By Timothy Fowler

Hunting=Time together

 

'Think about it, Dan," I said, "when do you have time to spend the whole day with your daughters, uninterrupted?"

They have busy careers. They have children and are running a household. Life is busy. Having a whole uninterrupted today to spend with your adult children is a complete luxury. Hunting is when this happens for me.

 

Some background

 

Dan's daughters are married to my two sons. (Dan is the other dad / Grandpa in our family. His two daughters married my two sons.) This makes us a double-knit, tight family. With just one set of in-laws, we get along beautifully, and it is a magical arrangement. Dan and I were recently off in a quiet corner at some family gathering, and he was asking about hunting. He wanted to know what we did out there because we were often successful, and we all seemed to be enjoying the process. I explained the best part of hunting was spending relaxed time with my boys.

 

To be clear––I love to hunt. I am a late onset hunter coming to the game at age 61 now. I hunt six-plus weeks a year and set up the outfitter tent most of those weeks somewhere remote. Spring finds us in the boreal forest hunting bears. Fall, we are further north pursuing elk. Later in November, we set up in sub-zero weather to pursue white-tailed deer and mule deer. This year we have a bonus (12-year wait) antelope hunt in late October. Sometimes my hunting buddy Peter and I set up the tent so our boys can blow in for a quick hunt, an overnight stay, and back to work the next day. He, too, is grandpa and dad. If time is short, we facilitate short hunts for them if that's what's required. People joke about not being able to wait for their kids to leave home, but I still miss mine. And they've been gone more than a decade. If you were a parent of busy adult children who have businesses, careers, kids, and lives of their own, you know how tough it is to connect. And I mean––really connect––and engage about essential topics of life. If you're that adult child who desires a meaningful connection, it can be equally challenging.

 

Hunting in connecting

 

Hunting is the perfect venue to connect. There are many traveling hours shared in the truck heading to the hunting grounds. Next week my son and I are at elk camp for five to seven days. It's a five-hour drive. There will be lots of time to cover whatever is on his mind. We will have time for meaningful conversations and have some time to reminisce and dream and plan about the future. It is its own reward to spend time with my boys. We will camp in my big outfitter tent. We'll share coffee in the morning, a pot of soup at lunch, and some exquisite wood/coal-stove-cooked dinner. All the while, we have the choice of quietly enjoying each other's company, or we can chat about whatever needs talking about.

 

Sometimes it is just quiet.

 

There's plenty of quiet time too. Hunting big game is often a tranquil, very solitary pursuit, so we have time to be in our heads––to be quiet while waiting for the game. To many non-hunters, hunting often gets boiled down (incorrectly) to a shot, hopefully, a kill shot. But there are so many layers of things that need to be accomplished and completed before anyone is in a position to take a shot. Each of these layers is an opportunity to connect.

 

Early Interest and Engagement

 

My boys showed interest early in shooting and hunting. They saved their allowance and odd job income to purchase shotguns at age 12. And then they bought big game centerfires at age 14. They still have and use these guns. And their kids are starting to show interest in shooting and hunting. One of my granddaughters calls her dad daily for an update when we're hunting at the end of the day. She measures a hunt's success by how much meat on the bone we have at day's end.

 

She often says, "don't worry, daddy, you can still hunt tomorrow."

 

And we will.