Seeing this post of Doc's in another thread brought back some very precious memories of hunting with my cousin Frank when we were kids. Frank was three years younger than me and the bother I never had. As kids we were inseperable in the summers, with hunting and fishing being our favorite pastimes, followed by agravating our sistersDoc Hudson wrote:What became of the truism:"A real hunter stalks as close as he can get, then belly crawls 50 yards closer." What happened to the goal of giving game powderburns as well as bullet holes?
. Our plans were to both retire early and spend our time hunting and fishing the U.S., but Frank got killed in a freak boating accident, doing what he loved with the woman he loved, at the age of 30 so those plans can never happen.Anyway...We learned to stalk game hunting farm pond bullfrogs and cotten-tailed rabbits armed with our trusty Daisy air rifles. I had a '94 clone with a "brass" frame and Frank's was a pump that looked like a Remington .22 rifle. His was more powerful but mine was cooler so we swapped about every other day. With either gun you had to be within about fifteen feet and darn near hit 'em in the eye for a kill and with the game we were hunting that was a trick. Bullfrogs can see almost 360* and rabbits are kinda skiddish so belly crawling 20-30 feet on the pond dam or 25-50 yards thru the field became pretty standand once we spotted the critters. We polished our stalking skill on the farm animals til the cat started taking his naps on the roof and our normally docile dog learned to growl every now and then in his sleep. Sneeking up on a sleeping cow is child's play, startling a sleeping horse will get you stomped. (ask me how I know, thank God it was just the pony!)
We learned about decoys, lookouts, and the advantages of having the high ground when we expanded our game list to squirrels. Ever tried to stalk a squirrel? Their eyesight would make a deer hang it's head in shame and once they spot you they tell every other squirrel within listening distance that you're there. But we figured out that if one of us got their attention the other could skulk up close enough for a shot...sometimes. We ate a lot more rabbit and froglegs than we did squirrel. We did learn about drives hunting squirrels, one of us would go way out and around to the far end of the woods and hide then the other come tromping down from the other end. Worked pretty good...for one shot.
We got a little older and our armament improved to some heavy artillery, Frank got a Mossberg 20ga pump and Dad finally turned me loose with my Stevens pump .22, we swapped those alot too. My oh my, the picken's got easy on the game we were used to hunting. Our game bags filled quicker, but we didn't get to hunt as much, our Dad's were death on just killing animals (that doesn't count rabbits in the gardens) and shell's were alot more expensive than BBs. Then we were offered the job of a lifetime for two young boys...killing crows that were ravaging the neighbors peanut fields...FOR PAY! We were going to get a dollar for every crow we shot! That was a HUGE amount of money for a couple of kids in the 60's in our neck of the woods.
Let me tell ya a little about crows...they're smart, they even see a gun and they're gone. Anyone who brags about an eagle's eyesight never meet a crow. And crow are what the Army copied when it came to using lookouts and early warning systems. Crows have honor too, they'll circle a downed buddy to see if they can help him...our honor was lacking some at that time, we took full advantage of that whenever possible
. The real trick was to get close enough that when the .22 went off we could get another one with the shotgun when the rest took off. Needless to say our stalking skills had to improve. We learned about blinds...stacks of haybales left in strategic locations in the fields, and camoflage...cover sheets to crawl with made of old burlap feed sacks, to increase our odds. We now had income that was more than enough to provide for a surplus of ammo on hand, and a few John Wayne movies 
, so we were able to target shoot quite a bit. We became pretty mean shots with those guns, I've still got the .22 rifle.These skills came in handy in the following years. The first year the uncles took us deer hunting I was 14, Frank had his Grandpa's '94 .30-30 and I had a brand new Marlin .444 that I had saved every penny I could scrounge for over a year for. The uncles were going to use us as drivers but told us that we could shoot a deer if we saw any, winking at each other the whole time. We each only had one bullet. There were three deer taken that year in deer camp, wanna guess who shot two of them? The uncles never laughed at us as hunters again.
As we got older our stalking skills dimenished due to having jobs and not being able to spend days on end in the woods. We took to the easy, and boring, way of hunting from trees stands and I now hunt from ground blinds ( my knees don't care much for climbing anymore) and still get my share of deer. But I can still remember the days that the cat slept on the roof and the dog growled in his sleep.
Thanks for reminding me of those times, and for allowing me to share them.
Rob
