Really interesting posts
The older I get, the more I realize very few folks grew up hunting the way I did. I look back now and think dad's way of hunting with me was "tough love" (as was pretty much his way with everything, God bless him). I don't remember ever being catered to (hunting wise) like we do with youth today. There was no youth weekend or anything like that. We weren't in a club or anything like that (this was in the early-to-mid-80's, and I don't even know if hunting clubs were a thing then?), we lived on Cheaha Mountain (National Forest) and my earliest memories of hunting were us splitting up and making big walking loops (dad called it "slipping around"). Well, he was slipping, I was a terrified 10 year old walking in the woods for two hours simply trying not to get lost, I wasn't even looking for wildlife, I was mostly trying to remember the directions he gave (which seemed to never look like he explained, but somehow I always found my way back to the truck).
This was normal: We would park at a turnaround at the end of a gravel road, and let's say there were two dim woods roads going out different ridges."You go out that right road. Not far down there it's going to turn to the right, when it does, walk out that big pine ridge to your left. That ridge will nose off to the creek down yonder, so cross it and get up on that next ridge on the other side. You know, it runs out there and hits that other road, and I'll meet you right there and we'll make another plan to hunt back to the truck."
Naw!!!...it never looked that way when I got out there LOL! The road never turned to the right, all those ridges split (which split do I take??), that creek was belt deep for half a mile so I had to detour, and in my head this was going to take 10 minutes--but it was a mile or more and took me an hour. 10. Years. Old. And I'll be damn if I didn't fairly often walk up on a longbeard gobbler or a buck, I can't explain that, because it never happens today when I go do that for old time's sake.
I was always scared and crying, and it would piss daddy off when he could tell I'd been crying. His way of hunting was like throwing a kid in the deep end of the pool and saying "swim!" But I wouldn't trade that for the soft, babysat life of a kid learning to hunt today. I never knew it was happening, but by my early teen years I was no longer scared of the woods, I had killed more critters than any of the other kids I knew, we were calling turkeys, gutting deer, finding our own sign, and I swear I know every rock and leaf on 100,000 acres of national forest still today LOL.
I never learned how to treestand or bow hunt until I was nearly 20 years old.
By my early teen years, we started hunting the Anniston Army Depot where my dad worked. Even though it wasn't legal, we'd man-drive that place every weekend (which is funny, because that kind of stuff would tick me off today, now that I'm a fancy treestand hunter). If I told you half the stories of those late 80's / early 90's years at the Depot you wouldn't believe me. That place was a total zoo, never seen anywhere else in my life, anywhere in the country, with more deer numbers AND big bucks. Every Saturday was like a dove shoot with us mandriving those deer. But again, it didn't matter to dad that I was still a "kid", I was expected to walk just as much as stand. And I loved it. Many of those old men I grew up around doing that are dead and gone now, but I still see a few of them these days and we reminisce about how "folks would never believe the deer we saw and killed."
