Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I was waiting for a break in the Westmoreland County rain. It was still dark at 7 a.m. when Brian called. Yep, it was 5 a.m. back home. He was splashing up the dirt road from his house to Burma Road with my four-seater, Kawasaki Mule in tow.
He was surprised I wasn’t out walking. So was I, but I had all day to get in steps since I was technically on vacation.
Brian was headed for Sweetwater Station and an antelope hunt with my grand-nephew Bridger.
Bridger and his dad, Jake, were meeting Brian for Bridger’s first antelope hunt. He was 12, had taken hunter safety, and handled himself well last winter on a pheasant hunt with the older guys.
Sunday morning brought back memories of earlier days, days when I was the experienced hunter, Brian was the novice, and we were setting out on his first hunt. Ironically, it was in the same area that Bridger had a tag.
I’ve written often of the early days of life in the Sweetwater Valley. Days before white settlers came to the area, when it was prime hunting ground for Arapaho, Shoshoni, Crow and Lakota hunters. Days when buffalo filled the Sweetwater and surrounding hills. Days when elk abounded, along with bear, mule deer, and those same pronghorns that 12-year-old Bridger was about to hunt.
Brian is about to turn 40, and Jake reached that milestone a couple of years ago. I was the same age on Brian’s first hunt, this one for whitetails, 28 years ago.
The Denver Post advertised a contest a few months after the hunt, in early 1999, calling for authors in a series they called “Writers on the Range.”
My late friend John Seaman was distributing the Sunday edition of the Post in those years when the Denver-based newspaper was expanding its delivery from the Denver Metro area to the entire Rocky Mountain region. I noticed the ad.
I submitted the story I’m including below as a contest entry. I won. I eventually wrote a dozen stories for the Post over the next six months. They sent me a wooden plaque with an image of the story printed on a brass plate. It hangs on the dining room wall today.
I didn’t realize it then, but the Post was advertising for another publisher, “Writers on the Range.” Their stories were syndicated and appeared in 62 different newspapers across the West.
Which brings me back to Bridger Conilogue, his dad, Jake, his dad’s cousin Brian, and the connection between generations that last weekend’s hunt on the Sweetwater brought.
Back in 1998, Brian had just turned 12 when we left early that morning. Eight years later, my dad, Brian’s grandpa, Luther Forrest Tucker, took his last deer at age 75, in the same area with a nice 250-yard shot across the Sweetwater River.
My grandfather, Eugene Gasser, hunted deer and elk in the same area over a century ago. ,
Here is the “Writers on the Range” story from over a quarter-century ago.
It was the kind of day you have to experience to truly appreciate. The weather was changing. You could feel the air pressure drop and the looming clouds on the western horizon reminded you that it was October in Wyoming. After several years of target shooting, a successful hunter safety class, and riding around with me while I hunted, my son Brian was about to embark on his first deer hunt.
We didn’t have a lot of time, but living in Fremont County has its advantages when it comes to deer hunting. There are dozens of good hunting areas within 50 miles of Riverton and we had permission to hunt on one of them. His excitement was hard to contain inside the cab of the truck. He read the regulations and examined the area map again and again and speculated on the size, sex, and species of deer we would see. We decided we were after whitetails, a species I had never hunted before, a unique experience for both of us.
Matt was our guide, a former student of mine. Brian’s interest was piqued when we saw a huge 5×5 mule deer hanging from his dad’s front-end loader. It was a very nice buck, but we were after the flighty whitetail, the deer family’s answer to jackrabbits on amphetamines.
We jumped deer within 10 minutes of starting our hunt, but they were mixed in with cattle and we didn’t have a shot. Our guide moved us about five miles up the valley into an open meadow that looked like it fell right out of a Sports Afield photo spread.
Perfect deer habitat, running water, an open hay meadow with a lot of willow thickets, and a border of shallow hills to the south. I almost expected to see a camera crew setting up for a hunting segment on the Outdoor Channel.
A two-minute walk and we spotted a whitetail trio. We put Brian in front, and he sighted a small spike buck. One shot and his hunt was over. The 125-yard shot from his .243 wasn’t the longest ever taken and the little buck was far from Boone and Crockett but he had joined the ranks of hunters.
There is something primitive and atavistic about big game hunting. You feel closer to nature than you do when fishing or hiking. I’ve heard some people explain that it’s almost a spiritual experience. Just the experience of hunting with my son would have been enough. Harvesting an animal was an extra bonus.
This kind of father and son experience is disappearing rapidly in America. Anti-hunting groups are gaining strength, and the misguided, myopic gun control advocates are targeting the wrong groups. I’m still waiting for the bumper sticker that says “People don’t kill people, guns do.”
Indirectly the break from our hunting tradition affects agriculture as well. With a growing segment of our population believing that food comes directly from a supermarket or is produced in a factory, it’s difficult to explain the need for import quotas and BLM grazing contracts.
Shooting, cleaning, skinning, and cutting an animal doesn’t allow the illusion of food appearing magically. It’s not a clean process but it’s a good one for everyone to know.
It’s also a valuable lesson in the power of a gun. Killing on television is neat, clean, and quick. Dirty Harry can blow away 15 people in an hour and never bats an eye. Perhaps if more of our society still hunted and raised their own food the respect for our environment would increase and the number of gun-related deaths would diminish.
The Dirty Harry reference is from a generation or two ago, but the televised violence and the Quentin Tarantino-style blood fests are still being produced by the dozens each year.
As a final testament to generations, Bridger took a nice pronghorn buck early Sunday afternoon with his late grandfather’s rifle. My brother-in-law, Jake’s dad and Brian’s uncle Matt Conilogue’s gun harvested another buck.
Thankfully, so are the traditions of father and son, the rite of passage and the handing of the baton from one generation of outdoorsmen to the next.
Keep our public lands free and open to everyone so this tradition can continue.