Favorite car, favorite ice-cream, favorite teams … that list could go on forever. For anglers and hunters, you can add favorite flushers, pointers and retrievers, fly rods, binoculars, shooting vest, hats, bows, spinning reels, boats, pocket knives, books, game birds, boots, shotguns, horses, decoys, newspaper columns — the outdoor lover’s list may be the longest of all lists. Okay, the lists may not be quite as long as my adolescent lists to Santa, but they end up being sort of the same. Why is that?
I suppose most of it might come from experience, but I actually doubt it. I think that at certain times during our burgeoning years of learning, we were being influenced by a lot of different opinions. Many of those ideas may have been born in magazines like Field and Stream and Outdoor Life or from books by Jack O’Conner, Michael McIntosh, Gene Hill, Pat McManus and others. But there was also that parent, family friend, aunt or uncle that you admired and were subconsciously (or consciously) imitating. I believe that this is when our outdoor ethics and values are most vulnerable — for both good and bad.
As we mature in age and in experience, we may choose new gear that helps us enjoy the pastimes we’ve chosen, though we don’t always change quite as much as it may seem. For instance, I know a very successful archer who hunts with the most updated, top-of-the-line compound bow which he updates every couple of years. He’s also known in the area as that lucky guy who seems to always bag a big buck.
What a lot of people don’t realize is how much pre-season scouting and preparation he does. What they really don’t know is that he takes one or two weeks each year, during the peak of the rut, to hunt with a Bear Kodiak recurve that is close to 50 years old — a high school graduation gift he’d received.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering why this guy is handicapping himself like that, I think you fall into the minority of sportsmen and women. We all have those trinkets of our past that we hang onto. For most, it’s a picture or a small item tucked away in a drawer or photo album.
For those of us that walk the woods, mountains and fields, well, these are more than stored-away bobbles. They seem to anthropomorphize as the leaves begin to change color, the trout rise, walleye surge upstream, skeins of geese fly southward and when dogs thrust their nose into a cold west wind.
When this happens, these are no longer “things” leaning in a corner, hung on a rack or stored in a safe. They transform into apparitions of past lives and experiences. Even when one of those old items is long gone and now seems relegated to the past, we find ourselves reaching back for an imagined touch or a rekindled memory.
Another fellow I know had his father’s old, single-shot 28-gauge stolen many years ago. It was one of the few things he had left of his dad’s sporting years. It wasn’t the best gun and not really the most potent for many tasks. Even so, when used within the hunter’s and its own capabilities, it was quite effective.
His father’s favorite dog was a jet-black English cocker named Cricket and together they collected a lot of cackling roosters and bouncing bunnies. That guy never got to hunt over that cocker though, one was too young and the other too old.
They did spend a lot of time playing fetch in the yard while building that boy-dog bond as he shared his secrets with her. And I know he cried huge tears when the dog went to its own pheasant-rich heaven.
Since that time, he’s spent much of his life outdoors in a sort of homage to those memories — hunting with his own replacement of that 28-bore. I’ve often heard him say that the little gun may not be for everyone, but it accompanies him like an old friend, as do his own cockers whom he sometimes refers to as “The Double-Bs.”
I guess that’s what sportsmen and women are, memory collectors; it may also explain the mounted fish on the walls. They constantly, yet unwittingly, prepare to leave those values and valuables in the next generation’s hands in the hopes that they can be found of use, trusting that what they once loved, the lessons they learned and those things they cherished, don’t become obsolete beliefs, memories or gadgets left only to gather dust, that those things they once held are held again. That a new generation will resurrect them so that they can carry our own memories and our spirit along with them on their next adventure.
Maybe you have just such an item that somehow, beyond reason, finds its way back out to accompany you on a special trip to the fields, lakes and streams. I hope so because yesterdays are made every day and tomorrows carry no guarantees. As for right now, I guess I’ll take Briar and Bramble for a stroll then check my supply of 28s for autumn’s upcoming woodcock season.
I better hurry, I think I just saw the shadow of a third older cocker waiting by the door.
“Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.”
—D. H. Lawrence
