Re: Took my 4 year old son deer hunting for the first time

Oculus Spirit [97682]

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I grew up hunting all the time. (LONG post, sorry)

Nov 22, 2013, 10:50 AM

either be hunting or at a Clemson football game. Fall was a busy time as a kid. But the hunting we used to do when I was a kid was a WHOLE lot different than most people do now.

I grew up dog hunting. I killed my first deer on a dog drive when I was 9. My grandfather started a club back in the 1930's in Colleton County. Back then you could not hunt deer in the upstate, and many people joined from Columbia, Greenville, and Charleston, etc. We had about 80 members.

As a kid, Saturday morning would start at about 5:30am when the alarm would wake us up at the Edisto Motel in Jacksonboro. We would get dressed and go to the clubhouse. There was an entire family of Gullah ladies (3 generations) who cooked breakfast for everyone at the hunting club over the years. The oldest was named Mary and I could never understand what she said, but I loved hearing her talk. Her daughter spoke with a Gullah accent, but I could understand her. Mary's grand daughter had almost no accent. Funny how Gullah has died at about the same rate as dog hunting. Anyway, we would have a big breakfast with bacon, sausage, grits, eggs, etc. On any Saturday morning anywhere from 40-60 people would gather in the dining hall for breakfast. there was always ample coffee for the old folks as well.

After breakfast the president of the club and the officers would sit down at a table with the dog drivers (guys who paid no membership fees because they brought the dogs). They would sit at that table and decide where to drive. We had pie plates tacked to trees every .1 miles along all the dirt roads. Back then all 12-gauge shotguns were limited to 2 3/4 inch shells, so a tenth of a mile was ample distance to safely shoot and not hurt anyone. In 60+ years, no one has ever been hurt. We would hunt every other weekend in the fall.

Anyway, the drivers knew how many dogs they had, and the officers in the club knew how many people there were and how many stands were on each road. So together they would decide where to make the drive. Then everyone would go outside to "circle up". There was usually a camp fire every morning out by the skinning shed so we were always warm.

One guy would "blow the whistle" and everyone would form a circle around him and "count off". 7 people per truck, so they would count off 1-7 and start over until everyone had counted off and had been assigned a truck. Then the 7 people would get in the back of the truck with their stools and guns and the truck would drop off the people at the stands along the roads. The drive usually made perimeter around a certain tract of land depending on how many people were standing and how many dogs we had.

My dad and I would get out, load our guns, and wait for the action to start. Usually about 15 minutes or so after being dropped off the dog drivers would drive into the drive and let the dogs out. The drivers were the heartiest souls in the club. They would get out with the dogs and walk through the woods. Everyone wore a bright orange hat, and the drivers would make a "whoop" yell as they walked through the woods with the dogs so you always knew where they were. Invariably, the dogs would jump a deer within a minute or two. If a driver saw the deer jump they would yell "doe, doe, doe" or "buck, buck, buck" real fast. Then the chase was on. You knew somewhere, those dogs would run the deer across a stander on the drive. If the dogs got louder and louder, you knew the deer was running towards you. You could hear them echo through the woods. If you were lucky enough, you would get a chance to hear the deer coming. Most of the time, you only saw the deer and heard literally nothing but the dogs. Sometimes a deer would evenly split the standers on the road, and no one would shoot. But most of the time someone would get a good shot.

On a good morning drive, especially on ladies day when we had 80+ standers and 120+ dogs, we could kill 20-25 deer. Eventually the dogs would get quiet. Every now and then they would jump another deer, but by about 10:30am most of the dogs had left the drive. Then someone would give 3 long horn blows, and you knew the drive was over. You packed up your stool and unloaded your gun and waited for the truck to pick you up and take you back to the camp.

Back at the camp there would be deer stacked 2-3 deep sometimes. We had 3 stations in the skinning shed with winches so we could skin 3 deer at a time. In later years we used a cable with a noose and a golf ball hooked to a trailer hitch and would tie the deer to a post and cut the legs and neck area and insert the golf ball and tighten the noose. Someone with a truck or 4-wheeler would the drive, pulling the cable, and it would peel the skin off in seconds. by the time all the deer were skinned, dressed, and hung in the cooler, Mary and her family would have lunch ready. Lunch was usually just as hearty as breakfast. Cube steak, rice, gravy, biscuits, string beans, etc. Everyone would line up for meals out the back door of the clubhouse and the food was served buffet-style as you walked by the kitchen. We had two large gas stoves and 4 ovens that my grandfather got from Fort Jackson in a military surplus sale. One guy would say the blessing and everyone in line would remove their hats. After the blessing lunch commenced.

