What a bunch of old geezers we have around here. I'll be 68 in a couple weeks and feel comfortable in this group. Retirement is such a final thing, I think of it more of a change to the next available thing. Sitting Bull was quoted saying "when the buffalo are gone, we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we love our freedom". Yes, I have hunted mice, sometimes with a real passion, sometimes just for coyote trapline bait.
I started duck hunting in 1967 in eastern Kansas. I'm not sure what we hunted more, probably ducks, but maybe quail just as much. I had a pretty well rounded hunting and fishing upbringing, one of the things my dad and I did see eye to eye on. My first game animal was a cottontail rabbit, then graduated to squirrel and then to ducks and quail. We fished a lot, crappie, white bass, largemouth bass, channel cats and flathead. We hunted pheasant and prairie chicken a lot, deer and coyotes were also on the list of common pursuits. Ducks were a big thing, but certainly not the only thing.
I moved to Idaho 34 years ago and got into grouse, all varieties, big into sage grouse till the population plummeted. I did a lot of archery deer hunting most of my adult life from age 16 and on till 2013 when I destroyed my shoulder and no longer could shoot a bow, I shoot a shotgun or rifle more or less one handed due to the weight. For decades I ran a trapline and paid my way through college with fur and working for a fur buyer.
I was big into bear hunting after moving to Idaho, shot my big bear in 2013 with one arm and the gun resting on a chair. Duck hunting was fairly central in Kansas, but the 60 day seasons didn't seem long enough to not find something else to do. My dad was an industrial education teacher at at Emporia State University, I was the kid that hung out in the wood shop and plastics shop. I learned about all kinds of things, we were molding foam decoys by the time I was 14 and vacuum forming snow goose shells by 16. I've been a full time wildlife artist since 1981, but never did any working decoys till 2004. I did a lot of fish, animals and birds. If I'm in the shop, I'm usually thinking about hunting or fly fishing, when I'm hunting and fly fishing I'm usually thinking about some project I've got going on in the shop. I'm thoroughly immersed in all things hunting and fishing.
I can't imagine retiring from anything, but have become fairly dependent on others to go anywhere to hunt and fish. My dad and chessie passed away in 2017 and that really took the wind out of my sails. My youngest son was good about taking me fishing, I think I got about 200 floats on some gold medal fly fishing water in Idaho with my son who at one time was a guide on the Henry's Fork. It was completely wonderful, but the surge in population has made the fishing there a zoo.
I have great places to fish here within 30 minutes of the house for trout and small mouth that keeps me outside some. I have accepted every invitation to go duck hunting over the past five years, which is exactly zero times. I bought my first duck stamp in 5 years a few weeks ago and plan to get with it as soon as we get some real ducks down here, that usually doesn't happen till around the first of December. We went once already but didn't see anything, it took me awhile to figure out how to load my vinci, it had been so long.
I'm not real sure how many decoys my son and I have made this year, all custom foam decoys, but I'm finishing up my fourth package of 200 cabochons that I paint for glass eyes. I can't say that retirement from anything is really on the radar, I just move to the next thing that becomes available. The last 5 years has been primarily fly fishing and occasionally tagging along with my son just to mess with decoys, but not hunting. My dad hunted till he was 83 and passed a few months later. My boys and I took him on his last hunt for those real green heads, you know the ones with the white patches on their heads. This was my dog "Zip's" last hunt and Caleb's dog's first year and my dad on the right and my oldest behind the camera with a four man limit of divers, we call that a sausage hunt. My dad had a ball. We don't retire from being outdoors, hunting and fishing, we just make changes along the way.
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