As a writer of a hometown newspaper sportsmen’s column, I often ponder about which assault on our sportsmen’s heritage to rant about each week.  Sadly, the assault list becomes longer every day and the fringe of a “what’s the use” depression often begins to set in. 

Like trying to put toothpaste back in its tube, choosing words strong enough to serve as an antidote for the apathy so prevalent among the ranks of sportsmen seems to be an exercise in futility.  There’s just too many somebody’s content to let somebody else fight the battles on their behalf.

Frequently, I feel like throwing in the towel used to wipe my word weary brow and hanging the guns, fishing rods, and fur traps up on the wall to gather dust, just like all the other doo-dads I’ve collected through the years.  How easy it would be to pick up a cleaning rag and bottle of antibacterial all-purpose cleaner and become an Edith Bunker house frau, oblivious to the world outside my door and ready to lick the boots of those wanting to control my destiny.

Though I’ve never been the Edith Bunker house frau type, it used to be that my floor was so clean you could eat off it.  Now you have to wade around towers of sportsmen’s magazines, piles of newspaper clippings about sportsmen’s issues, and cardboard boxes of printed, but yet to be filed research on even more issues just to get to the chairs and table that look out over “my woods”. 

However, when I’m alone early in the morning and take the time to sit at the table with a tall cup of coffee and really look closely out at “my woods”, I’m reminded of their importance to a very special person who’s come to stand for what I believe is necessary and right, and that is the necessity and rightness of being willing to fight for the preservation of our traditional sportsmen’s heritage, our freedoms, and our constitutional rights.  And so, for that very special person and others like him, I show my doldrums the door and continue a personal campaign to combat apathy among our sportsmen’s ranks.

You see, “my woods”, surrounded by hundreds of “open to the public” hunting acres, is just a little patch of semi-wilderness, about ten acres in size and full of all sorts of wondrous things for children to explore by sight, touch, taste, and sound. 

“My woods” used to be bigger, but some of it was given to my youngest daughter and her new hubby who loved it here in the forest.  Just kids themselves, they kept their nose to the grindstone and with help from friends and family, they managed to clear a small space and build a home where they could raise a family in their own new woods. 

Now they’ve gone, by-products of a burgeoning cost of living that’s forced them into town and closer to work, miles away from “their woods and mine”.  Along with them went my first-born grandson, Little Beaver…the Prince of Prickett Dam, and his tiny new sister, too.

Gone with them are the little neighbor boy’s fingers that held mine on a walk through “our woods”; trusting fingers slimy with snail trail, leaf worms, and slow moving toads.  Gone are the eyes full of wonder at shiny dew on a spider’s web spun overnight and beautiful wet rocks in a rain puddle, pebbles collected to sit on my sill as an offer of love and lingering remembrance of our too short time together. 

Gone are the tiny grubby palms full of berries, red, blue, and black, held up to share as a treat.  No more old jelly jars holding flowering weeds to bring grace and dignity to a quick picnic lunch, just the two us dining eloquently on peanut butter sandwiches alone in “our woods”.   No more excited  shouts of “Gramma, come look, come quick, come see!”  “What is it?  Will it bite?  Can I hold it, please, Gramma, please?”

I remember how his short little legs, wobbling unsteadily along a fallen log, strengthened over time to master a shinny up a tree and then a quick dash to the sun speckled pond when a Bullfrog sang his song; how he would call on the phone from next door and say “I’m coming, gramma, please watch for me!”  And I’d watch westerly out my window toward the Little Beaver Trail bulldozed especially for him though the trees, watch as he slowly poked along examining what changes had come to “our woods” overnight.

I remember how his tiny ears soon became tuned to the honking of migrating geese, the drumming of partridge wings, and the beautiful song of Red-winged Blackbirds in the spring; that his first word wasn’t “mamma” or “dada”, it was “hawk” over and over, and over again, as the bird flew before us down the green canopied road on a hot summer’s day.

“Our woods” became nature’s classroom and he learned to read clouds for the weather they’d bring, what makes a rainbow, and how to find Orion, the Hunter, on a star-studded winter night.  On sleepovers, we’d nestle shoulder to shoulder under the covers while looking up at glow in the dark stars, whispering about all the marvelous things we’d managed to learn about in “our woods” that day

As time passed, my little neighbor boy grew big enough to become a fishing partner who quickly mastered the art of casting his line gently alongside mine by the honey hole log that still bears his name, “Avery’s Log”.   Between bites and joyous shouts of  “I got one, Gramma”, he learned to watch for mink scurrying along the bank in search of food for their young and Eagles soaring toward their perch, high in the trees.  

He soon grew old enough to tag along on the trap line, learning to read critter sign and identify tracks just like grown-ups, but who had a habit of exploring beaver dams with wet feet or falling in all together when curiosity got the best of him.  

