Hunting heritage: Milestone moments bridge gap between generations

An eerie black silence still cloaked the surrounding woods atop a large hill at the Montour Preserve public hunting lands early Monday morning. Sunrise was still a good 20 minutes away.

Suddenly, a branch cracked nearby. Dry leaves rustled. Something was walking toward the large oak tree we both were sitting near. That something was large, dark and hard to pinpoint – especially through glasses fogged after a brisk hike up the hillside on a frosty late-fall morning.

“Something’s coming,” Paige said in a loud whisper. “Is it a bear?”

Just short of three years before this moment, Paige struggled to come to grips with the idea that her grandfather was no longer with us.

That is when my father’s death became real to me – when Paige realized that she’d never have the chance to hunt with her grandfather. She knew how important hunting was to him. She saw the passion – heard the stories. Her verbalizing of this was an instant slap of reality that things had changed forever.

Those who hunt because of the longstanding family traditions know how sacred hunting milestones can be. I was so proud of Paige when she recently finished her hunter-trapper education class, and it was hard not to think of my father and how he reacted when I completed the same course decades before.

Paige and I celebrated her achievement by scouting a few of the best hunting spots at the public land my family has hunted since I was her age.

When we reached the top of the large hill we planned to hunt on opening day, I shared stories of how her grandfather would arm my brother and me with a thermos of hot chocolate and a few mini Snickers bars for each hunt. And that even when his health was starting to fail, he still would walk up that same hill with a gnarled wooden stick trying to drive a deer toward my brother and me. She and I scouted for deer signs, cleared leaves from the large oak tree we hoped to hunt near on opening day and I told her stories of the coyotes, bears and even a bobcat I saw on that same hill in hunting seasons past.

I should have saved those stories for another day.

It wasn’t a bear that approached us opening morning, but a small, curious doe. Not long after sunrise, we were surprised by another doe that nearly walked right up to us. Shortly after that, a group of three more doe passed nearby. Through the first couple hours of the season, we saw more than a dozen deer. It started to feel as though our hunt was taking place in a petting zoo.

Afterward, while she unwrapped a mini-Snickers bar, I tried to explain that hunting wasn’t typically so easy. In nearly three decades of pursuing deer in that area, I had never experienced such a thing.

Paige simply smiled, shook her head, and said, “Grandpa must have pushed them to us.”