt at Cedric’s farm, an area that is heavily farmed, with a fair smattering of humans going about their daily chores. The whitetail here have come to recognize humans and have gotten used to their presence. A doe might walk up pretty close even though she has detected my smell. Then there is the wind – if it is a gentle 20kmph breeze, a whitetail can detect you at maybe 2-300 yards.

There’s one other thing I do that gives me a high kill chance – remember Part-5, the prep for the hunt, those fifteen days prior to season start? Every one of those fifteen days, I come and go in broad daylight, first ta fix the SpyPoint cameras and then ta choose the right spot and fix the tree stand.

Thereafter, every day I go there to replenish the lure – the salt and the piles of apples and carrots and even if I cannot actually see them when I enter the clearing, I know they are there, just outside my line of sight, fully conscious of my presence. I let ‘em smell me and grow accustomed to my smell.

What with all the largesse in the form of apples and carrots, I figure that the whitetail see me in a positive frame of mind.

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You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned all the gear needed ta skin and clean the kill, after it’s over. If you’ve been paying any attention, that’s because I have written about that in one of the prior parts in this series, I don’t remember which. Suffice it ta know that all those items – the Gerber kit of skinning and the dressing knives, the winch and rope for stringing up the whitetail and of course the coupon that I’d have ta attach to one of the deer’s earlobes as proof of my permit – were already stowed in my pick-up truck, ready ta roll.

Before I went to bed that night, I did one last thing – I laid out my Alpha Chef Bullet Shaker Thermos flask on the table, ready to be filled with piping hot Colombian mild, first thing in the morning. The Alpha Chef carries a 24-hour steaming hot guarantee.

The season would start 5:30am next morning and one of those whitetail in the clearing, gorging on my apples, taking me to be Santa, would find out I actually wasn’t.

I was hoping it would be Zorba.

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Take it easy. Part-7 is waiting ta burst forth, once I get some inspirayshun.

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So now you have a gun and you think you are ready ta rock and roll. Actually you aren’t. Not until you get acquainted with the rules first.

Hunting is strictly controlled in Canada and if you are a serious hunter, before you even entertain the thought of going out on a hunt, you have to read the bible on Quebec hunting laws, Sport hunting – General Regulations, cover to cover. It clearly lays down the law.

You start by getting acquainted with the definition of ‘prey’ – what you are allowed ta hunt. And those are – Caribou, whitetail (common spotted deer), moose, black bear, bearded wild turkey and the last category, defined as ‘other small game’ – rabbits, partridge, duck, ptarmigan and other wild fowl.

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Once you are clear about what you can kill, you move on to where you can hunt – ie:the ‘zone’, the region where you are allowed ta hunt. Quebec is divided into 29 hunting zones and the guide comes with a map of those 29 zones. You have to pick a zone and go buy a one-season license, that will allow you ta hunt only in that zone. You also need a “hunter’s certificate” for the weapons you’ll use.

If you are an experienced hunter, you’ll know the zones where the chances of a kill are the maximum. But remember, the more the game in one particular zone, the more the zone will be crawling with hunters.

Take for instance Anticosti Island, the spit of land that looks like a traffic island at the mouth of the St Lawrence. It has more deer than humans – in fact so many that it might as well elect a whitetail for mayor instead of a human being. You could kill a whitetail there even if your gun went off by accident.

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But I won’t advise you to hunt in Anticosti. I know I could get my kill but I don’t venture there because I’m smart. Places like Anticosti attract huge hordes of hunters in season, most of whom are stupid schmucks who are nothing but drunks with loaded guns. I don’t like the odds that some pissed drunk son of a bitch will mistake me for a whitetail and put a bullet in me. Stories of accidental shooting deaths while hunting in Quebec are legion and more often than not, the perp is able to get away with a suspended sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

M

It isn’t even about the meat harvested from a hunt, which can be sizeable. I mean, a 250kg whitetail can easily yield around 100lbs of prime meat and that’s a lot. But if a hunter tells you he does it for the meat, to put food on the table, trust me that’s BS, he’s lying. He does it for the adrenaline.

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One other thing about hunting zones – every zone has privately-owned and public land. You needn’t seek permission to hunt on public land, your permit takes care of that. But if you wish ta hunt on privately owned property, it has to be an understanding between you and the landowner, whereby he allows you to hunt on his land in exchange for a certain amount of cash as rent. $500 per head for letting you hunt is normal, a nice spot of change.

Like I told you in Part-4, I hunt at my dear friend, Cedric’s prime 100-acre spread that abuts a massive wild life reserve known as Parc Omega, in Montebello, just over an hour’s drive from where I live. I don’t pay Cedric anything for the privilege, for reasons explained in Part-4, if you have cared ta read it. To Cedric, I’m family.

In general you are safer if you hunt on privately owned land since it is expensive and therefore less crowded and consequently the chances of your catching a misdirected .306 slug between your shoulder blades are minimal.

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Let’s say you got yourself a hunting license for a particular zone. Now you got ta sit down and read the rules for that zone, which tell you when you can kill a certain species, what kind of weapon you are allowed ta use, whether you can kill a male, a female or a calf of that species and just how many you can shoot – the bag limits.

Oh yes, the bag limits – very very important stuff. Here are some numbers you can bag per season, in a very general sense, since they vary, zone ta zone – Caribou (two per hunter), Moose (one per two hunters), Black Bear (two per hunter), Bearded wild turkey (two per hunter), Whitetail (one per hunter) and so on. For whitetail, in order to make life interesting, they have lucky draws and if you win, you can have an extra whitetail or say, in a doe-only season, you are allowed ta bag a buck too, over and above the doe that you are already eligible for.

There are bag limits even in the ‘other small game’ category. For partridge, it is 5 per day and you mustn’t be caught in possession of more than 15 at any given time, even in your basement freezer back home. Likewise, for ptarmigan it is 10 and 30 respectively and so on.

