doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Hunt like a farmer do

Heck I got heaters in mine....

This will make 42 years I've hunted deer here in PA. The first years were the best of course! The year I started my father and older brother stretched a canvas tarp under a large hemlock, put our bags on half and covered ourselves with the other half. We had 4" of snow the next morning. I remember it like it was yesterday. We graduated to a tent and used that for the next 35 years. The locals started calling us the tent people. We took it as a compliment. We carried cold turkey sandwiches and candy bars. Turkey has no taste when that cold and you really notice the wax in chocolate. I liked to still hunt east from camp until noon, sit and eat my lunch then still hunt back. I shot most my bucks doing that. Everyone else that made up our group, but for me and two others have past on. Hunting the eighty acre farm is just to small a piece of woods. I miss the walk into that expansive forest. Deer hunting has lost its charm for me- I am sad to say. I really do enjoy the meat though.

Kurt

If that ol' farmer would cut the bisquits and gravy out of his diet, he wouldn't have bad knees and could probably stay awake without the caffine. Might live longer and not have that heart attack while putting his socks on while still in his 60s neither.

Lowell...I believe you're describing my dad. I remember when he got older and it was hard to walk we put him on a stand with that old octagon barrel 25-35 winchester while the rest of the hunters walked toward him.

When he started shooting at all those running deer coming out in front of the drivers he used up more than his annual quota of one cartridge per season as was his norm. So, he sent me to town to buy him two new boxes of 25-35 ammo. When I told him what they cost I was sure I had lost my inheritance...he hadn't bought a box of ammo for that gun in at least 25 years.

After he passed away and mom asked me to come to the ranch and take possession of his guns...there were those two boxes of 25-35 ammo...one full and one with two rounds gone.

Started hunting deer and elk in the brutal cold of Central and Eastern Idaho so when I moved to Pennsylvania the 10 below temperatures of the Allegheny National forest seemed balmy. Everything I needed fit in my Woolrich coat pockets. Most important was dry matches and a canteen cup to heat water for hot drinks. What Lowell is calling a farmer is better described as a woodsman - someone who is so at home in the woods he long ago learned not to get lost and to deal with the weather and terrain. Most hunters today are city people and are not at home in the woods. So many more things are carried along to help them get by in the unfamiliar environment. They seldom get more than a mile off the road for which they now want a quad vehicle. It is sad how little they know about the woods or the hunt.

This ol'boy was a farmer, thru and thru.
By noon, he'd have his deer!
After he'd shot his deer, I would watch him driving his pick-up over hill 'n dale and pasture to fetch it - didn't want any help, he said. On those colder Novembers, he would hang his deer on the barn door...it was usually a smallish doe. Nothing to brag about.

Chuck, this ol'coot's farm house had every un-healthy smell known to man...smoke from his cigs, smoke from the pot-belly stove and smoke from the ham 'n eggs cookin' in the kitchen.
He was bent-over from a hard life!

Now we need charcOal suits...

It ain't about the braggin' Lowell. It's all about the eatin' !! Mine used to shove a PB&J in the pocket of the old green and black check wool coat before headin' out. Nothin' wrong with that!

Lowell: You describe a "hedge poker" or "rough hunter" and I represent that. I am the sporting goods store's worst nightmare. I shoot a twenty-year-old Golden Eagle bow; yesterday I dropped off 11 ten-year-old arrows to be re-fletched, rather than buy a dozen new. I "waste" one or two arrows a year when they zip thru a deer, and have to replace maybe $10 worth of broadhead razors every 5 years.

For shotgun deer season I use an 870 with sabot barrel and iron sights ($209.00 once in a lifetime). I go thru maybe a box of 5 shells ($9.00) every year. No special clothing that I can't double-duty on the farm. My luxury is a substantial ladder stand at $109.00 that my wife insisted I start using when I reached Medicare years.

Pheasants abound just outside my humble domicile, and my arm of choice is, of course, a Parker, and accompanied by ParkerDog, my Yellow Lab, we make it "pay." No driven birds at great expense and great distance, just hedge poking, plain and simple, like it oughta be for those of us living the nostalgia of a yesteryear and born a century too late.

It never ceases to amaze me when I visit Destry "Markethunter" Hoffard in Michigan, and we take a short side trip to the Dundee Cabalas and see how much white people's "bling" exists for the would-be nimrod who is short on opportunity but long on cash. The amount of camo clothing deadens the senses, and the idea that a full size styrofoam deer with antlers is necessary for target shooting seems to me "over the top." Yet it is encouraging that such places continue to exist and even proliferate, supported by a next generation of hunters and sportsmen still willing to tear themselves away from 24-hour cable news, instant messaging, Blackberries, and surfin' the Internet for a little old-time outdoor entertainment.

I'll have to admit that I head to my deer woods later than most, about a half hour before sunset. My last archery season I took two bucks (10 & 4 points) in five one-hour episodes; other years I have zeroed out after thirty or more evening hunts, and my only profit was sitting in the woods at sunset while watching the trees change and drop their leaves. But how do you really measure the "profit" of the primeval experience? I've been a hedge poker for 55 years, since at age eleven when I stuck my first rabbit with a homemade arrow loosed from an osage orange long bow. My first pheasant dropped to my first "double," a Stevens Mod.24 O/U .22/.410 in 1956. A half century has passed in the blink of an eye. This old farmer looks forward to another season; no deer scents, grunt calls, rattlin' horns (plastic or otherwise) or fox urine being part of the equation. EDM