I remember the first one I ever drew. It was a pink card – a “special permit” in the language of the day. The year was 1968, and I was 14 years old. My first “cow permit” and I was thrilled beyond words. There were no “limited quota” licenses then. For antelope, you had to show up at the Game and Fish Department “district office” and stand in line on the appointed day (actually you showed up after work the evening before the appointed day and camped out in a lawn chair all night to hold your place in line) to get your license. For deer, you just bought a license any time before you went hunting. And for elk, you bought a license that entitled you to hunt in what we’d now call a general license area. Then, if you wanted a “special permit” you filled out an application and sent it in to the Department. If you were successful, you might get to hunt in a premium area like Little Mountain or the Ferris Mountains. Or you might even be lucky enough to hunt a cow in the Giffy Butte country where we hunted.
I got lucky. I scored a cow license in the area we’d hunted forever. It was the old man’s favorite area. He knew it like you might know your own back yard because it was his back yard. He had ridden horseback and walked every inch of it from timberline to sagebrush. But he wouldn’t be there. He died unexpectedly in the spring of ’67 and the last year had been hell for everyone involved. But the days and months had ticked by slowly and Old Luke was not going to let me fail on this one. My dad’s best friend, he became my life coach and my lifeline in those days. The paperwork was submitted, the drawing was held and on a glorious morning in July, that pink card arrived in PO Box 133.
It sat on my dresser all summer, stuck in the frame of the mirror. I looked at it every day and thought about what it was going to be like to kill my first elk. Sometimes, I’d just sit and hold it and envision myself sneaking through the timber with Uncle Grant’s .270 over my shoulder. I shot the rifle over and over that summer after Uncle Alan took it to Salt Lake City and had a scope put on it to replace the old peep sight. Sometimes, I’d get the rifle out and just hold it and the cow permit together. Then my brain would cue the video again and I’d be back in the snowy timber of my imagination. The pink card, the Model 54 Winchester and I were a team. All we needed was a chance to play.
Almost half a century has passed since that summer. But the magic is still there. The suspense, the anticipation, the video in my head – they’re all still there. I hope they always will be.
-Grandpa
A few excited weeks in May define a lot of things about the year in our family. The results of one small draw determines what we’ll eat for the following year, how we’ll spend our fall, and how many thousands of hours will be spent at the shooting range practicing
like crazy, cleaning and inspecting every square millimeter of our
rifles, and going over and over the terrain we’ll be facing in area (cough cough). A lot of work goes into it, and we get so much out of it!
I always love the sound of a knocking on my front door, then grandpa comes in and says, “we’re going to apply for a big game tag!” It’s the best. Weeks go by. We’ve determined that the only reason we’re ever taught math in school is to calculate the odds of being successful. Finally, on a routine get-the-mail, a huge packet shows up, and in the top right corner, a big “Wyoming Game and Fish Department,” their logo, and below that, “Draw Results.” Opening it is almost as exciting as pulling the trigger…
-The Ranger
To a large degree, our families’ year revolves around hunting season. It’s a time when we bond, go on death marches (Grandpa’s version of “elk hunting”), and get meat in the freezer (hopefully).
So as you can imagine, the lead up to - and the draw itself - is a mighty big deal. Our family always puts in for antelope (in area “up yonder”), deer (in area “cough, cough”) and elk (in area “y’know…that area...”).
No matter where we are in the state of Wyoming, we all do the same thing on the morning the results are in. We wake up and get on the Game and Fish website, then celebrate, mourn, and exchange flurried emails about the results. From May on, (and sometimes before that) we dream of the wapiti jumping over the moon. And if we’re lucky, we get to enjoy recipes such as elk pot roast, deer cheese-steak sandwiches, and antelope Parmesan. And if we’re not - well, there’s always next year.
-The Apprentice
Grandpa is like a kid in a candy store when it comes to the big game draw. Starting in May, he is 100% in hunt mode until approximately January. May is a time of great excitement for our family. It usually consists of several emails back and forth between the Apprentice, Ranger, my brother-in-law and Grandpa. Then, if my dad has decided to hunt with us, he is right in the mix. If not, it is because he is cooking for an outfitter. The initial messages sent from Grandpa look much like this. “30 days until the deadline. Have you put in yet?” “29 days until the deadline. Have you put in yet?” I receive my daily reminders with
my morning alarm. We find it particularly humorous that he sends these to my wife. She works at the Game & Fish. I personally wait until the last day of the month. Not sure if that is superstition or the fact that I get paid on that day, but I have seemed to luck out more times than not, so I am sticking with it. However, I would be suprised if Grandpa wasn’t on the WGFD website at 12:01am on opening application day, asserting his position as the first resident to get his application in. He really is that hardcore when it comes to the draw. Needless to say, next to adding a new family member – hunting applications are the next big thing.