Check out season dates as they depend upon the zone you are going ta hunt in. Just as a rough ball park, moose season is September->October, whitetail : September->November, black bear : May->June and September->October, bearded wild turkey : April->May and so on. The longest season is for caribou : August->October and then December->January. The extended season is partly because no one wants to hunt them for meat (the taste sucks) and also because the -50℃ Canadian Tundra, where you usually find caribou herds, is too hostile an environment to enjoy a hunt in.

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Always be aware of when the season has ended in your zone. Get caught post-season with a dead whitetail in the back of your pick-up truck and you are looking at a serious fine, north of five grand, plus the confiscation of your hunting permit and gun. And if you are dumb enough to be sitting having a beer inside your truck or a skidoo or ATV, celebrating your kill when the rangers catch you, your vehicle is gone too.

All confiscations are permanent and confiscated stuff are auctioned off in public auctions.

Canadian forest rangers are very different from their counterparts in my country of birth, India, where a twenty rupee bill will allow you to go on a massacre and swagger around like Roy Rogers and no one will bat an eyelid. If you’re a rich movie star in India, they might harass you a bit, slap a case on you just to soften you up for the eventual palm greasing and then let you walk away. Hey, the ranger in India will even recommend for you a taxidermist, who just happens to be his bro-in-law.

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Okay, so now you really are ready ta rock and roll. If you’re going after large game, don’t begin with black bear or moose – things can get nasty with those. So start with the harmless whitetail.

Well before the season begins, find yourself a good spot, preferably a clearing in a copse of trees. I did and it was easy. I fixed six SpyPoint Castorama internet-ready infra-red motion sensing cameras at various points on Cedric’s land. I found that the camera north of the Parc Omega Reserve clicked the maximum shots of whitetail and chose that one.

That weekend, still two weeks ahead of season, I took my tree-stand in my F150 and had Cedric help me erect it at that spot, taking care to remain downwind of the little clearing where the SpyPoint had caught whitetail milling around. The whitetail must have watched me setting up the tree stand but whitetail are whitetail – dumb as ever.

A tree-stand is a camouflaged perch, around fifteen feet up on a tree and it looks like a chair with armrests and a bar in front to rest your rifle for the shot. The camouflage, while essential, isn’t enough. Whitetail have a strong sense of smell. Your camouflage might fool ‘em, but your smell won’t. They can smell you from a hundred yards and if they do, you might as well pack up and go home.

Besides a strong sense of smell, whitetail also have a very keen eyesight that can detect motion easily. So, before you climb up onto the tree stand, you have ta make sure you won’t need ta go pee or poop or eat/drink or anything else, because you have ta remain stock-still for hours at a stretch, if you want a kill.

And for heaven’s sake, make damn sure the stand is sturdy and can take your weight. A hunter pal of Cedric’s is now a paraplegic, after crashing to the ground when his tree stand came loose. (pic courtesy:sportsmanguide.com)

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So, now you have your tree stand ready, at a carefully chosen location that you know to be thick with whitetail. Here’s what I do just before the actual hunt. Still two weeks from season, I drive down to Cedric’s and launch a ‘hearts and minds’ exercise – the lure.

In the middle of the clearing where I had erected my tree stand, I leave a large lump of salt on top of a tree stump for the whitetail ta lick on and they love licking salt.

Before the season is done, I’ll have burned through 300lbs of salt.

Next, I pay 60 bucks for eight plus eight 25-lb sacks of apples and carrots I leave a pile here and a pile there, on every one of those pre-season days. My trips to Cedric’s farm are essential. I replace the SpyPoint batteries and leave fresh piles of apples and carrots behind. Soon the SpyPoint begins going off feverishly every ten minutes and that spot where I fixed my tree stand starts looking like New Delhi’s Connaught Place in rush hour. Whitetail of all sizes converge on the clearing ta gorge on all them yummy apples. Variety is the spice of life, so I get a few bags of carrots too, just for a change of taste. I pamper them.

Important – those fifteen days, I come and go in broad daylight and even if I cannot actually see them when I enter the clearing, I know they are there, just outside my line of sight. I let ‘em see me and grow accustomed to the sight of me entering the clearing every day and leaving all that yummy stuff out for them. They are so dumb they think I’m Santa.

Here, I’d like ta qualify my statement – the females are the dumb ones. They get trusting and friendly real fast. Last fall, after I had been laying the piles of apples for a few days, one just walked up to me while I was arranging a pile of carrots and began merrily chomping on them just a few feet away. I held out a carrot in my hand and she unhesitatingly came over, sniffed at the carrot for a micro-second, before pulling it out of my hand with her teeth. As she came real close, I had the chance to gaze into those mesmerizingly serene, guileless and trusting doe eyes. It wasn’t season yet and so I couldn’t touch her, but I’m not sure if I would be able ta, even if it was season.

Hunting females is a cinch, but a word of caution here – we are all emotional beings, we humans. If you want ta be a hunter, don’t let your prey get too friendly and pull at your heart strings. You’ll find it impossible to put a bullet in her. Remember what you’re there for – to kill her and shrink-wrap and freeze her in little chunks in your basement freezer and BBQ her through the year over beer. You’re not here ta cuddle her.

The males are another thing. Whitetail bucks are mean and suspicious and won’t venture into the clearing unless they are absolutely sure you aren’t around. Or unless they are horny and think they’ll find a doe there.

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Whitetail hunting season coincides with whitetail mating season, which makes it a lot easier ta lure them. I only use lures as a fall-back, if the season is about ta get over and I still haven’t got my whitetail.

