Way back in the late '50s I was hunting groundhogs in a neighbor's field in Northern Delaware. The field I was in had wheat or something around two feet high, but I could see over it to the groundhogs that were on the edges.
It had gotten too dark to shoot and I was headed home when I flushed something big in front of me. It ran for around 50 yards into the woods I had to go through and climbed to the top of a tree. BIG branches were swaying.
I was mighty scared walking through that woods and my Marlin 39A Mounty seemed pretty puny in my hands.
I have no idea what it could have been. We don't any big animals that I know of. It ran too fast and the moving branches were too big for it to have been a raccoon.
One time before that I was groundhog hunting in the same field. It was just getting too dark to shoot. I saw what I thought was a groundhog around 100 yards away, but I couldn't really tell what it was. I watched it for a while and it turned out to be a young deer's head. He was grazing toward where I was sitting in the tall grass. I stayed put 'till he got within around 25 yards. Then I jumped up and yelled. He jumped around four feet straight up in the air.
I guess the animal running up the tree and scaring the crap out of me was payback.
