1965 = 18 years old.
Rifle = .303 British Enfield, straight from World War II, $15, picked it out of a barrel full of them, based on the way the riflings looked when I held it up to a window in the store. Pulled the bolt and sighted it by centering a tack on the wall in the barrel and lining up the open sights, on top the barrel.
First deer I killed was a fawn mule deer, aimed at the doe and hit the fawn in the neck, the fawn was ten feet above the doe and three feet to the left. I was at least 75 yard away. I was 14 or 15, it was 1961 or 62. (I still shoot just about as poorly!)
All the land was private and already difficult to get permission to hunt farms and ranches. Landowners were allowing "special friends" to hunt but you needed to be "special", being friends wasn't enough, even in those days. Friendships only went so far when the deer hunt came around. About one in 5 would allow us to hunt their property.
Pheasants had taken a major set back in the 1950's, from bad winters and late spring blizzards, by the 60's the majority of the pheasant were gone but there were still pheasants on the ditch banks and the willow patches, but not like I remember them when I was in grade school. They used to cover then entire gravel road I walked to the bus stop, during a winter morning. Thousands of out of Province upland game hunters came to hunt pheasants and huns in the 50's but by 1965 it was pretty much just us local boys left chasing them.
Ducks Unlimited built thousands of acres of wet lands just out of town in the late 1940s and 1950s so by 1965 we had ducks eating us out of house and home. Hunting ducks over a harvested-flooded pea field, on the prairie, was nearly unbelievable. I used a short barreled 410 shotgun (cousin blew 4 inches off the end, shooting at a rooster with 2" of mud jammed down the front end). I can recall at least 3 times seeing three mallards fold and fall, from a single shot, out of that old 410 barrel.
It was easier to get permission, from the same landowners, to hunt ducks, they were depredating their grain fields badly. Many years we hunted ducks without a limit, to keep them off a field with grain in the windrows. Pheasants, we just hunted public road ditch banks, or our own Dad's farms. Only the rich folks got to hunt geese, again you needed to be "special" to get permission to dig a pit in the middle of a land-owner's barley field.
The large landowners and their American friends were having great goose hunts but us poor boys could only watch from the road. (It's still against the law for Canadian landowners to make money off wildlife, but, like today, they had "special friends", and it all worked, with a wink and a nod.)
For example: my Dad never charged anyone a dime to hunt pheasants or huns on our place but the money the Americans paid us to sleep in the bunk-house and even the granary and to eat at the house, sure came in handy, when it came time to buy Christmas for us kids. There were no motels or restaurants anywhere near that country, in the 1950's, only a couple of run down, old Hotel/Bars, 15 to 20 miles back over dusty, rough roads and those few rooms sold out long before the hunts ever started.
We lived 150 miles from anything resembling a mountain. Our big game was antelope, mule deer and whitetail deer. Not tons of deer but a few, out in the Red Deer River country, 90 miles north east, on a gravel, wash board road. Antelope hunting open up in 1964, after having been closed to hunting since 1927. Antelope were like flocks of mid-west snow geese, in those days. Thousands of them, every where you'd look. We shot the hell out of then in three years. By 1968 or 69 we'd killed so many (legally) they put them on a draw hunt, the first draw hunt for any big game animal in Alberta, as I recall. I never drew another Alberta antelope tag after they went to the draw. Pretty amazing what hunters can do to a population, if you turn all of them loose on a species, even back then, before hardly anyone owned a rifle scope. I still prefer antelope meat, over deer or elk, if cared for properly.
Never hunted elk, moose, caribou, bear, mt. goat or sheep until well into my thirties forties and fifties.
40, 30, 20, 10 years later, carved out the time (barely) to get an education which allowed it to be a continuous progression of trips, hunts, horses, wheelers, tents, teepees (lodges to our purest muzzleloader buds) buck skins, camo, wool, gortex, under-armer, boots, mucks, upgrades in vehicles, guns, gear and the pure joy of days in the sun, wind, rain, and snow. I've left my share of hide on the bark and the rocks. I've out lived damn near every joint, in every extremity and my bladder, but I wouldn't trade a pain or a lump for any other life style that's been available, I even enjoy a playing round of golf or a watching good ball game now and again, just for good measure. As far as I'm concerned, my generation, cut the heart out of the watermelon! Hope you all have seen it much the same.
These truly are the best of times.
DC
