Somehow I always seem to recall that October is one busy month.
Maybe its because its my wife’s busy season with her business? or maybe its because I instinctively look forward to the first cool breeze after summer blowing across my face or the first honk of migrating geese overhead, reminding me that hunting season is around the corner? Well, I’m older and more jaded now so I realize it may be hunting season but I’m not likely to do nearly enough hunting with my schedule and big boy responsibilities these days, but I do think about it a lot.
My father was a Cowboy.
Well he really wasn’t, but inside I think he always thought he was. From the time I could ride a tricycle we went hunting. We hunted ducks, geese, turkey, quail, deer, hell, if it had fur and you could eat it we probably hunted it! It wasn’t until I was older that I realized the whole hunting trip was a sham. My Dad would hunt but that wasn’t really why he spent money on guns, ammo, licenses then drove six hours on Friday to the middle of BFE TX.
What he really loved was removing himself from the daily grind of being a CPA in the big city and getting out into the west Texas countryside, sleeping under the stars, drinking whiskey (scotch) at night, telling BS stories and jokes around a camp fire to his friends and listening to the coyote calls.
I think getting out there to hunt made him feel like the cowboys he’d watched on the big screen at the Heights Theater matinee in the 1930s. He was always the first one up at 4:45am to get the coffee on and harass all the other sleeping campers with his famous chant “Wakey Wakey, Hands off Snakey!” What an S.O.B.!! It was 20 degrees in the cabin!
I hated hunting back then as a kid. It was too freaking cold and dark and I saw no good reason you should freeze your ass off in the dark for two hours just so you can “Get a jump on Bambi” I remember one year some fat lazy guy, who could never climb or fit into a box blind, shot the largest buck we’d ever seen right out the window of the camp cabin while drinking coffee! I never bought into that early morning BS after that. But I kept hunting with my dad.
At his funeral earlier this year I saw a few of his friends and business acquaintances we used to hunt with. After the typical condolences comments, they could not wait to sit down with me to recount the crazy ass stories that happened with my Dad while hunting.
The Jeep killing story is still legend… One year his business partner had brought out a brand spanking new Jeep CJ-7 Laredo. It was a bad ass jeep and should never have come hunting with this group of wannabe cowboys. After an evening hunt the guy went to pick my dad up and as he got into the passenger seat of the jeep with his 30.06 pointed downward (of course..safety first he always said) while emptying his magazine he accidentally fired off a round straight through the brand new transmission! Uh oh…
We never saw a nice vehicle up at the hunting lease again, but his partner was a sport and found a Tonka toy jeep replica, had it mounted on a plaque with a deer tag attached and an inscription that said something like “Best shot of the season” with my Dad’s name on it. Even this year, almost forty years after the event, it had a half dozen grown men crying with laughter recounting the story.
Good times indeed. So I guess that’s why having my own hunting place was so important to me as I got older. Its not killing a stupid deer I care about, its more about not letting the great hunting memories die and having an opportunity to share new ones with my family and friends.
There is something deep in a man’s soul that resonates with the primal hunting experience and I think that’s probably what the Native-american/Indians talked about when they sat together around the camp fire at night.
Maybe it sounded something like this.. “Do you remember the time runs-with-two-bears shot his horse in the leg with that crooked arrow he made? We all laughed so hard we fell off our horses too!”
Hell, maybe Dad was a Cowboy after all?
MIKE CENTEX LIFE 