My great-grandfather moved west from Tennessee with a family friend at the turn of the last century to homestead a piece of land just outside of Ashton, ID. They were only one or two generations removed from Germany. It was rough going, and most of their meat came from hunting and fishing. It was a subsistence situation, so creeks were dynamited, and game was killed as needed. Eventually, after having several kids who participated in the gathering of as much food as possible from nature, my great-grandpa sold his homestead to his friend and moved. The perspective stuck in my grandfather, and though he lived in metro areas and within towns when he started his family, he was a hunter, fisherman, berry picker, and fungophile in his spare time. My father grew up in this world, and was more at home in nature than in town. By the time I came around, he had lost his desire to eat wild game, so he hunted less and less. I only hunted with him for varmints, and he never took me game hunting. He was an avid shooter and handloader though.
I was very impressed by the guns, bullets, loading paraphernalia from the earliest age, and I snuck into his hobby room and read his loading manuals as soon as I could read, about age 5. The hunting was more of a social thing for me, and I went hunting with whomever I could when I came of age. My kids will be hunters if they desire to be.