There are two kinds of lures I have zeroed in on. Foremost is the call – if you can imitate the sound of a doe in heat, trust me, any bucks within a mile will come charging, their richards long and distended. Here’s what I did – I checked out hunting call apps and found some interesting ones in the ITunes app store. I chose the IHunt app since it sounded the most natural to me. It has the calls of every kind of wildlife on the planet. Next, I got myself a WiFi-ready speaker with a tiny 20W amp. I fixed the speaker in a wedge formed by two tree trunks at the edge of the clearing and I was ready ta roll.

If the IHunt app doesn’t fool a whitetail, I go to Phase:2 – doe’s pee. Yeah, the urine of a doe in heat. You get it in any hunting store and the best I found is a brand named just that – Doe in heat. It comes in a tiny $15 bottle and it is real doe’s pee. I sprinkle a few drops on a rag and tie the rag to a low slung branch as close to my tree stand as possible. Doe’s pee has a very pungent stench and if I’m lucky with the wind direction, it won’t be long before a horny buck pays a reccy visit.

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The first time I set eyes on Zorba was just after I had fixed the SpyPoint cameras this August, with still two weeks to go for the season ta begin. Zorba was magnificent, his ten-point antlers rising above his head majestically, like a crown. During those fifteen days, as I watched him come and go, he usually appeared well after midnight. He came and went with heavy deliberate steps and when he entered the clearing, the first thing he did was ta raise his head and sniff at the air imperiously. Then he made his way toward the apple piles and the does and lesser bucks kinda scattered and let him have his fill first.

I named him Zorba because he seemed ta have that gruff, rugged Anthony Quinn persona. One time, he ambled right up to the camera and sitting in my basement 50kms away, I watched as he raised his nostrils ta sniff at it. I had fixed the SpyPoint just above his reach, on a sturdy branch and after a moment of sniffing he lost interest and began sniffing the butts of the does who had gathered there, sending them scurrying this way and that, in blushing embarrassment.

In two weeks, Zorba wasn’t going ta stop at just sniffing butts – he would be looking to put his richard in some serious pussy. That is when I’d get him……

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You want ta know what happened to Zorba, don’t you? So, watch this space for Part-6.

“Hunting is not a sport. A sport is when both sides know it is just a game.”

– Jim Corbett (1875-1955) British hunter, tracker, author of ‘Man-eaters of Kumaon‘

If you want ta start hunting like a pro, listen very carefully….

Here is how it goes down here in Canada. First, you get yourself a hunting license . It is around a hundred bucks (or like any American will say, a Benjamin); you attend a one-day course on hunting regulations and firearms safety and then at the end of the day, you have to pass a written test on everything you learned.

But don’t worry, you’ll pass – the system is rigged to see that you pass. The “Departement du Faune et Parcs” of Quebec needs your membership for its financial survival and the gun manufacturers need your order.

The classroom and the test are a farcical pantomime. It’s like when a company hires its external auditors who sign a contract to audit the very same company that is paying them to audit their books. In the end of the audit, the auditor certifies that the client’s books are up and up and there has been no embezzlement or any other malfeasance during the fiscal year.

Same thing ………… a rigged system, making laws to break laws. 

When I settled in the west there was one thing I learnt very quickly – it is not that the system in the west is less corrupt and more law abiding than in developing nations like India, my country of birth. The law in the west is stretched to bring inside its umbrella of legality all those things that other nations would consider illegal.

One glaring example is the US President, who has been positioned safely ensconced far above the law, by the American legal system. The American Pres cannot be prosecuted for any reason whatsoever, a fact amply proven through a recent Supreme Court order in a series of open and shut cases against Donald Trump that would have sent an ordinary American to jail faster than the speed of light. Trump can commit fraud, embezzle, lie, deceive and cheat – stuff that he has already shown ample propensity for – and it’s all legal.

Likewise, you want to buy a gun in Canada? Just go through a process that is in fact nothing more than a sham and a Canadian hunting licence – a piece of plastic that looks like a debit card – will arrive in the mail within 10 days. It is permanent and you don’t ever have to renew it, unless you turn out to be a schmuck and break the hunting laws down the road.

Next, armed with your hunting permit, you apply for a ‘Firearms Possession Licence’, renewable every five years. A week later another card will arrive, this one with your mugshot on it, that says that henceforth you are permitted to buy, carry and sell your ‘non-restricted’ firearm.

A non-restricted firearm can either be a single shot shotgun or a rifle – bolt action, pump action, breech loading, whatever, but single shot, ie: you have to manually reload after every shot. If you are as young as 12, for you to possess and fire a non-restricted firearm, Canadian law needs just the identity and email ID of your parent or legal guardian.

Then there’s the ‘restricted’ category of firearms – long barreled, heavy caliber handguns and semi-automatic rifles that you can keep on firing one shot at a time, fresh rounds falling into the chamber automatically one after the other every time you pull the trigger, until the magazine runs dry.

Most first-time licence holders don’t get to have a restricted firearm permit off the bat. You have to apply separately for it, with a convincing reason as to why you want to possess one. It’s easy. Sports shooting at a range can fall under the category of ‘convincing reasons’. I got my Glock that way.

There is a third category – ‘prohibited’ firearms. Those are handguns with short barrels, revolvers and pistols that can be easily concealed and are used solely for firing at close range (like killing other humans). Also under ‘prohibited’ are automatic weapons, military assault rifles and firearms that have been modified (like sawn-off shotguns).

I don’t have to tell you why these categories exist. Unlike our neighbors in the south, Canada lets you fool around with guns only for the purposes of hunting. That ‘right to bear arms and protect’ crap that you hear down south of the border is nothing but a pile of horseshit that has turned putrid, with flies buzzing around it.

In Canada, if you are driving with a gun in the car and the cops pull you over for some reason, here are the only ways that they may let you go if you….

• You have a valid and correct firearms license
• You are driving to or from a firing range or gun club.
• You are driving to or from a hunt. And have a valid hunting permit. If you are coming back from a hunt and have your kill on the back of your pickup truck, you have a ranger’s certification (token punched and attached to ear of a valid kill).