Every year, I jump on social media a few weeks into June and make a wager with my wife as to how many posts we see praising the Game & Fish or cursing them. I know how it feels not to draw a tag for the 10th time in a row. I don’t care if the area has 2%
success. This could be the year! When WGFD announces the results, I know Wyomingites do their dang best to break the internet logging into the draw results. I am one of them. At 8 am, I pull up my computer, tablet, phone and anything else with Wifi and then discuss the draw for the rest of the week. Is it the excitiment of getting the big bull tag you have been waiting for? Is it finally drawing that area that has less than 2% odds? Maybe it is the anticipation that your hunt is now FINALLY in the planning stages. Either way, it is a birthday and Christmas all rolled up into one glorious event. It is the green light to talk about hunting non-stop until you bring home little white packages. Except, then you have to tell the story of the hunt…so, I guess it actually doesn’t stop there. The draw assures quality family time. It provides the hope of steaks, roasts and hamburgers. More than anything, it brings our family together. By the way, it’s 14 days until the deadline. Have you put in yet?
-Long Rifle
I should have done it years sooner. I just kept putting it off. I was too busy. I had family stuff to do. I had work stuff to do. I had church stuff to do. The bottom line was that I was an idiot. My good friend Kirk Deeter maintains that fishing is as much about the people we fish with as it is about anything else. He’s right, of course. And I was an idiot for waiting years to fish with my old friend Spencer.
I don’t remember when I met him – back in the 1980’s sometime, I expect. I was just beginning to realized that I was getting bored with being a biologist and that I was getting interested in how fish and wildlife agencies work and how we could make them better. He was the big dog of that small group of folks who were convinced that we could use management science borrowed from the business world to make fish and wildlife agencies more effective. He was the reigning herd bull; I was a stupid little spike who bugled too loud, too high and too often. He probably should have put the run on me, but he didn't.
Instead of running me off, he took me in. He taught me. He shared his wisdom, and not just about our work. I remember the time he told me that I was confusing my job with my life. I didn’t want to hear it, but he was right. He taught me to listen, to reflect and to capture other peoples’ thoughts without worrying about my own. We traveled a lot together in those days. We went to dozens of states to share what we knew. We were even hired by some big shots in DC to go to a small, teardrop shaped country off the southern tip of India to help them do some planning for their national parks. It was a hoot.
But he never lost track of who he was, and he wasn’t about to let me do that either. He always had both feet planted solidly on the ground. So when he retired, we started a consulting company. We didn’t know very much about running a consulting company, but we figured it out. We worked with state and federal agencies, even some other outfits. We worked on salmon in Alaska, wolves in Utah, prairie dogs in Nebraska and a host of other gigs. We had a blast. We might have even done some good in a place or two. I hope so.
But eventually, I moved on. The partners went their separate ways. And Spencer went to Casper. He and his wife wanted to be close to their family there. And he wanted to fish the North Platte. We fished it together with some friends not long after he moved there. He made the mistake of letting me row the drift boat. I doubt he’ll make that error again. But as always, he was kind and patient and he took my ineptitude with a laugh. That’s the way he is.
That’s why I’ve long maintained that if God had given me an older brother, I’d want him to be like Spencer. And why I won’t wait so long for us to fish together again.
-Grandpa
A few weeks ago, I traveled with Grandpa to Washington D.C. We had the best time, we saw and learned so much, and it made us really glad to live in such a great country! One of the days we were there towards the end of our visit, a buddy of ours, Joel, who lives in the D.C. area, invited us to go fly-fishing with him on the Potomac. We were to catch many different types of fish, including shad and catfish. Grandpa packed his fly rod for the two of us to split, and we were ready to go.
Joel picked us up from our hotel north of D.C. in Maryland, ready to go with all sorts of fishing gear. From there it was about a twenty minute drive to a spot on the Potomac south of the city near Alexandria. We rented a small little rowboat, got our gear in order, tied a little black fly on the rods, made lunch, and set sail for deep waters towards the other side of the river.
