Hunting. I fired a shotgun for the first time when I was 12 years old. Killed a dove on the fly. That first blast from the 16 gauge brought an immediate addiction to the thrill of hunting. This was to be my passion for the next 5-6 years. My predilection for hunting came naturally. Daddy and my two older brothers enjoyed the sport. Daddy had about given it up when I came along. Hunting was not just a sport for him. It was a means of putting food on the table. One winter we ate 76 squirrels from the oaks around Rock Pond. He would sometimes get two in one shot. Shells were expensive and the food was needed. Squirrel in a gravy stew was good eatin for breakfast. Put some cane syrup on the bisquits and dip a huge helping of grits and we were off on a trip to nervana. Peters Victor 12 gauge and 16 gauge shells were about $2.50. At our house that was substantial money in 1957. That would pretty much buy a tank of gas. Financing my pursuit was going to take some real effort on my part. Both of my brothers were staying at home along that time. They had jobs at Bartow Gibsons Roadside Milling on Hwy 39. Jerome ran the mobile feed grinder and Lloyd worked at the facility. They would hunt on the weekends and leave their left over shells in their hunting jackets at the house. Those shells would slowly disappear during the week when I hunted after school. This wore a little thin after a while. Still got some shells but not so many. Time for some creativity on my part. I noticed that the wind would blow down some of the corn stalks making the corn impossible to harvest with the corn picker. I asked daddy if I could pick up the corn and sell it at Roadside Milling for shell money. He agreed so I would pile scattered ears of corn and later toss them into the back of the pickup. Corn was about a dollar a bushel so 5 or 6 bushels was a couple boxes of shells. We had one pecan tree and mama had lost interest in using them so I asked if I could pick them up and sell them. More money for shells. When I got desperate, daddy would occasionally buy me a box of shells. I hated to ask. We were not exactly on the high end of the income spectrum. Just as with daddy, it was not just a sport. It was a way to put some food on the table. I kept meticulous records for a year or two and averaged one dove or quail for every 3.5 shells. This put the birds at roughly $.25 to $.30 each. A little more expensive than cubed steak and pork chops but a welcome treat for all of us who loved wild meat. Stewed dove or quail with a nice gravy poured over rice with biscuits was chow time heaven. I always cleaned what I killed. Plucked the doves and skinned the quail, removed the entrails and presented them to mama. She would always go over them again picking out bird shot and removing pin feathers from the dove I might have missed. No way to find all those bird shot so we ate a few of them. Sometime along the way I was xrayed and a bird shot showed up. When the technician asked me, I had to think a minute before I could declare it to be lead. Usually they went straight to the outhouse but this one had gotten temporarily stuck. After school days and Saturdays, were largely spent in the woods or fields. Of course if daddy needed help that was priority. Things always slowed down on the farm in the late fall and winter. On a typical Saturday I would leave our house walking with first our very senior Irish setter, Jack and later with my pit bull, Chief. We would head out through my great uncle, Bud Youmans woods in front of our house. We would tromp through better than a mile of woods and get up a couple coveys of quail. I knew where every covey was likely to be. The dog would help me flush them. I would knock down two or three and watch where the covey went. We would go in that direction and kick up the singles and get a few more. I was headed for cousin Frank Spooners waterhole. It was about two miles from our house. It was just about as good as waterholes could get for attracting doves. It was in a clean pasture with no brush or tall weeds. The dove liked it because the lack of cover made it easier for doves to watch for hawks, their natural predator. The water hole had a grey clay bottom so I had never seen it dry. It held water well. Frank fought in WWI and once told a story of fighting in wheat fields and bullets clipping the wheat around him. One tough guy. Cadellia, his wife, was a great lady. One of few words but had impact when she spoke. I would occasionally take them 4-6 dove. Frank loved them. There was a huge oak tree right in the middle of the dirt road in front of their house. Beautiful and unique. A driver could just go around it. Progress dictated it should be cut down when the road was paved. Shooting a dove and having it fall in the water was a problem. The unwritten rule was that you retrieved the game whatever it took. At first I would just wade out there in my boots and have chilly feet on the two mile walk back. It did not take much of that to promote smartness on my part. I learned to wait for the wind to blow them to the edge. During all those times in the woods, I never encountered a rattlesnake by myself. Once with my daddy, once with my first cousin, Jim Williams and once with my brother summed up my rattlesnake adventures. There was an experience with a water moccasin. I was walking around the edge of a swampy place and I saw this thick blackish snake right in the middle of my next step and a loud hissing, breathing sound that came with the sighting. I backed up three of four steps and shot from the hip. The blast hit the mud beneath the snake and blew him about two feet into the air. All of a sudden I have this wiggling, squirming mass of snake in the air just in front of me. Not what I wanted. When he hit the ground, I shot two more times and he got away. I got away, too. In retrospect I should not have been in the woods by myself. Being at least a mile from help most of the time, one bite from a poisonous snake could have earned me a marker in Rock Pond Cemetery. I very much advise against hunting alone. I had no time for girls in those teen years. Had no money for them either. Hunting was much cheaper I would wisely guess. Plenty of time ahead of me to bag that prize lady....and I did.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:45:34 +0000
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