Oh yeah, it is very different down south of the border. Let me show you just how different through a real life example…….

Christmas 2014, a doting Nevada dad takes his 8-year old son to a gun show and gets him a cool 9mm Uzi Pro-1W1 assault rifle with a 36-round magazine and a hair trigger. Capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, it is a lethal weapon that is usually carried by members of special forces. That is 10 rounds every second. Try to count to ten in one second and you’ll see how fast that is.

And that is the kid’s Christmas present. 

Not even five minutes have passed since the kid removed the gift wrapper in the parking lot of the show and he is dead, flung five feet by a short burst, accidentally killed by his own little playful fingers.

The kid’s death has turned Daddy dear into a gun control advocate. Lots of good that will do to you now, moronic schmucko.

So now you have your hunting permit and your firearms permit and now you trot over to a gun retailer or outfitter.

Me, I didn’t have to buy my first gun, since I already had one – Dory, my trusty Lapua338 with the Nikon Monarch scope from my days at the SOAS. Dory is an all-in-one – lightweight, accurate at 5000 feet, the 8mm round leaping out of the muzzle at an astonishing mile per second, it can drop a half-ton moose in its tracks with one shot.

Gun owners are never satisfied with just one gun. This is as plain as Pythagoras’ theorem, trust me. You buy your first gun and you’ll get hooked. Soon you’re spending a better part of your savings on guns, rounds of different grains, scopes and accessories. My colleague, Michel, owns no less than six different scopes alone and has turned a large closet in his house into an armory. He has a Sako A7 .338, A Nosler M48 .306, a Mossberg Patriot .306 and has just struck a deal on his brother-in-law’s Ruger18004 Limited Edition.

Another thing – gun owners don’t just own guns, they brag about them – how they acquired them, what a great deal they got, how it was going to go away if they hadn’t bought it right there and then, how they got a whitetail at 500 yards with it and so on.

Me, I just have a gun rack along one wall of my walk-in closet. I too have some beauts and I’ve been carrying on and on about guns and you must be sicka listening. But before I change the topic, let me tell you how I got my Marlin. Last spring, my buddy Simon was going off on a bear hunt and said he had a place open in the package with the outfitters because his bro had dropped out. I had vacation time left.

Bears need a heavier caliber, if you don’t want them to keep coming at you even after you’ve put a round ‘em. You need something that’ll stop them dead in their tracks. I went off to Baron and got myself a Marlin .450 lever action. With bears, you got to go with lever action because with a charging black bear you won’t have the time to work your bolt.

If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll tell you all about my first black bear kill some day. I am a right proper blabber-mouth.

Hold on a moment. There are other very interesting stuff you can go for, besides a rifle or a shotgun. In fact, for some of them, the hunting season is way longer, an advantage given to them because it is harder to get a kill with them, but that’s something I’ll come to later, if you’ll have some patience. 

Those others are bows and arrows and crossbows, but they are close-quarters stuff, accurate only within just 50-60 yards. Besides, the turn-around time (ie : reloading) takes too long and the whitetail may be gone by then. 

Never ever try to hunt black bear with crossbows or bows and arrows (though some folks do). With a maximum range of 60 yards, if you miss (the chances of which are very good), you will have no time to reload. A charging black bear covers 60 yards in three seconds. I mean, we all have to die some day, but being gradually crushed and mauled and mutilated, your skin torn of your back, your spinal chord severed with one twist, isn’t the way you’d like to go, is it?

Or if you’re up on a tree stand and a 500-lb black bear is tearing the bark out of the tree in rage, he might just starve and freeze you to death, if you’re hunting alone and don’t have cellphone coverage there. 

In hunting, there are many interesting ways to die and if you’re a schmuck, chances are that you’ll find one of ’em.

Then there are guns that fall under the category officially known as ‘Black Powder Firearm’. A black powder rifle is nothing but a modern version of the old musket that was in military use in the mid-18th to early 19th centuries, where you stuffed a measure of gunpowder in the barrel and then dropped a steel ball after it, pulled back the hammer over a sliver of flint, cocked it and fired. And then you cleaned the barrel with a long narrow brush and repeated the whole procedure for your next shot, the time lapse between shots around 3-5 minutes.

The white settlers in those days preferred those leather powder pouches to store their black powder. They gave them a sense of supremacy. And that is because in 19th century Mid-West America, the most popular powder pouch material was squaws’ tit, no kidding. Ask the Harold Robbins character, Nevada Smith, if you don’t believe me.

The black powder guns used today are nothing but a sleek fad. You can get one with a Zeiss scope and the powder comes in the form of neat little pellets, so you don’t get your hands dirty. So, instead of having to pour a measured quantity of gunpowder down the muzzle from a powder pouch like Daniel Boone used to do, you just stuff two little pellets down the muzzle and shove the round in. You fit a percussion cap (which is like a tiny explosive charge), under the hammer, cock the hammer and fire.

And spend the rest of the day cleaning your gun.

The feel of firing a black powder gun isn’t exactly the same as a regular rifle. If you are using those older black powder pellets, the gun will take two seconds to fire, after you’ve pulled the trigger. And when it does, it will look like the whole thing is exploding in your face. Flames will shoot out not only from the barrel but also right in front of your nose where the percussion cap explodes after being hit by the hammer.

So, hold steady after you’ve pulled the trigger and wait for the gun ta fire. Second, immediately after the flames, there’s an awful lot of smoke that the barrel discharges, which will block your view and leave you coughing and spluttering unless you take care ta hold your breath. If you have managed to just injure a whitetail, it’ll be gone before you are able to clearly see once again through the smoke and you won’t know which way it went. 

