Half a century teaching young hunters

By CONSTANCE SEE

Whitefish Pilot

H.P. "Pat" McVay will begin his 50th year teaching hunter safety classes in the Flathead on March 10. He's also taught a junior shooting program through the 4-H Club for many years where several of his students went on to compete in the Olympics.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman John Fraley called McVay's teaching style a blend of old-fashioned wisdom with modern teaching tools. The classes are taught for convenience from the basement of McVay's home outside of Kalispell.

"He also shows kids about re-loading and how different powders burn — that fascinates them," Fraley said. "He even shot a coyote from the porch of his home and helped a student and his mother get the animal's hide tanned. That epitomizes his style."

The coyote's carcass was used as an instructional aid for a local Boy Scout troop.

McVay was the first gun-safety instructor in the state. He remembers five decades ago waiting for a call from Hungry Horse News publisher Mel Ruder letting him know as soon as the gun safety law passed, but McVay was already two steps ahead of the game.

"Mel called me at about 11 o'clock at night to say it had passed, and the next day I had all the information on our junior shooters we'd been training and mailed it all off to Helena," McVay said. "When they got it, they called to say they didn't know what to do with it yet."

Since age six, when his grandfather handed him his first firearm, a .22 Scout, McVay has been hunting for survival and sport. He will turn 87 on March 14.

Friends and family kid him about the six-point elk he shot in 2005, the biggest he's bagged. Unfortunately, his second shot blew a horn off, so McVay gets several reminders of the one-horned bull.

He's shot elk, mule and whitetail deer, moose, mountain goats, mountain lions, bobcats, lynx and one bad black bear.

As McVay retells the bear story, he and a friend hiked into the Moose Lake area carrying their raft and fishing gear. He hung his backpack on a snag stretched out over the water. He was fishing when another man in the area shouted he'd just seen a black bear grab the backpack.

"I had my .38 Special and took care of him," McVay said. "It wasn't a big bear, but big enough to get my bag, the dirty bugger. Instead of opening the top and just taking my sandwiches, it ripped the bottom out of my bag. Not a very smart bear."

He donated the bear to a Forest Service crew.

McVay said much has changed over the past eight decades since he first learned to use a gun. Things were "a lot freer" when he was growing up, he said, when people had to shoot game to survive.

"We have so many anti-gun people now, it's scary," McVay said. "A gun never did kill anybody. Somebody has to manipulate it to do it. I feel we have all the laws on the books we need about guns. All we have to do is enforce them."

He enforces his own rules in class as well. Following classroom instruction, hunter-safety students are taken out into the field to run an obstacle course and practice their skills. If McVay doesn't feel they're safe enough to hunt with himself, he won't pass them.

"He loves the kids and the kids love him, and that's his number-one asset," Fraley said. "We have some families that have three generations he's trained."

The public is invited to a celebration of McVay's many contributions to the community at an open house on Sunday, March 11, from 2 to 6 p.m. at Fish, Wildlife and Parks, 490 North Meridian Road in Kalispell.