Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.
Aldo Leopold. Draft foreword, A Sand County Almanac, in Companion to a Sand County Almanac.
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A couple of years ago, I more or less lost access to a piece of land that I'd hunted on since I was a teenager. I wasn't technically told to keep out, but was simply told that the new owner's son-in-law was planning on hunting.
He'd heard about the deer I'd killed over the years, and tried to get me to explain how and where I'd hunted for decades. I immediately found that was something I wouldn't and couldn't do, which was a strange experience. I was tight-lipped because that was a pretty personal question and he was put off because I wouldn't share anything with him.
I haven't been back since then and it's been almost like losing an old friend.
When I was 16 years old, I started hunting deer on the ranch of a friend of my father's. The rancher was a few years older than my dad, and he ranched the family homestead with his father, who was then almost 100 years old. I started hunting there as it was late in the season and I hand't gotten a deer yet, and my father suggested it.
After that, I hunted the same ground for many years. The old rancher (about 100) died, and then my father, and then the rancher. He was never married and it passed on to his sister and his sister's children.
I vaguely know those who inherited it, and I've hunted there exactly once since that time, the year after the rancher died. I felt odd about asking at that time and I wasn't sure that I was really that welcome and just haven't asked since then.
The funny thing is that there are other places that I can and do hunt, including places where our own cattle are. But, perhaps because I hunted there when I was young, I've continued to regard it in a special way and miss it.
Marsh wise, another related tale.
I hunted the same big pond and associated creeks with my father, and then when I was of college age often by myself, for what seems like a long time. Looking back, I probably first started hunting it when I was about five years old and then hunted it very steadily after that up until I was probably about 21. So around 15 years. Now I wouldn't consider 15 year a long time, but it seemed like a long time from the prospective of my earlier years.
Anyhow, the pond and the creeks were on a couple of sections that were leased by a group of guys here in town who all vaguely had a connection with the medical field. It wasn't all members of the same profession by any means, as it ranged through those who simply had a connection with it. As is often the case with such things, however, it was really only a few guys who really used it. Me and my father, a retired Oral Surgeon, a pharmacist. . .
For whatever reason, it all fell apart about the time I turned 21. Not sure why. Anyhow, for years I'd go buy there and think back on it.
More recently I've been told that the big old pond has silted in so now it doens't really hold water anymore.
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