If you wish me to continue enlightening you, I am trying to imagine the next part, so hang on for Part-5…

Curly is unlucky. He just happens to be the closest to you. Your Bushnell Broadhead range finder says 30 feet, give or take. No problem, the Vector can take down a moose at 60 yards. Curly is a heavyset male – maybe 300 pounds – with an antler set that consists off two large multi-pointed antlers on either side and and two smaller frontal 6-8 point antlers. Your TenPoint Vector© crossbow gets its brand name from them.

The more the number of branches (points) that an antler has the more alpha the male is.

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Your bow string, made of a composite fibre, is taut and quivering, held back by the latch, the butt of the Carbon Express bolt nestled in the front of it. Drawing the string and cocking it is difficult in the cold, but your TenPoint comes with an AcuDraw cocking device that works somewhat like a fisherman’s reel. A concept in physics called “moment” makes it easier to reel the string back until the latch catches it.

Curly is sniffing a doe’s butt, relaxed, ambling along. “How about it, Tina? Huh? It’s mating season for C’s sakes,” he seems to be mumbling to her. Remember Tina from Part-2 and how Curly was looking for her to give?

Well, tonight, Tina won’t have to give – Curly won’t be living that long. You look through the scope at a point slightly above Curly’s shoulders and hold your breath as your index finger feels for the SafeGrip trigger guard and snakes its way in and around the trigger. Never tarry at that point – take in a deep breath, two seconds and then, let go.

‘Thungggg!’ – the arrow shoots out in a blur. You strain to hear the sound of the hit and sure enough, you hear the ‘thokk!’ as the titanium of the broad head meets tissue.

The first reaction of a caribou, hit by an arrow or a bullet, is a startled leap into the air, followed by a crazed scramble as it tries to figure out just what the hell happened. That’s exactly what Curly does and in the twilight as he leaps up, you can clearly discern the broad head sticking out from slightly above his shoulder blades, buried right up to the fletch (the fins).

You must have hit a vein – blood is spurting out in gushing pulses, no doubt keeping pace with his dying heart. As his hooves hit the ground, Curly breaks away from the herd and takes off into the wilderness, in the general direction of a small snowbound copse of pines on a knoll around a mile from where you are.

Funny how quickly life returns back to normal in the animal world. Animals are nature’s ultimate fatalists. They know their time on earth is fleeting. They don’t hurry, plan, hoard, trick, deceive, conspire, nope, they don’t. Perhaps they are way above us, spiritually, more ‘with it’, more accepting and more virtuous than us. They are God’s so-called chosen ones maybe? Yes, perhaps they are the ones who eventually have the last laugh.

Not a tear is shed for a downed compatriot, there is not even a pause. The herd is already moving away, unaware of the sudden intrusion and consequent assassination.

It usually takes a while to find the stricken caribou – sometimes maybe even a couple of hours. You pray it will collapse somewhere you can access with your ski-doo or ATV, so you can rig it and tow it back to the shack. You can’t sling a 250lb caribou over your shoulder and walk back with it, no.

If Curly tripped over the edge of a ravine, you just lost your kill. You will have to grit your teeth and go back to the shack and maybe try again tomorrow, though it might be difficult if the herd has moved on by then. There was a guy, over at the inn at Whapmagoostui, who had offered his drone at a hundred bucks an hour, but caribou had seemed so plenty, you had declined. You might need him, in case Curly can’t be traced.

Meanwhile Curly just keeps on going, disappearing in the snow weighted pines, the grey-white of his pelt the perfect camouflage in the mud and snow. Fortunately, the crimson of his blood stands out on the snow and you go after him. You track him for an hour and you finally find him lying on his side, still alive, chest heaving, his eyes wide open, as plumes of mist escape his flared nostrils.

There is no indignation, no reprehension, no accusation, in those beautiful, guileless eyes. His eyes don’t say, ‘Hey what the f–k did I do to you?’ There is just acceptance – a simple innocent understanding, something that strikes you that only Hindu sages are known to have. The SlickTrick Magnum broad head is sticking out between his shoulder blades, its gleam dulled by blood and tissue, but otherwise undamaged. Broad heads are expensive but unless they have hit rock, they can be used multiple times.

As you sit on your haunches and watch the life ebb out of Curly, you note that the spurts of blood have waned to just a trickle now – he does not have much time left, maybe seconds. You will be able to extricate the arrow only after you have cut Curly open later on. You are filled with a strange melancholy as you regard Curly silently. You don’t enjoy the sight of a living being dying right in front of your eyes, especially when you are the one that despatched that being.

“I’m sorry it had to end this way, Curly,” your voice is a muted whisper as you reach out to touch the fine silky down on his heaving chest,” I hunt for food. In my place, you would too. “ You immediately start feeling better.

That’s of course a lie. You hunt for pleasure, for the thrill. But you are you, corrupted by the world you live in.

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Suddenly  you sense that you are not alone and you stiffen. Your time at the SOAS has given you, not just a sixth, but a seventh, eighth and a ninth sense. There is a shuffle in the snow behind you and at the same instant, your SOAS training kicks in, suppressing the impulse to immediately turn and look. In the world of carnivores, sudden turns can be fatal.

You gradually swivel your eyes and now you can see them clearly. Coyotes – you let out a sigh of relief, in the form of a blast of steam from your nostrils. Coyotes are cowardly, not known to kill unless they are certain the prey is incapacitated.

A pack of arctic coyotes have formed a U-shaped half ring behind you, low growls and snivels coming out of their bared teeth, along with clouds of steam from flared nostrils. Arctic coyotes are like their cousins, the wolves – cute, but cold and emotion-free. You could literally die trying to cuddle one, trust me.

Remember the road runner cartoon that has a scrawny, dumb coyote called Wile-e-Coyote who gets outwitted by the road runner every time? Well, coyotes aren’t dumb at all. They are just dirty sons of bitches. They kill caribou but they don’t like the taste of venison. They find some sort of macabre pleasure in transforming the poor deer into chunks of flesh and leaving those chunks there. Coyotes are crazy about fowl, like partridge, grouse and wild turkey, not deer.

