A lifetime of hunting

I used to think getting ‘old’ would be a total drag. I’d be setting around in the rocking chair reflecting upon the good old days and I guess that day will come.

I’m now in my early seventies and no longer have the least bit of desire to guide elk or bear hunters but I’m delighted to find I can still climb into a tree stand or pack meat out of the woods. I no longer drag deer or hogs very far but have learned that quartering and packing meat in smaller quantities better suits my stage of life! I am still a very active hunter but these days, I am of the mindset that the next decade or so of hunting should be spent experiencing the glorious fall and winter days doing exactly what I enjoy most.

I’ve eagerly await fall and cooler weather hunting for a total of sixty four years now. Yes, I started hunting when I was eight, squirrels and rabbits mostly in the patch of woods around our farmstead in rural Red River County in northeast Texas. I never considered letting my boys hunt on their own at such a young age but things were different back in the late fifties, especially for country kids.

I remember following my Dad and older brother around in the woods from the time I was big enough to keep up with them and Mickey, my brother’s old black and tan hound. At the age of 8 with eyes as sharp as a tack and lots of shooting practice, I was quite capable of knocking a fox squirrel out of the top of the tallest oak on our place, using the buckhorn sights on my old .22. Maybe my upbringing as a kid of the fifties and sixties is a contributing factor to my love for not only hunting but just about everything outdoors related but maybe not.

I’ve had friends and family members that never showed interest in the outdoor lifestyle. Maybe people are a bit like hunting dogs, the desire is either ‘hard wired in’ or, it’s not. I’ve introduced many adults to hunting that took to it like it was something they were destined to do but just needed someone to expose them. When I go to the woods or fields these days in quest of game or game birds, I’m not only enjoying the ‘here and now’ but also the many fine times I’ve experienced afield through six decades. When I have a hunting partner down a brace of mallards or harvest a fat buck for the freezer, I can almost always relate the experience to a fond memory of the past where almost the same even occurred, only at another place with another person.

I remember vividly the first whitetail deer I saw harvested and I hope the statute of limitations has expired! I was eleven years old and it was a crisp November day. My brother in law who was also one of my major hunting mentors had asked me to join him and a friend that was a serious hunter.

This guy was the epitome of Grizzly Adams, beard and all! I was summarily placed in the lower branches of a tree while my mentors when on to their hunting locations.

I managed to endure the tree branch for an hour or so and then spent the remainder of the morning setting on the ground beneath the tree. On the way out, “Grizz, as we will call him’’, made a comment something like this. “There has been a couple doe feeding on acorns under a white oak every morning just around the bend. Get ready, he instructed my brother in law, you are about to kill your first deer.” Whether doe were legal back then I do not know, I seriously doubt they were.

As we rounded the bend, ‘Grizz’ jumped out of the car first, armed with an old Chinese military rifle he had purchased mail order.

Yes, back then you could order a firearm from a catalog and get it shipped straight to your door! My brother in law was armed with a .22 magnum, probably also illegal back then.

He never had the chance to shoot, Ole Griz placed his sights on a fat does shoulder and sent that steel military round on its way.

The solid bullet obviously ‘pin holed’ the deer and it took off leaving very little blood. “Let’s go back to Granny’s house (Griz lived with his grandmother in a backwoods cabin).

I vividly recall Griz’s roomwasacornerofthe cabin separated from the rest of the place by bedsheets hanging from the wall. Cracks showed through the floor which was covered by the cheap blue flower pattern vinyl flooring common to the time. “

We enjoyed an awesome breakfast cooked on an old wood stove and then loaded up a couple of hounds and went back to trail the deer.

It’s funny after all these years, but I remember every detail of that first deer hunt, the hawk that lit in the tree I was under, how uncomfortable that limb was, and especially the awesome breakfast that was served by that fine old lady that had lived her life in a far different world than what we are experiencing today.

In retrospect, it’s not the shooting of a deer that I remember but the fine fall weather and great food and yes, the companionship of a couple of very experienced woodsmen that had also lived in a far different era.

As I matured, I continued to add chapters to my life has a hunter. When I began my career as an outdoors writer, the chapters continued to grow as I experienced hunting and fishing with a great many people in a great many places.

I remember well doing bow hunting articles up in North Dakota with a fine family that farmed 20,000 acres of very rural land not far from Jamestown, ND.

They supplemented their income by outfitting bow hunters. For several years, I eagerly awaited my yearly trips up to the area to hunt those huge farmland deer and spend time with those fine people. The folks were of German descent and the ladies did the cooking and fed everyone in camp. Could they ever cook!

During midday after the morning deer hunt, we would often drive the roads and shoot pheasants, yes at the time road hunting was legal in certain places.

The ladies turned those pheasant into some of the tastiest game meals I have even eaten. Once of their specialties was smothered pheasant in mushroom gravy with rice. I’ve since attempted to duplicate their recipe and on occasion come pretty close but nobody could cook game like those ladies!

It’s been a decade now since I joined my friends up in North Dakota. Hunting seasons are almost upon us once again, As a famous outdoors writer once penned, “My health is always better in the fall”. I concur!

Contact outdoors writer Luke Clayton via his website www.catfishradio. org. Watch A Sportsmans Life, a weekly outdoors show with Larry Weishuhn, Jeff Rice and Luke on Carbon TV www.carbontv.com or Youtube.