Dawson has a head of hair so curly-thick, black and enormous you could hide a flock of crows in it. If Jimi Hendrix were alive to see it, he’d turn green with envy, I kid you not. It’s beautiful. Teenage girls and grown women fairly swoon at the mere sight of his luxurious locks, my wife being one of them. Unfortunately, wood ticks love his big hair too, albeit for entirely different reasons.
Of course, Dawson didn’t know this until he found one of the vile little bloodsuckers imbedded in his scalp the day after one of our spring turkey hunts a couple years ago. His mother found it when he complained of a weird bump growing on the back of his skull. He said she practically had to use a garden rake to paw through all that hair looking for the tick.
To be frank, we hadn’t given much thought to tick prevention on our turkey hunts up to that point; we were way too busy swatting mosquitos, gnats and a variety of other winged vampires eager to drain our blood. The mosquitos are so dense on the river bottoms we hunt that we automatically spray ourselves down with bug juice before entering the woods. It works, but I’m reluctant to get that stuff near my eyes, mouth or nose; it’s poisonous, tastes terrible and seriously irritates your eyes. It also attacks the synthetic finishes on eyeglasses, binoculars, watches and turkey calls. Plus, it stinks.
A debilitating experience with West Nile fever many years ago has left me a bit fearful of anything capable of transmitting West Nile virus, Zika virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, eastern equine encephalitis and dengue fever, so when we heard about those small, portable devices that emit an invisible cloud of repellent guaranteed to offend every kind of mosquito known to man, we splurged for a couple of them. They definitely kept the skeeters out of our turkey blinds, but after Dawson’s tick encounter, we decided we still needed something more “tick specific” and discovered that permethrin, properly applied to clothing, will kill ticks on contact as they crawl across your clothes. It’s deadly, lasts for weeks and is harmless to skin. We use it religiously now.
Turns out that May 2018 was National Tick Awareness Month. We were discussing this odd bit of news while hiking back to the truck after a morning of turkey hunting when Dawson almost stepped on a prairie rattler. The snake reflexively coiled into a defensive posture but didn’t shake its rattles or behave aggressively, but it didn’t make any effort to leave either.
We all stood still not wanting to provoke it and wondered aloud if it was confused by the smell of permethrin on Dawson’s cuffs or just trying to figure out how to get into that big mop of hair on his head.
Dennis Smith is a freelance outdoors writer and photographer whose work appears nationally. He lives in Loveland.