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The coyotes had been there first actually and they were on the verge of tearing Curly apart, when they sensed your approach. Oh yeah, that is another lesson you have learned early in your life – always remain downwind.

But this time, Curly had been downwind and you had no choice. The coyotes caught your scent and retreated behind some shrubs at the periphery of your vision. You know they are still there somewhere, just not exactly where.

You remove the outer glove from your right hand and ease the Glock out of your jacket pocket. In slow motion, you swing it up in the air and fire a round. Startled by the shot and dazzled by the gaudy orange and yellow hunting vest that you have on, the coyotes quickly melt into the snow.

The vest is important. You don’t want a Dick Cheney clone mistaking you for a caribou and drawing a bead on you inadvertently. There are assholes like Dick Cheney everywhere. In Quebec, fatal hunting gun accidents aren’t prosecuted. They figure that if you believe that the caribou had it coming, then your accidental victim had it coming too.

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I’ll switch to first person now. I can do dat. It’s my fookin blog, remember? It’s about me anyway.

My encounter with the coyotes was the last day of the season. It’s over now. Hunting season has shut down for the year.

Of course, I can still go out and get some coyotes or rabbits. For coyotes, there are no stipulated bag limits in the Montérégie where I live and so, a couple of years back when I came up empty handed at the end of the season with no kills, I went on a rampage.

I offed at least 20 coyotes that December. I didn’t eat ‘em of course. Interestingly, we kill coyotes but never think of eating ‘em. Sure, coyote meat is kinda rubbery, like horse meat or bear meat, but we eat bears and horses. Then how come we wrinkle our noses when it comes to the coyotes?

Simon, next door, tells me this is one of those conundrums, but I think it’s the stigma attached to coyotes – bullies in a pack but wimpy cowards when alone, streaked with dirt, fur always messed up with flecks of blood from the numerous daily skirmishes over scraps of kill left over by hunters – that scavenging, sniveling persona that has grown round them.

The last coyote I killed was a female, a magnificent specimen the size of a full grown German Shepherd, encased in long, thick, fluffy, dirty grey fur. She was barely breathing when I came upon her, the round having passed right through her chest. Startling blue eyes stared up at me, unwavering and cold, the acceptance of the suddenness of life’s twists and turns writ large in them.

At some other time and setting, I might have hugged her, but after you are out hunting a while, you learn not to get carried away with wild animals if you want ta stay alive. Coyotes are dogs without the love gene.

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In Canada, all farm-owners are hunters and trappers too, since their farms invariably teem with wildlife of all sorts, throughout the year. If you own a medium sized farm in Canada of say twennie acres, you’ll never have to buy even a single pound of meat at the grocery store as long as you live. You’ll be dining on fresh venison, turkey, partridge, duck, rabbit – all year long.

I hunt at Cedric’s 100-acre spread that abuts a massive wild life reserve known as Parc Omega, in Montebello, just over an hour from where I live. Cedric and I have known each ever since, one stormy February night in 2010, I had stopped on the 20-East and pulled out his unconscious wife from a Jeep Cherokee that had skidded into a ditch and was about to be completely swallowed up by snow. I had dragged Gina’s limp body across 100 feet of asphalt and laid her across the back seat and covered her with my jacket and driven her to the Valleyfield Emergency, calling 911 ahead so they’d be ready for her.

They are very different – the Provenchers. Barely literate deep rust belt, 200% Trump constituency, living practically cut off from the outside world. Historically these folks are virulently bigoted and if you stop at a village for a coffee and gas, they’ll be nice if you don’t stay too long.

But me – I am family now. Nothing happens at the Provencher household that they don’t make sure I am a part of. When he found out I was an avid hunter, he took me out and swept his arms over the dense forest land that I could make out over the horizon and said, ‘From now, this is your land to hunt, come and go as you like.’

As word of Gina’s miraculous escape spread through neighboring farms, a little old brown Bengali from a hick town named Durgapur in Eastern India became one of the most beloved human beings in the region.

Christmas now is at the Provencher spread every year. Gina’s twin, Sophia, a spinster who has a kind of ethereal beauty, has learned how ta make tandoori chicken and its funny how Gina finds ways for Sophia and me to end up sitting side by side at the dinner table every time.

Of course, the secret of a friendship is give and take. I never fail to share my kills with Cedric. This time too, I let him have the coyotes. He in turn would probably sell the fur to Canada Goose, Kanuk or other high end parka places at around eighty quid a piece. You buy that same parka for upwards of $1000 a piece.

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But killing coyotes is not my style. Large game hunting (bear, deer, moose) is and that’s off limits by the end of November.

Funny, but the large game (especially the whitetail) somehow sense that the hunting season has ended and that it is okay now to be swaggering around, with not a care in the world, with no need to wait until dark. Post-season, if the whitetail could use their hooves to thumb their nostrils at you, they would.

There is a small town of four hundred souls on the Quebec-Ontario border named Duhamel, a stone’s throw from the Provencher spread – as pretty a town as you can ever find anywhere on God’s earth. Local farmers like Cedric ride into town on their pick-up trucks once a month and stock up on non-perishables like toilet paper and shampoo – anything that they are unable ta grow.

When the hunting season draws to a close, Duhamel begins ta look like Times Square for whitetail. There are more deer than humans in that town then. The town folk are okay with it. You keep your kitchen door ajar in Duhamel and go take a shower and when you come back down, there might be a whitetail taking a peek inside your fridge for yummy stuff.

Post-season, everybody in Duhamel makes nice. Almost every home in Duhamel acquires a pet whitetail and every home has mountain-sized sacks of carrots and apples to feed them. Off season, like Robert DeNiro’s Don Lino in ‘Shark Tale’ every Duhamel citizen says ‘deer are our friends, we shouldn’t eat deer’.

