I don't remember my first hunting trip.  But I do remember bits and pieces, and moments from so many.  How many mornings did my father give up the chance at even seeing anything just so a sniffling, coughing, restlessly moving little boy could sit in the stand with him and learn to enjoy some of God's greatest gifts?  I remember the blanket he always carried so that I could curl up snug and warm in his lap and sleep in his lap until the sun rose. (and sometimes well after)  I remember the snickers bars and cans of Tex-sun orange juice he always had for us in one of the pockets of the M-65 field jacket that he still wears to this day.

  I do remember my first shot.  Along with learning what buck-fever is and what it can do to even the steadiest of hands.  A beautiful eight point walked directly underneath us.  My heart was pounding itself up into my throat.  We watched it for what seemed like forever.  It wandered out about 50 yards or so.  I kept thinking "why isn't Dad shooting yet?".  I looked up at him, he smiled down at me and handed me his rifle "old meat-in-the-pot" he calls it.  I was dumbfounded, terrified, and ecstatic, all at the same time.  It was the best feeling I had ever felt.  I would love to say that I dropped that buck right there in it's tracks, but I cannot.  I missed.  I was mortified.  I thought Dad would be mad at me, that I had let him down.  I slowly looked up at him, and he was smiling even bigger.  The buck only ran about 100 or so yards and stopped.  I handed the rifle back to the man that could not miss, at least not in my eyes, my father, my hero.  When I saw the deer drop, I forgot all of the bad feelings and shame from just a few moments ago, at missing the buck.  My hero had saved the day once again.

I remember sitting in the stand with him for the last time.  The day he told me I was ready to venture out on my own.  He told me, that day, the reason he started leasing the land the year I was born.  "I didn't want you growing up to be a 'city-jerk' like your mother". (He wasn't trying to be mean towards my mother, city-jerk is just a term we used for city raised people with no concept of the outdoors.)  My father was raised on a share-croppers farm in the middle of the cotton fields of the pan-handle, just northeast of Lubbock. 

My father and I still go hunting together sometimes, but not often enough.  It was one of the first things we did together after I returned from Iraq.  But now it is two men, peers if you will, Sharing man stories of work and adventures.

My daughter is already an avid and excited hunting enthusiast, even though at the ripe-old age of four she is not ready to to do more than observe just yet.  My son turns one in less than a week.  I hope 30, or so, years from now they can look back and feel as I do now about my hunting experiences with my father, and see me as the hero that I see him as.

(I could not find a photo of my father and I hunting.  I have set my mother on the quest of finding one.  I did however find a picture from a fishing trip we went on just before my uncle died.  My father is the man in the middle with the white cap and pork-chop side burns.  This picture was taken in spring of 1976)

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