The Silent Rifle

Can't believe it! Twenty years ago I actually referred to myself as "old." Was barely sixty, but the column involved won a First Place Award from the National Newspaper Association in the "serious" category. Time is catching up to me. Didn't send in a column this week on time. Forgot what day it was, so am repeating that "old" column from 10/26/88:

If someone told me in 1940, 1950, or even 1960, that a time would come when a still healthy George would not take down his rifle on "openin' day," I'd have called him tetched. After shooting my first deer in 1938 at age 10, I lived for hunting. Fishing kept me alive between big game seasons.

The walls of my den hold cherished trophies from those days in the mountains and the plains, but most of my hunting was done before I had money to get mounts or rugs. Hundreds of hunts live only in my mind, the cold mornings, coffee over a campfire, the huge buck that simply vanished from an open meadow, the wondrous tall tales around a pot bellied stove, and the big ones on the pole. Many of the best times produced no meat or trophy racks, but the driving force was still the stalk of big game and… skillful use of the gun.

I've often thought about the turning point… the one day when something happened to irrevocably change my youthful devotion to "the stalk and the shot."

Nov. 22 of 1964 was a Sunday, the last day of hunting season. Earlier I had passed up several large bucks and a good bull elk, waiting for something bigger. For that final day I had the place picked where on of the largest whitetails in the world hung out, and I planned to be there before daylight. Just as I was preparing for bed on the 21st, Hal Kanzler called and asked me to go with him to the east side of Glacier Park to photograph bighorn sheep the next morning. First reaction was disbelief, "How could any true man of the west miss the last day of game season… to take pictures?"

Besides being a helluva mountaineer, Hal Kanzler was a man I admired and enjoyed being with, so daybreak found me somewhat reluctantly struggling through snow at the foot of Mt. Hinkle instead of stalking the biggest whitetail in Montana. Was carrying one of Hal's cameras in place of a rifle, and the temperatures was hugging zero. The climbing was lung-searing tough, and if we advanced the chilled film in our Exactas too fast, it tore loose from the spool sprockets. Our lunches froze solid except for soup in a thermos. The wind howled constantly and penetrated our clothes, numbed our faces, and froze our fingers. We had to find protected places on the cliffs to build little fires every hour or so to keep from freezing.

It was one of the most rewarding and exciting days I'd ever known in the mountains. Hal and I saw several major ram fights, including one where the ultimate loser got butted right off the top of a cliff, three younger rams ganged up on a big full curl, the scenery was magnificent, and I discovered a challenging new world through the ground glass of a 400-millimeter camera lens.

The last game animal I killed was 10 years ago when I was casually sitting at the mouth of a brushy draw in southeast Montana. Youngest son Clark had earlier bagged his first buck and we both had walked on the clouds. Now he was trying for a double by sneaking down that draw, just before sunset. Suddenly I head a deer running and a 4-point whitetail broke cover 30 feet away then whirled up a sidehill to my left. Instinctively threw up the old 30.06 and touched one off. The fat young buck cartwheeled down the slope and my dominant emotion was not elation but anger at myself… for shooting. It wasn't a trophy animal, I hadn't really earned it, and we didn't need the meat so I was left with nothing. Later that night, before I dropped off to sleep, I decided a true hunter must have honest emotion, "the fire." To shoot something just to be shooting something is wrong.

I've gone hunting a few times since then, but only to be "in the woods," enjoy the companionship of my fellow man to relive those times when the excitement of the hunt was the pulse of life.

In the last dozen years I've shot four huge whitetail bucks, a half dozen massive bugling bull elk including a 7-pointer, several Boone and Crocket bighorn rams, six timber wolves (on the Athabasca River), trophy mule deer, a world record antelope, unnumbered mountain goats, a few grizzly and black bears, a wolverine and hundreds of lesser critters. Never had to gut, drag out or skin one of 'em. Merely dropped them into a Kodak carousel.

There is one little thing that still bothers me a bit. Perhaps! Just perhaps, there is nothing philosophical about leaving the rifles in the rack. What if in my old age… I've only gotten lazy?

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national-award winning Hungry Horse News columnist.