Michael A. Sawyers
You felt it. I felt it.
All of us who were lucky enough to be taken to the woods to hunt at a young age experienced the sense of awe inspired by our natural surroundings.
My first trip was in the 1950s. Suddenly I was surrounded by forest that I hadn’t been able to see as we walked in during the dark. As daylight seeped into the October woods, there were trees everywhere.
It must be a million miles back to our home. It must be a hundred miles to the car. People hunted mostly out of cars in those days, vehicles such as 1951 Plymouths or 1954 Fords. Along dirt roads in the mountains and hills on opening days of squirrel seasons, there were barely enough pull-out spots to park all of the vehicles.
There were some pickups around then, but not like today. In addition, there weren’t that many two-car families.
I can’t speak for a western lad whose first hunting experience was in the sagebrush desert near Rawlins, Wyo., or in the vastness of Anywhere, Nevada. Out there the long distances are visually obvious.
Back here, back in the East, back in the Appalachian Mountains, you can see only as far as the oaks and the hickories and the underbrush allow. Consequently, it is your 12-year-old imagination that tells you the distance to things. It must be 50 miles to the nearest road.
I kept close tabs on my father. I realize now that he was keeping an even closer watch on me.
We had the best possible hunter education course. There were no classrooms, just woods and guns and stern overseers such as a father, or uncle or older brother who didn’t want to get shot and didn’t want you to shoot yourself. Messes up a good day in the woods.
There were two kinds of shotgun shells in those days, low brass and high brass that were made of paper and came in one size — 2.75 inches— shot only lead pellets and killed things when properly applied, mostly squirrels and rabbits. Early in my hunting adventures, I shot a ruffed grouse. The old-timers in central West Virginia, people such as my great uncle Ben Posey, called them pheasants. I was sitting on some ridge near Loveberry in Lewis County and the bird flew up onto a branch. I shot it, using a single-shot, Stevens 20 gauge that killed on one end and crippled on the other, especially when the shooter weighed 80 pounds or so.
Nowadays there is a mind-boggling list of shotgun shells that have various lengths and an unending variety of the stuff inside that goes out the barrel.
Chokes? In those days, each barrel had one, the one it was manufactured with, usually a full choke and usually at the end of a barrel of 30 inches.
The woods were endless to us in our young days. As I sat on Polish Mountain in the Green Ridge State Forest, I speculated that the shot I just heard may have been to the north, maybe even in Pennsylvania. Wow! I heard a shot in another state, I imagined. Just on the other side of the far ridge, the one where the sun was peeking up like a planet with pink eye, was probably Baltimore and behind that, not far of course, the Atlantic Ocean.
I’m 62 now and I can still remember the sense of awe, the illusion of the vastness of my surroundings that washed over me as a young hunter.
You may be 42 or 52 or 72 or 82. You know what I mean. We were adrift in a sea of leaves and trees and squirrels and we floated in the magic.
Later, as our bodies peaked in our 20s and 30s and 40s, the sense of awe slipped away so subtly that we didn’t even realize it was gone.
The hills that seemed like Mount Everest to us during our novitiate years were scaled easily, more than once in the same day even. We relished our abilities to cover ground, though our hunting success may have been better had we just stayed put. Occasionally someone would kill a deer and we enjoyed dragging it uphill. There weren’t as many deer being drug out of the woods in those days.
The decades passed. Gradually, then suddenly, there were deer everywhere. Baltimore hunters no longer came only to Allegany and Garrett counties to hunt whitetails. In West Virginia, hunters from Huntington and Parkersburg stayed home to hunt rather than make the traditional trek to the state’s Potomac Highlands. And why not, they had bigger bucks with bigger racks in the Ohio River counties.
Turkey populations blossomed. Now we were hunting gobblers in the spring. The old-timers said it was wrong to do so, that it would hurt the flocks. Some posted their land against this new hunting. They were wrong.
Our hunting improved. In a county where once only a handful of deer was bagged, now thousands were being tagged. Seasons expanded or were created.
Hunting opportunity that we could not have imagined as youngsters now filled the pages of our regulation booklets and the corners of our hearts and minds.
Just look at what happened within the past week or so, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources established bow and muzzleloader antlerless deer seasons in September in many counties.
As hunting improved, some folks began to hunt only the larger of the particular species, seeking bucks that had antlers of minimum widths and certain numbers of points. Some chose to let jake gobblers walk, knowing there was a decent chance they would get a shot at an older bearded bird.
Then something started to transpire, the calendar pages kept flipping over. We became husbands, then fathers, then grandfathers ... great-grandfathers even.
Chronology happens.
A hunting mentor of mine once said, “What one man ain’t got, the other one does.” He was speaking of infirmities or anything that would slow us down. It might simply be Father Time. It might be respiratory problems. It might be a bad wheel. It might be worse.
The woods just got bigger again. Let us allow our sense of awe to return as well.
Contact Outdoor Editor Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.