After lunch we would have about 30 minutes or so to rest, and a lot of people would take naps in their cars or trucks. The the whistle would wake everyone up again and we would circle up again and do another drive in the afternoon. While everyone was eating and cleaning deer, the dog drivers were traveling the dirt roads picking up dogs and usually by the start of the afternoon hunt they had most, if not all, of the dogs back.

After the afternoon hunt, we skinned those deer and then we would go into the cooler and take out all the deer and cut the meat into pieces. Shoulders, hind quarters, necks, and the loins would be split in half. We would then take the meat and stack it into piles, usually with a loin and a neck and shoulder. Or a hind quarter and shoulder and neck. Etc. We would usually have about 40-50 piles, or however many people said they wanted meat when they signed in on the sign-in sheet in the morning.

This is where my job came into play. We would have 2 long rolls of paper with numbers on them and the numbers matched. We would tear off one number and put it on a pile of meat on the table, and the other would be folded and went into a hat. I was the hat holder. Then people would come draw a number and they would then go pick up the pile of meat on the table that matched their number. Put it in the cooler and go home. We usually left around 5-6pm.

Now this is how people used to hunt and it was as much of a social experience as anything else. There were always kids to play with and we all became friends over the years as we all grew up hunting together. But today this type of hunting, and these types of clubs, hardly exist. Everyone still hunts, which is fine. But it's a TOTALLY different experience. Dogs have become extremely expensive to keep and there are less drivers. The shells and shotguns are more powerful now, adding more danger with 3-inch plus magnum shells. And far too many clubs just don't do things the right way anymore. They drop standers off at random places, unevenly spread apart, etc. Also very dangerous.

We used to have one day at the club each spring called work day. Everyone would come down and help do maintenance jobs to prepare for the fall hunting season. We had plumbers who would come and fix the toilets and septic tanks. Electricians would help fix the well pumps, or whatever. We would also replace the tin roof sheeting, or build things like the deer cooler. For DECADES we simply hung the deer in a small screened in area with a door to keep flies away. No AC or anything. One work day we built an enclosed, insulated room with an AC unit so the meat could be kept cold. Others would go and check the pie-plates on the trees marking stands and make sure they were all visible and in good shape. Others would go cut firewood for the fires we built at camp on colder mornings in the fall. Others would do mowing, trimming, and remove vines, etc. And everyone showed up and people donated their time, expertise, and materials.

So while everyone thinks it's a great thing that I took my four-year old son still hunting, I'm still terribly sad that I will not get to the chance to take him on a dog drive, at our club, the way it used to be years ago. At 37 years old, I can see that he will grow up in such a different world than I grew up in. When I was growing up, our hunting club was exclusively a dog hunting club. We had about 3,000 acres of family land, and leased another 3,000 acres from WESTVACO. Actually, we leased that land from the Bradley Lumber Company in the 1930's, and later to Westvaco. Now the land has been sold to Kapstone, and I understand they do not even lease to dog hunting clubs anymore due to liability concerns. If this turns out to be true, we will have to split the club and only allow the dog drives on the family land and use the leased land for still hunting.

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Took my 4 year old son deer hunting for the first time

have you trained him up as a good retriever yet?***

for duck season***

How dare you teach him the violent ways of hunting.

But...

I prefer to teach him how to put good food on the table

that's what

My current favorite is Ahi-bambi

Good for you!***

I have no comments on the ethos of this!***

My dad never took me hunting ever.

I never took you hunting either. So, there's that!***

Honestly, I think he enjoyed "driving" on the dirt roads

The activity really doesn't matter...

Will probably work 4 or 5 15-hour

My Dad never took me hunting or fishing...

I grew up hunting all the time. (LONG post, sorry)

srs csb. Good read.***

Clone I hate to bear the bad news, but he did not take his

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Awesome, Tiggity!

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