Youkilis:
I like that story.... Especially the ending.
During the last upland game bird season, I had a few of my friends from the casting club join my wife and I for quail and chukar hunting.
They're shotgunners, my friends are. Serious ones, too. AyA side-by side 28 guage and Beretta 686 serious. My wife did most of her hunting with them and carried her shotgun most of the time.
We'd leave our 20 acre hunting camp which borders the National Forest on two sides, and drive about a mile so so from the gate to the area we like to hunt in. My wife would take off with my two shotgunning pals and the Britainey "Spastical" and they would go there way while I would take an air rifle and my 4 year old daughter and 7 year old son and go my way.
It's nice to hunt with younger eyes. They notice things I might take for granted. Things like pretty rocks. Indian paintbrush blooming with their delicate little orange flowers. Cooper's hawks perched in trees. Clouds that morph into shapes that look like everything from cars to cheeseburgers, at least to them.
Off in the distance, we'd eventually hear the popping of the scatterguns going off as we took our little strolls across the desert. I can't say that I ever came back to the Jeep empty -handed, as I was often carrying one kid or the other after walking them a little too ragged. It's kind of hard to shoot when you've got a four-year old in your arms...........
But the hunt for me isn't about the killing. It is about being in the position to kill. Killing is something I've done plenty of. It is always the low point of the hunt for me, and something that I'd do without if there was some way to eat a quail, cottontail, or chukar without killing first.
Back at the Jeep, with the shotgun-toters with near limits and me often with two worn-out kids and an empty bag, wife and friends all say how sorry they are that I've got these kids "cramping my style" and the wife invariably volunteers to take them on the afternoon hunt.
I decline. They don't really cramp my style. Oh, I KNOW I'd get more game without dragging them across the desert slope of the mountains with me. But I also know about the other things I'd miss.
I'd miss those pretty rocks, and those clouds shaped like so many things, and the sense of wonder they express when seeing a Cooper's hawk snatch a quail out of the buckbrush just a few yards from their feet, and those glorious sunsets, with the sky ablaze in hues of orange, purple, and magenta, with my kids falling asleep in my arms, while I sit on some boulder and watch a covey of mountain quail wander by less than 25 yards away, instead of waking them, which I would surely do if I made a move for my rifle that rests in the crook of a deadfall's branches.
Back in camp, I can still call that a successful hunt.
-JP
http://www.uplandhunter.com
