dgibson
New member
Much to my surprise, someone off-premises accused me of being an "armchair hunter," having never really hunted anything because I never posted pictures on websites to prove myself. An even greater surprise was that the accusation actually stung a little.
I thought a man's word was good enough, and it's not like I'm bragging about bagging world records without substantation...sheez.
So, anyway, for fear that someone here might have similar evil thoughts rolling around in their head, here's the micro-version of My Hunting Life. I've never taken pictures of myself or my kills, preferring the memories instead, but here's what I've got:
I started hunting with Dad when I was a wee lad...I can't tell you what age. We hunted squirrels almost exclusively for years, then picked up rabbits when I was big enough to follow along. I can tell many tales of small game: The Fingernail Squirrel, The Last-Ditch-Effort Squirrel, The Squirrel That Became Two Squirrels, The Unkillable Rabbit, The Rabbit of Many Pieces...I can go on for hours.
Dad wasn't much on deer hunting in my youth, because he had a bad experience in the Pumpkin Patch when he was younger. I finally talked him into trying deer hunting again in 1998. Since then I have taken a few deer a year; while Dad was alive, it was one buck & one doe. Since he died it's been nothing but does, by my choice. The racks below are nothing special to anyone but me; the left is from my first deer, and the right is from the last deer I took before Dad died:
Here's a nice one (by local standards) that came sometime in between. I've never been much for scoring and such, and just cut the antlers off with the idea of making a set of rattling horns out of them:
Someday I'll get around to those rattlers. There was another buck about as good as this one, and several does before and since.
I took up turkeys in 2000, knowing very little about what I was doing except what I had read in the popular magazines. This is my first and last turkey, taken the same year I started on my third hunt:
The beard measures somewhere between 9 and 10 inches, and the spurs were right at an inch (I only measured them because Dad said "How damn long are those things, anyway?"). The turkey weighed about 24 pounds and was apparently a fairly old bird, but I had no idea at the time that any of this was considered good. What I did know was that he was very good eating. Since then I've been skunked every year, mainly by my own amateurish mistakes; but the first one hooked me for life.
I have never waterfowled; I have hunted quail a few times, but usually in conjunction with rabbits; I've tried coyotes once or twice, and have been the bane of a handful of groundhogs.
Well, there you go. I am not the Mighty Western Hunter and have never claimed to be. Like it or lump it, and if you choose to lump it, well...that's too bad for you.
So, anyway, for fear that someone here might have similar evil thoughts rolling around in their head, here's the micro-version of My Hunting Life. I've never taken pictures of myself or my kills, preferring the memories instead, but here's what I've got:
I started hunting with Dad when I was a wee lad...I can't tell you what age. We hunted squirrels almost exclusively for years, then picked up rabbits when I was big enough to follow along. I can tell many tales of small game: The Fingernail Squirrel, The Last-Ditch-Effort Squirrel, The Squirrel That Became Two Squirrels, The Unkillable Rabbit, The Rabbit of Many Pieces...I can go on for hours.
Dad wasn't much on deer hunting in my youth, because he had a bad experience in the Pumpkin Patch when he was younger. I finally talked him into trying deer hunting again in 1998. Since then I have taken a few deer a year; while Dad was alive, it was one buck & one doe. Since he died it's been nothing but does, by my choice. The racks below are nothing special to anyone but me; the left is from my first deer, and the right is from the last deer I took before Dad died:
Here's a nice one (by local standards) that came sometime in between. I've never been much for scoring and such, and just cut the antlers off with the idea of making a set of rattling horns out of them:
Someday I'll get around to those rattlers. There was another buck about as good as this one, and several does before and since.
I took up turkeys in 2000, knowing very little about what I was doing except what I had read in the popular magazines. This is my first and last turkey, taken the same year I started on my third hunt:
The beard measures somewhere between 9 and 10 inches, and the spurs were right at an inch (I only measured them because Dad said "How damn long are those things, anyway?"). The turkey weighed about 24 pounds and was apparently a fairly old bird, but I had no idea at the time that any of this was considered good. What I did know was that he was very good eating. Since then I've been skunked every year, mainly by my own amateurish mistakes; but the first one hooked me for life.
I have never waterfowled; I have hunted quail a few times, but usually in conjunction with rabbits; I've tried coyotes once or twice, and have been the bane of a handful of groundhogs.
Well, there you go. I am not the Mighty Western Hunter and have never claimed to be. Like it or lump it, and if you choose to lump it, well...that's too bad for you.
