Father-And-Son Heroin Trips

This morning I ran across a blog:  Outdoor Bloggers Summit.  I had never read it before.  On Thursday's post, 12 Feb 2009, there was a challenge that was initiated by a piece of writing from The American Spectator.  The piece, The Hunt for Gray February, was written by Christopher Orlet.  Hopefully, those who read this blog will find Orlet's opinion very narrow and biased.  If I were the editor, I would have asked Mr. Orlet to "flesh it out a bit."

I don't have any experience with gender bias, but it does bring back memories of an opinion piece in the Great Falls Tribune several years ago.  That piece was written by a Mr. Paul Edwards of Helena, Montana.  (FYI: Mr Edwards had recently moved to Montana from California.  Not that Californians are bad people, but he did have a view that was not shared with my Montana community.  He was also a screenwriter for several hit TV shows--I don't remember which ones.  He had also purchased 160 acres that bordered the Sun River Wildlife Management Area--locally known as, "The Game Range," or "The Winter Elk Range.")  In it he lambasted a father/son team that had traveled to Siberia to hunt grizzly bears.  This is my letter-to-the-editor response:  (I believe the date was 20 July 2000.)

In response to Mr. Edwards letter of 4 July: Import yourself to this Montana, of diverse people and condemn our lifestyles and heritage?  Call us "throwbacks," "ignorant, base and shallow?"  Call a father and son, "spiritually challenged?"

Those are not the prose of a great writer elevating the level of debate, but of a supercilious interloper, wielding a haughty pen, alienating us, the Cro-Magnons.

With a jaw too small for wisdom teeth, my evolutionary development is on par with yours.  And yet, I know if I transplanted myself to California, I would need to adapt to social conditions and individuals that I believe to be against Him and His laws.

Please, sir, pack your bags and your ink-filled dagger and return to California.  If saving bears is your passion, go to Sacramento and have the bear, which graces California's state flag, reintroduced to that state.  Those bears are not endangered--they are extinct.  Repotting you and your soapbox to my neighborhood and pointing a prejudice finger at me, before roots develop, is truly, "tasteless and appalling."

A brow ridge and dragging knuckles do not limit my knowledge of hunting.  Without hunters, your Sun River land would border a cattle ranch with 20 wintering elk, not 2,000 (Sun River Wildlife Management Area)

Problem grizzlies would not be relocated there--they would be secretly shot (not by hunters).  Hunters have kept the Sun River Game Preserve a preserve, closed to hunting.  Without a modicum of research your epitome of Erector Set sentences seems incomplete and Neanderthal.

Done with the ethics and morals I was taught as a young man, there are few father and son activities better than hunting.  A more self-important and bombastic individual may wish "the organs of public information" to promote a futuristic and mentally pleasing activity, such as father-and-son heroin trips.

This may not be the best of my writing, but it was written with a passion from my heart.  I will always enjoy reading it.  (Cramp in arm from patting myself on the back)

As hunting seems to be losing some of its members, it is important that we (hunters) share those good, ethical and moral experiences of hunting and the outdoors.

TTFN