When I was growing up, Christmas was important for the usual reasons: the carol sings, Santa Claus, the presents, the lights, the Savior’s birth — all the stuff that a school kid would first mention.But as I neared my teens, it became important for a second reason: hunting trips. The family farm in Georgia was a long way from our Virginia home, and we didn’t have a place of our own to hunt close by until I was in high school. So Christmas and the long vacation were our only chances to squeeze in a hunting trip.
As best I can recall, we did the long drive when I was 10, and I was allowed to accompany the adults as an observer when they went bird hunting. For anyone who doesn’t know any better, in the 1960s in the South, there was only one bird: the bobwhite quail.
My father spoiled that first trip by getting a kidney stone right as we were loading the trucks to leave. The dogs were ready to go, the shotguns had been stowed, and then Dad crawled out the passenger door of one truck, holding his side. Now that I’ve had 19 of them myself, I understand how a kidney stone might interrupt a hunting trip. Dad checked into the local hospital, and I spent the next few days trailing along behind my grandfather and his pointers, Mike and Tim, and a setter whose name escapes me. I don’t recall how long my father stayed in the hospital, but I remember everything about the two or three days with Pa-Pa and his bird dogs.
Two years later, they let me carry a gun, my grandmother’s .20-gauge side-by-side Fox. I can still take you to the spot along the lane where the covey erupted from the briars and I somehow managed to take down my first quail. Yes, several adults may have fired at the same bird, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
I was probably 13 when I found a shotgun of my own under the Christmas tree, and I remember the snow on the ground as the big jet left later that morning, headed for Texas. An uncle lived there, designing stuff for NASA and duck hunting every chance he got. The morning after Christmas Day, we were miles from the nearest road, hunkered down behind a makeshift blind, waiting for black ducks and mallards to drop into our little pothole.
As I recall, I killed a black duck out of the first group that decoyed. It is possible that one of the other two shotguns in the blind put some No. 6 shot into the same duck, but they let me claim it, just the same. We hunted almost every day for a week and killed mallards, pintails, widgeons, black ducks, shovellers and mergansers, plus an unlucky snow goose or two.
The point here is that while there are an awful lot of things demanding our time during the holidays, getting into the woods, the backwaters and the fields should rank high on a sportsman’s list — especially if there is a youngster involved. Memories are made young, and according to what’s left of my gray matter, the pleasant ones of days afield certainly hang on a while. I remember putting my hip boots on for the first time almost 40 years ago, killing a big rattlesnake on that first duck hunt — I still have his rattles, in my desk drawer — sighting in my first and only deer rifle and trying to remember to pick out one bird on the covey rise, not to be surprised by the whirring of wings.
We have so few things of substance that we can leave to our children, and our love of the hunt is one of them. This holiday season, look for opportunities to pass it on.
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