Hunting is and always will be in my blood. My paternal grandfather was a dirt poor (really dirt poor) farmer from the Michigan Northwoods. Since this was long before TV was invented, there were twelve children, my father being one of the youngest. In dad's family, if you wanted to eat, you hunted and fished. Game laws were ignored... I really don't know if there were game laws back in the early 1900's.
I grew up on a small farm outside Saginaw, MI. There was lots of small game and no big game at all. I was in my teens before I ever saw a deer near our home. This has changed over the last sixty years. The farming areas of the Saginaw Valley now supprt a very large deer heard. Back then our freezer was always well filled with pheasant and rabbit. Again, game laws were ignored.
Immediately out of college I started shooting rifle competition on the Saginaw Gun Club team. Our team ran the sighting-in days at the club and I refused to hunt big game... no way was I going out in the woods with the people who came to sight-in. I did start deer hunting when I was thirty when a friend invited me to go deer hunting with him in the far Upper Pennisula of Michigan. Ain't nothing up there but trees and more trees, very few people . I got lucky and bagged a yearling buck the first day. The next fall I went deer and antelope hunting near Buffalo, WY and, again, deer hunting in Michigan.
At that time I had a good job and plenty of vacation. Each fall, I would spend two weeks hunting out West and another two weeks deer hunting here in Michigan. My job was kind of intense and I did so look forward to spending that time away from telephones...
Now long retired, I spend a lot of time each fall just sitting in the woods and watching nature. These are good times as were the days I've managed to wander the Western mountains by myself. I no longer have a real need to kill animals... I've done that but I feel the same way about being in the woods by myself that Thoreau did about time spent fishing... that time is not deducted from one's lifespan.
