Excellent post.
I miss my father, coming home from a week or two in elk camp, smelling like wood smoke, sweat and blood. Very unique smell, the heavy wool clothing held all those wonderful smells.
I miss going in to set up hunting camp as a kid in the early 60's. Helping cut firewood and set up the two wall tents, all the time wondering when I would get to go hunting.
My first buck, shot with my Dad's 1937 Model 70 '06 with iron sights offhand 150 yds or so downhill, a 4 point muley.
Finally got to go to elk camp my junior year in high school. Took a couple years of packing other's elk before I got the chance to kill my first, one morning, a feeding spike. Dad told me that if I ever had a chance to shoot an elk, keep shooting till it hit the ground. Three shots that you could cover with an orange in the middle of the ribcage. Took me 4 hours to gut, quarter and hang it with the hide on and then cover all the quarters with fir bows to keep the critters at bay.
Remember going in to pack out another bull that I killed with my Uncle. We took the "Deer Carrier", an inline two-wheel drive cart made of conduit and powered by a 3.5hp Briggs that my Dad made. The highlight of that trip was seeing a Northern Pygmy Owl at head high in the tree next to us as we climbed the steep north face of the ridge with our empty pack frames.
I miss that camp and the companionship and tales at the end of the day. That camp was used continuously for over 70 years and many generations. Many, many deer and elk were taken from that camp, twin 12x14 wall tents and an outside fire by which my Uncle cooked pies with a reflector oven. At the start, before my time, were the days, that if you saw an elk track, you followed it until you came to the elk, and they usually came home with big elk.
Those were the days of Bean boots and red and black plaid wool coats and LL Bean black wool pants. Long johns were the waffle knit cotton variety. There were many times that you thought you stayed pretty clean until you took off your black wool pants and your long johns were soaked in blood.
The only red we wore was the floppy red wool hat that dripped rain water down your neck and let tamarack needles drift down your collar and to places farther south.
Those were the days, but nothing stays the same. Now we have wonderful synthetics that keep you warm even when wet, but merino wool is still the best, electronics and technology that keep us from losing ourselves (unless the batteries go dead) and find what is over the next ridge without actually going over said ridge. Firearms that are capable of accurately shooting way farther than most hunters should be shooting. We now have optics that can allow us to split hairs at extreme distances instead of wondering if it would fog up internally in the rain and not allow us to see clearly the buck at 100 yards.
Is it for the better, maybe, maybe not. For those that have never experienced the past when things were simpler, now is what they know and have nothing to compare. For some of us that have been at this for close to half a century, we wonder if the best is in the past.