He outgrew the fidgets and could finally sit still with an adult in a blind here in “our woods, sitting quietly watching for deer to amble by.   He became a marksman with .22 in hand, aiming at the self-setting steel target I requested as a gift on “Mother’s Day”, but intended for him all along. 

Today my little neighbor boy is still a young lad waiting for passage beyond childhood, yearning for the right to be a license-carrying sportsman.  When that time comes, I’m sure he’ll be a fine one and, God willing, I hope to be here to silently swell with pride for having had a hand in helping him to become an honorable member of the sportsman’s community.

Yes, I sit at my table thinking back on the good times my little neighbor boy and I shared in “our woods” learning about God’s Wal-Mart, where what humans truly need to sustain themselves can be found without tamper proof packaging.  Shelter and warmth from the woods, water from the springs to quench thirst and clean up with, furs and hides to wear, and food from the forests and waters to staunch hunger.   Creature comforts, no, but doable and workable, yes, if need be, just as our American ancestors learned to make do with what God and the land provided them. 

I sit here and I question how we’ve allowed ourselves to come to this point in America where hunting, and fishing, and trapping are under siege; where sportsmen are thought of as a pillaging plague on earth by environmental zealots wanting to preserve more than a fair share of our public lands and “protect” them from traditional human use.  

Through apathy, ignorance, or both, hunters, fishermen, trappers, and “noisy” outdoor sports enthusiasts realize too late that the promise of keeping public land open forever to sportsmen is a false one, but by then their voices are only a cry in the wilderness, begging for the right of traditional use and motorized access for all.

Unfortunately, through this same apathy and ignorance, outdoor sportsmen have no strong collective voice to call a halt to the victimization.  We fall prey to the “Divide & Conquer” tactic, losing focus of the true enemy, and fight amongst our own user groups.  Our ranks are further weakened by attitudes of  “I don’t care about the next generation, I just care about me and what I can do today.  Let the next generation fend for themselves.”  I’ve heard this said countless times, and it still stuns me.

Beginning before many of us can even remember and up to this day, billions of sportsmen’s dollars have been used to help protect and replenish the bounty of our land, not just for us now, but also for the aspiring sportsmen of tomorrow.  That international eco-conservation organizations now want to take over the protection and preservation of our public land may be testimony to the excellent job sportsmen’s dollars have done, but it most certainly does not give them the right to drive us out and take our place. 

These “Johnny come lately” international eco-organizations have used little, if any, of their own money to “protect and preserve” public land.  Instead, they rely on slick con-man brochures asking for donations, and apply for government grants to keep both themselves and their schemes afloat.  They divide and multiply and then hide their duplicity and nepotism while feeding parasitically from the taxpayer’s trough.    

No, outdoor sportsmen don’t pillage America’s natural resources or maliciously despoil the forests, fields, and waters they tread upon, and there’s no amount of convincing that will make many of us believe our nation’s abundant resources are suddenly in jeopardy because the UN and its self-serving partners in America say so.

Environmentalists and their sympathetic cronies are holding our sportsmen’s heritage in ridicule as a shameful onus to be borne by those who believe in taking without guilt from the wondrous abundance of what God has provided.  This is not the sportsmen’s heritage I taught my grandson was his, nor is it one I wish to leave him or any of my grandchildren.

In “our woods”, the woods belonging to my little neighbor boy and me, is taught the lesson that with the taking of life, whether it be the life of deer, fish, partridge, or beaver, comes respect for life; a respect that has no room for wanton disregard of the abundance and value of what is provided for those who wisely know to take without depleting the source.  The lesson is taught that with the taking of the fruit of the land, one does not trample the bush that provides the fruit.  That is age-old common sense sustainability, which is becoming lost in the cacophony of the “Dear Me, The Sustainable Eco-system Sky Is Falling” choir.

Yes, my little neighbor boy has moved away, but I know more than a small part of his heart remains at home here with me in “our woods”… and the feeling of comfort it gives him to know he can return to our woods when life in town suffocates his need to roam free, my friends, can never be taken away from him.  

People like me, aging baby-boomers born during wartime and often fed the fruits of the land to sustain ourselves, can do the youth of tomorrow much good by taking a child fishing, hunting, trapping, or just for a walk in the woods or along a stream to learn about what’s there and of the respect with which what’s there should be treated. 

We would all do well to remember that the predators who pose a danger to the aspiring sportsmen of tomorrow don’t all walk on four legs and they don’t all live in  “our woods”, the woods that belong to you, me, and every other outdoor sportsman in America .  The legacy we leave tomorrow’s outdoor sportsmen will serve our country well when the eco-environmentalist’s socialistic candle has been snuffed by the winds of democracy.