Hunting Season

My dad found some old pictures, and had my brother scan them. We can only identify a few people in some of them though. My dad's uncle Charlie (my great-uncle) is the one on the left. He lived to be an old man, 91 or 92. He passed away in December of 2003.

I can remember the stories that various family members used to tell. It seems Charlie was the one who had to be the dog, when they went hunting without a dog. He would always be the one who had to slog through all of the dense cover to jump the birds out, so everyone else got to do the shooting. It would appear by this photo that he did infact get a bird once in awhile too. Dad told me that one time, when he was hunting with uncle Charlie, that they jumped a rooster pheasant, and my dad shot too quickly and missed, leaving him with an empty shotgun requiring reloading. He watched uncle Charlie take his time turning, and then carefully mount the shotgun to his shoulder, and then take careful aim and swing the correct amount of "lead", and only after my dad was sure that the rooster was too far out of range did uncle Charlie fire. Dad said it was so far away, that it took a second for the shot to cover the distance, before the pheasant was knocked end for end to the ground.

The last year of uncle Charlie's life he spent in a nursing home. It was a very nice nursing home, with no more than eight patients at the facility, the patient to staff ratio was never more than 3 to 1. Good old fashioned home cooking for meals, he said the food was his favorite part, and he even gained a few pounds while he was there. The family used to spread out our visit times, so he got a visitor almost every day. My day was Saturday mornings. We used to watch the hunting shows on cable TV, and he would ask me if I saw any pheasants or deer in the past week. Of course I always had a wildlife report for him each week.

I saw a 6-point buck running next to Fisher's cornfield along Wellsville hwy last Saturday. Not a big buck, but a "shooter".