No hurry to hunt

I didn’t go hunting last weekend.

Retired, I should have plenty of time to find a nice deer without having to bounce around all the hunters on Opening Weekend.

Matter of fact, one of the benefits of retirement is mid-week hunting, fishing and skiing.

At the time of this writing I haven’t seen the check station numbers, but I’m assuming there were lots of young deer and elk harvested.

With the annual statewide teacher in-service coinciding with the 2-day youth hunt, hopefully there were plenty of young smiling faces.

But, believe me, times have changed.

In l974, when I arrived in the Flathead Valley, I was a freshman football coach and we had a frosh football game scheduled the week following Opening Day.

When one of the players told me he would miss practice so he could go hunting east of the mountains with his family, I thought about not letting him play in the final game.

Then another player told me the same thing.

When I told varsity head coach Harold Hughes I was thinking about not letting those kids play in the final game, he responded, “You might want to re-consider or you might not have enough kids to play the game.”

Coach Hughes understood the importance of ‘bringing back meat’ to local families and the familial hunting bonds.

In the classroom, I was shocked by how many kids missed school the week after the traditional Sunday Opening Day.

In some classes, back then, half the students were missing.

Thirty years later, very few students were making extended family hunting trips “to the east side.”

Let’s hope Montana’s hunting legacy is still alive in the hopes and dreams of young hunters.

Jerry Smalley’s Fishful Thinking appears weekly in the Hungry Horse News.