Until the next hunting season – when those very same Don Linos turn blood thirsty just like in the movie and all those pet whitetails that had been prancing around town disappear from view. They are now looked at as juicy venison cuts and steaks.

Cool.

I am not finished yet. Watch out for Part-4.

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Mig Alley

North Korea – China border

March 1952

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You are probably wondering why the story has suddenly moved to the Korean peninsula.

Listen, this blog is mine and I can take the story anywhere I please, capisce? Just bear with me and you’ll see the connection at some point in the future.

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When the Korean War began in 1950, the North Koreans didn’t have an air force worth its name. Their bosom pals, the Chinese, did but they could not have done much to help since they themselves had a pitiful air force consisting of hand-me-down Yak1s, Mig-2s&3s and assorted other World War II planes that the Soviets had been about to mothball.

Besides, China was itself a paraplegic in 1950, decimated and sucked dry by decades of brutal Japanese occupation.

As to the other communist nation that could have helped, Stalin’s Russia, it was still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War and just beginning to gather its shit together, ill-prepared to provide the North Koreans with any significant support.

North Korea was wide open.

Those days, victory depended solely on air power and America had overwhelming superiority there. Could America have moved in and delivered the coup de grace, bombed Kim Il Sung’s communist dictatorship back to stone age, united Korea into one vibrant democracy that is today’s South Korea and built a permanent presence right at the communists’ doorstep? Did it overestimate the USSR/China’s military capability at that moment? Did America chicken out? I think that it did.

America had no reason to be so apprehensive about a Soviet counter strike.

Yes, a Nazi son-of-a-bitch theoretical physicist named Klaus Fuchs, had recently been saved from the Nuremberg noose and pampered by the US. Yes, he had been put to work on the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project and yes, he had defected and shown the Russians how to build an atom bomb and they had tested their first device in 1949.

But the Soviets were yet to build a reliable nuclear inventory. My bet is that uniting the two Koreas would have been a cakewalk for America if they hadn’t chickened.

The 500BC Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, has written that it is necessary to have an intelligence apparatus that has the means to assess the capability of the enemy. Israel’s Mossad and Aman have proved that. America’s intelligence agencies failed to accurately gauge the Soviet/Chinese preparedness and therefore we now have to live with two nations, North and South Korea, both nuclear-armed in an antsy truce, divided by a deadly DMZ on the 38th parallel.

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There is one country that profited hugely from the Second World War – The United States of America.

For America the Second World War turned out to be a boon which saw unparalleled economic prosperity, of the kind that is especially reserved for nations that fight wars in other lands far from their own.

Let’s get a sense of how the America that we know today became the America that we know today……

Before Pearl Harbour, the US was a peacenik nation, happy not to interfere in the conflicts of others, reasonably secure from cross-border invasions by two great oceans on either side and two friendly nations, Canada and Mexico, to the north and south.

Pearl Harbour changed everything. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, it “awoke a sleeping giant”.

Between 1941 and 1945 the US government signed $175 billion (USD 4 trillion today) worth of prime defence contracts, 25% of which went to just seven companies – Boeing, Lockheed, North American, Grumman, GM, Ford and Chrysler. Between them, they provided the flying machines, the tanks, artillery, jeeps, trucks and armoured vehicles that were required for the war.

American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks and 2,000,000 armoured personnel carriers and trucks. 

In four years, American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size.

Numerous large American corporations, that were making cars and trucks, home appliances, toys and other products for peacetime use, switched and transitioned swiftly to wartime production. Ford Motor Company began producing B24 Liberators, 18200 of which were built in the period 1940-1944. In addition to aircraft, Ford plants built 277,896 vehicles (tanks, armored cars and GPW (General Purpose Willys – reconnaissance vehicles known as Willys Jeeps). Chrysler’s wartime production included trucks, tanks, aircraft parts, guns, ammunition, rockets and bombs. GM’s Chevy specialized in all kinds of trucks, aircraft engines and artillery shells. Buick produced the M18 Hellcat tank destroyers and supplied radial engines for Boeing B-17s and B-24s, Douglas C-47s and C-54s. Alcoa, the aluminum giant, switched to airplane fuselages. The Lionel Toy Train Co. began making aircraft parts. Mattatuck, a nail manufacturer, switched to producing machine gun magazines and ammo.

Then there were large shipyards and steel companies such as Bethlehem Steel, Newport Shipyard, Norfolk Dry Dock and New York Naval Shipyard who churned out battleships and submarines by the dozen. By January 1945, the US Navy had 61,045 ocean-going vessels including 23 battleships, over 100 aircraft carriers, 59 cruisers, 425 destroyers, 400 destroyer-escorts, 237 submarines and 54,000 landing craft and assault ships. Plus 37,000 planes.

All of these armaments were built at American factories that were never touched by aerial bombardment.

Before the Second World War, America was a nation ravaged by depression, with a 40% rate of unemployment. By 1950, 5 years after the war, that America was unrecognizable. Those same factories kept on humming with activity, quickly switching back to peacetime production of consumer goods and reconstruction materials.

Every European nation needed household appliances, cars, washing machines, radios, medicine, movies, food, concrete, cement, steel and everything else. Europe’s industrial sector had been flattened and there was a virtual monopoly named America, ready to sell. The Europeans stood in a queue, hungry to rebuild.

America’s employment and household incomes skyrocketted. Every home now had a car, a TV and a front lawn and every man, a job.

America had just discovered that it loved making war.

America had also realized that war was good business. The $175 billion had paid off.

And that is how, in the initial stages of the Korean War, American P51 Mustangs, F80s and F86 Sabre jets (and later on, F100s and F104s) came to own the skies over North Korea.

