As a kid there were two skills I mainly learned from my father, how to work and how to hunt. My father was in the army, I remember him talking once about the $800 he got a month and where it was to be used. Needless to say we didn't have a lot but by hunting and raising a garden we ate pretty good.
  Venison, quail, pheasant those are meats you might find in a swank restaurant but we also had plenty of squirrel, rabbit, dove and an occasional ground hog...hell I even ate a raccoon once. To me this was normal, to me the best meat you could buy from the  grocery store were hamburgers and hotdogs because when we did buy a steak from the store it was a cheap cut, tough as shoe leather and laced with fat and gristle, which, by the way, my dad made us eat. You know..."Finish everything on your plate boy, there are starving people in India that don't have as much as you."
  Hunting was different then, we'd jump in the truck drive out into the country, stop at a house and ask if we could hunt their property. Sometimes it was yes, sometimes it was no, but it was simple...straight forward. My dad would make friends that way and when he did our freezer was stocked for the year.
  Deer hunting..................The first deer hunting experience I had was on Fort Hood. There's a rod and gun club there and during the season they set up a lottery for soldiers/hunters. The soldiers arrive about 4:30 am for the morning hunts, 2:30 pm for the afternoon hunts, wait to see if they were drawn, the lucky ones are taken to a stand in a big army truck everyone else goes home. My dad took me one afternoon, we were drawn and I remember well the bumpy ride out to the area we were to hunt. We laid down behind a downed tree and waited for a deer to come out so my dad could shoot it. I wasn't hunting, I was there to observe, I was six years old. It started getting cold and as it did my teeth started chattering, I couldn't help it. My dad became really perturbed and pushed my down under a heavy green army canvass we were laying on and told me to be quiet.
  The next several hours were miserable to me, etched in to my mind, I reckon for the rest of my life. We didn't get a deer that day but as we stood in the dark waiting for the big army truck to pick us up we looked at the stars and talked, my dad wasn't angry anymore and I heard for the first time a deer snort, "the warning there's danger present", he said. The ride back was just as bumpy, a truck loaded with cold soldiers in camo and a couple of dead deer.
  And that was deer hunting to me for the next ten years, laying on the ground scanning a brush line, looking out across a field from the loft of a barn, aiming my rifle out of the second floor of an old dilapidated farm house, no matter where it was it always seemed to be cold.
  Then things changed, my dad retired from the army, went to a community college on the GI Bill and started an AC business and for once we had a little money. He had a lease we could hunt and we built blinds with soft seats, sliding windows and even propane heaters. Part of it was because we had money but I think the other part was because my dad was getting older and just wanted to be comfortable.
  The last year my dad hunted was the year I stopped hunting and didn't hunt again for about ten years. It was the year after I graduated highschool, I bought into the lease and could hunt when I wanted for the first time. My dad bought the back end of a refrigerated truck and set it up as a meat processing areas complete with a bandsaw to cut steaks. The thing that made me stop hunting was that my father shot more than the legal limit that year. I won't say how many more, it still embarrasses me. I became really perturbed, I wanted to push him down under a heavy green army canvass and tell him how disappointed I was in him. After that, what he had taught me about hunting meant next to nothing to me.
  Time ticks on and after about ten years I started hunting again, rediscovering some of what I had lost. I rifle hunted a couple of times in Bandera with reps. from a wine company trying to smooze me. Took a couple of deer and pretty much stopped again unsatified with the same ol' same ol'. A few more years went by and I was talked into trying bow hunting by a friend of mine. I'd played around with compound bows as a teenager and was really quite good though I'd never hunted with one, but this was traditional, the classic stick and string. So my de-evolution began, I had to relearn everything, not moving for an hour at a time, covering my scent , learning the subtle signs that tell you where to set up, making myself invisible in my surroundings.
  I've been hunting a ranch by Lake Buchanan for almost a year now. Dozens of times I sat there and watched the day turn into night, sometimes sitting through the night to watch the sun come up again. In those times I've only taken four shots with my bow and with those four shots I've taken three hogs and a deer. All clean, ethical. All easy to track.
  Last night I walked down one of the ranch roads, found a place where game traversed and sat back a little ways in the brush, a cool wind in my face, a lane in front to take a shot if presented. My bow sat three feet away leaning against a wild persimmon. As I sat there a hawk swooped between me and my bow, oblivious to my presence, the tip of it's wing inches from my face. It flew out through my shooting lane and landed in a tree across the road from me. It perched there for a minute and then started back towards the opening. At the last moment it saw me, spread it's wings stopping in mid air, changed directions and was gone. 
  I watched a group of deer feed ten yards in front of me, three does and a couple of yearlings. Two of the does were mature, one was huge. I could have taken her but I was waiting for a buck I'd seen in the area earlier this year. I watched them  for about thirty minutes as they grazed and made their way off. Later I had three bucks come out, three I had seen with the buck I wanted. One was a four and a half year old eight point. Classic Hill Country rack, not real high, not real woody but symmetric. Another eight, not as big and a younger six. But the one I wanted wasn't with them, probably split off by now in anticipation of the rut. As they moved into the brush the two smaller bucks started to tussle a bit then they were gone. The light faded and I walked back to camp in the dark, through the woods not bothering to turn on my light. Best hunt of the year, what hunting is to me.

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