It was fun from the start. Grandpa and I were so used to mountain trout fly fishing, so Joel had to teach us the whole new way of doing it. Contrary to before, this new way of doing it involved throwing out the weighted line, letting the current take it out and under the water, then stripping it back in slowly. When a fish caught on, in order to set the hook, rather than pulling back on the pole with all your might, this new method was called “strip-setting.” You took grabbed some loose line and stripped it back like heck. This was really new for us Wyomingites, and it took a ton of getting used to. Right at the beginning, I felt a sharp tug. I did this crazy flailing thing with the pole that may have worked back home, but definitely not in Virginia, and the fish fell off. Grandpa took a gander at it and did much the same thing. Oh, dear.
I finally got the hang of it somewhat, and I almost brought a fish in, bringing it just feet from the boat. Joel brought in a nice shad, and people nearby seemed to be doing well. What matters was, though, is that we were having a blast and learning all kinds of cool new things. Soon, we realized that all of us were getting kind of hungry. At that precise moment, we also realized that nobody had brought the lunch along. Ai karumba. We went all the way back to shore and ate lunch. Others who were fishing only a bit downstream from us had brought in about a dozen shad and catfish, but we didn’t seem to be having as much luck. After lunch, Joel took off for the bank to try to do some river-side fishing, but no luck. Ah well. You can’t win every day I guess.
Grandpa and I traveled to the other side of the country to learn some cool things about our nation’s capital and to see and do some way awesome stuff. Little did we know, however, that we would get a taste of a very new and foreign type of fishing, and boy did we love it!
-The Ranger
A few weeks ago the Grandpa and I caught a small window in the weather and tried our luck at some early season fly-fishing. Along the way, we at our weight in eggs, ham, gravy and hash browns, found a couple great wild asparagus hunting places, and had a great time!
We got up at the unearthly hour of 6:45ish (I’m not exactly a morning person…). After we had an early morning pick me-up of toast and hot chocolate, we went in search of “Second Breakfast” (as hobbits call it), and boy, did we find it! We went to the local diner and ordered two ham skillets with eggs, biscuits and gravy. We ordered two, assuming that they would come on normal-sized plates that we could eat from and be on our way. We were wrong - they came on platters the size of a Thanksgiving turkey platter. The menu had neglected to mention that skillet was made out of mountains of hash browns, rivers (and I am talking about the Colombian, in Oregon) of sausage gravy, piles of bacon, clouds of biscuits, kingdoms of eggs and ham and all manner of breakfast goodies. We violated every rule Grandpa has ever made about never eating anything bigger than your head!
With our pants much tighter than before, we left to fish. On the way, we talked about the advantages of being a wildlife biologist, about Grandpa’s friend who walked a bull elk to death (that’s a story for a Grandpa to tell), and about all sorts of other grandpa/grandkid things.
When we got to the fishing spot, we saw that the water was extremely high (Upon further inquiry we learned it was at 2,400 cubic feet per second). We determined to do our best to land a fish, but knew the odds were against us with the water that high. So after rigging our rods with a “little black fly,” we set out.
Nothing worked. We tried bigger “black flies,” and all different color “black flies.” We just couldn’t get the fish interested. So, we decided to hunt the quick and mighty wild asparagus. It had frozen the night before, so we only found about a half-pound of these tasty delights.
We then tried hunting for asparagus in one other area. It is quite a well-known area. In fact, you have probably heard of it. The place is called Wal-Mart. There – lo and behold - we found pounds and pounds of asparagus. We got some, to play a joke on my family. We then went back to the truck and discovered that I had locked us outside of our truck on accident. Not exactly in the plan…
Once the appropriate locksmith had been called, we waited and cleaned the asparagus in the Subway complex inside Wal-Mart. Then the locksmith arrived and, for lack of a better word, he broke into the truck with ease. So then we headed home after a day of many adventures!
I learned that day that local diners can be a great place to go if you want to eat your weight (or more) in gravy, that high water and fishing don’t go well together, and that asparagus is most easily found in its natural habitat of Wal-Mart, and that keys are best in hand (or pocket), instead of locked in the truck. But most of all, I just had a great day with my Grandpa.
-The Apprentice