The term ‘Shock and awe’ would be an understatement. Bridges, railway sidings, workshops, army barracks, civilian settlements, large built-up areas…nothing was spared. North Korean ground forces were clobbered, bombed and strafed mercilessly. It was a turkey shoot.

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Then, suddenly the tide turned. Strange things began happening. Pilots in the F86s started engaging a new kind of hostile jet fighters that looked a lot like their own F86 Sabres, but were heavier armed and could climb faster. They would appear out of nowhere in tight boxes of four that came to be known as a ‘swarm’. Frequently a swarm would zoom right through, above and below a formation of F86s, leaving the Americans gaping, like ‘What the…&???? What were those?’

At first, some imagined them to be rogue American pilots in aircraft that had either been stolen or reverse engineered from the F86s. Given that the F86 Sabre was just a year into service then, the appearance of enemy hardware that strongly resembled and even outperformed F86s, was disquieting to the Americans.

Those “freaky fighters” were the newly developed Soviet Mig-15. In all 18000 were built. NATO gave the fighter the code name “Fagot”, a sobriquet that was meant to be a denigration that soon looked undeserved.

Quickly the American supremacy over the North Korean skies disappeared. The Americans were now fighting the North Koreans as equals. Only, these were not North Koreans actually. They were Soviet and a handful of Chinese pilots in Mig-15 jet fighters that had been loaned by the Soviets to the Chinese.

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As per the mandates of the farce that we all now know as the UN, it was important to maintain the illusion that the North and the South Koreans were fighting each other and not the Soviets & the Chinese, against the US & UK. These were nuclear powers at a time when the rules of nuclear engagement had not even begun to be written. Nuclear holocaust was just a trigger-happy pinkie away. Neither side wanted to risk expanding the war beyond the Korean peninsula.

The Mig-15s and the F86s engaged in dogfights and skirmishes mainly along a stretch of the border between North Korea and China where the Yalu River empties out into the Yellow Sea. The Migs launched from Antung Air Field, close to the border on the Chinese side and the Americans, from Kimpo and Suwon, 350kms away, in South Korea. 

The stretch of the border, where the two sides slugged it out 30000 feet above the ground, came to be known among the US pilots as Mig Alley. (Check out the box shown in the top of this piece).

Since the Americans had a greater distance to cover, they came to the party, equipped with drop-tanks and were therefore heavier and slower, a distinct disadvantage, especially when trying to maneuver or climb out of a tight situation. On the plus side, the American pilots were better trained and the F86 Sabres were more user-friendly and comfy, with heated cockpits that was spacious and a large bubble canopy that afforded the pilot a panoramic view.

But by far the greatest advantage that the Americans had was the invention of the G-suit, a sterling example of American ingenuity. The G-suit was a set of inflatable bladders that connected with a compressed air outlet inside the cockpit. Let me explain…..

G-forces bear upon a human body in motion, during sudden accelerations or decelerations or vector changes (ie: change in direction of motion). The more abrupt the change, the more severe is the effect on the human body. You may have noticed how your body gets shoved forward when you are driving and have to brake suddenly. Or how you feel the securing straps bite into your chest when you are on a monster roller coaster that has begun its downward plunge. In both cases, the force that impacts your body is known as the G-Force.

The internationally accepted unit of acceleration caused by gravity is “1G”. In metric units, it is equivalent to the weight of 9.81 Newtons of force per one kilogram of mass.

Imagine you are a F86-Sabre pilot coming out of a dive to get away from a Mig tailing you. You are pulling more than 6-7Gs. At that vector change, blood fails to reach your brain and your eyes, preferring to remain around your ankles. You develop tunnel vision and black out within minutes. Not a good situation to be in when the ground is rushing up at you at twice the speed of sound.

A fighter pilot’s G-suit bladders inflate and squeeze tight against the lower body parts, preventing blood from going down, allowing it to circulate to the brain. The Mig pilots didn’t have G-suits and many Migs were lost in dives or tight maneuvers, without a single shot being fired. To the Sabre pilots, this was a huge advantage.

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The most severe recorded case of G-force death was that of Princess Diana when her limo slammed into a Paris tunnel entrance at 70 mph. Without her seatbelt on, her body experienced a sudden deceleration, relative to her heart, that had the force of 70Gs. If we assume she weighed around 80kgs, that would have been a force of nearly one metric tonne. In that instant it tore her pulmonary artery, a condition that was impossible to survive. Had she worn her seat belt, the deceleration would be around 30Gs and she might have had broken ribs but would most likely have survived.

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A Mig-Sabre party in Mig Alley usually lasted only 20-30 minutes max. But that half-hour looked like the Battle of Britain, the famous 1941 air battle for Britain’s skies where hundreds of British Spitfires and Mosquitos buzzed around hundreds of German Messershmitts and Stukas inside a restricted airspace of maybe one or two city blocks, often colliding with each other and breaking apart in mid-air.

In the Korean skies, at one point in the spring of 1951, a dogfight recorded 50 Mig-15s, 48 B-29s and 54 F86s at the same time, zipping around inside an airspace that resembled a box with sides just 10kms long.

Mig Alley saw the dawn of a new kind of air warfare – aerial dogfights with jets zipping around at 600mph. Soon pilots on both sides realized that they needed far swifter reflexes in order to come out of a dogfight unscathed.

Dogfights create aces and within weeks of the arrival of the Mig15s and the start of the aerial skirmishes, Mig Alley began producing aces among the American pilots.

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Aces were being born on the Chinese/Soviet side as well. A wiry young 23-year old Chinese, the eldest of three children of a carpenter from Anshan in the far eastern province of Liaoning, became the first Chinese ace of the Korean War.

That Chinese ace was Flight Lt. Zhao Baotong, Zao Bao to his mates in the 4-aircraft Mig-15 schwarm that he lead.

In case you are still wondering what all this has to do with Babayev, his Tu-95 and his bombing run, take it easy, Part-4 is coming soon.