Why do I hunt? I suppose at the basic level of understanding why I hunt is because my father hunted. He for the same reasons is a hunter, because his father was a hunter. This is a very basic answer to a simple question. At least on the surface this is true. The honest, more complex answer to what I feel is a question of convoluted uncertainty.
I have been hunting for longer than my memories go back. My father tells stories of my grandfather carrying me as a toddler on his shoulders when he went small game hunting. I was about 6 or 7 years old when I began begging my father to take me “up the mountains” with him for the annual guys archery hunting trip. Interestingly enough he never came home with a deer on those trips. More on that later as it has been part of my life lesson. Of course my father being the father he is did not resist much and I was off to the mountains with Dad and his buddies. So began my love affair with hunting and what it meant to be an outdoorsman filled with endless lessons will forever carry with me.
My memory is not the best and I have always envied those that can easily recount even the most obscure memory. However, sitting here today at 40 years old I look back over my life and some of the sharpest and fondest memories I have revolve around hunting. My trips with my father on the annual archery whitetail hunt are for sure included in these memories. My parents are from Philadelphia and I was born north of the city. About the time I started making the trip “up the mountains” we moved to south central Pennsylvania. My father had a group of guys he grew up with that had a cabin in upstate Pennsylvania. For a young boy accompanying my father on these trips was like winning the lottery. I was the only kid as most of the guys did not have children or at least did not have children that were interested. So I was the kid in camp.
As the kid in camp I spent a week every fall in a cabin full of men who were not shy about being what a group of guys are when they get a week away from home. As a adult I am well aware of what that means and what it meant to them. I am sure there was some restraint in their behavior when I showed up though. No one ever shot a deer all the years I made the trip. Neither did I when I came of age to hunt. However, I spent that whole week learning. I spent every day with someone different and learned about the woods, hunting and many other things from each one of them.
Looking back over those years I realize just how fortunate I was to have those experiences. My father has some severe physical limitations and could not do all the things I wanted to do. I don’t know that I appreciated that then but now understand that by sending me out with his buddies as well as himself I was getting a much broader education than I would have otherwise. He saw the importance in encouraging my desire to be outdoors and learning how to hunt and I am the hunter and outdoorsman I am today because of him.
Overtime we forget many of the details of our life. We are so focused on the daily rush of life and no longer spend time remembering. Our lives are nothing but the here and now and the tomorrow to come. It is sad that for most there is no yesterday anymore. For me my memories of these trips “up the mountains” are cherished stories with details I can remember unlike so many other things in my life. Why is that? I do not know. Perhaps it’s the excitement of my father and I pretending we were Indians creeping through the woods with a bow and arrow looking for a deer. Maybe it was finding old homesteads in the middle of the woods and wondering what happened to them. Or was it picking apples from a long forgotten orchard. Regardless these memories are part of the core of who I am today.
We may have never shot a deer during all of those trips but what I did get was even better. I got an education in friendship. Friendship between a father and his son. Friendship among men who do not get to spend much time together outside of hunting camp. That it isn’t about the kill but about the experience. Lessons that the world needs more than ever these days. Sometimes we need to do what my father taught me to do. Stop and find a rock. Sit down on it and be silent. Just sit and watch, listen and be part of it.
