Your first hunts

[willhunt4coues]

lets here them stories of your inspiration to start hunting.

[willhunt4coues]

I used to go into our back canyon and hunt rabbits and birds with my pellet gun on weekends and after school. I use to also be the apricot watcher and shot lots of birds so they didn't eat our apricot off of our tree. My dad then started letting me go out to what we call pipeline around here and I would shoot rabbits with my SKS on one sholder, .22pump on my back, 2 .22 pistols on each side, with a 20 guage single shot in my hand let me tell you if I saw a rabbit well I guess you know what happened next (dang Rambo I loved his movies). My dad also used to use me and my sister when i was 5 for bait for bear he would set us at a pond then give us the tape recorder with a speaker and turn it on while he sat up on the hill behind us. Talk about scary . When it became time (10 years old) he finally put me in for coues when I was ten and thats when I had shot a Coues deer in the Pinals at 250 yards with a 7mm-08. Yet he was only a spike but that deer was the biggest I had ever saw. I will never in my life ever forget. Thank you Dad.

[coueschaser3]

I grew up chasing snakes and everything else in the mountain behind my house, frequently in trouble at school for a snake or horned lizard or something gettin out of my desk when in grade school. Got my parents called in 3rd grade for catchin 3 speckled rattlesnakes on a field trip. they said "hes gonna do it when he gets home anyways" My Dad took me and a buddy hiking every weekend and bb guns turned to pellet guns and with that rabbit hunting and coverin alot of ground seeing everything else and dreaming about it. Then to 22's and shotguns after quail and rabbits. and finally to pigs.

 

Took two years to get my first pig. My dad never hunted anything bigger than pheasants growing up, so my buddy who was two years older than i and myself tought ourselves from scratch. Shot my first pig at 13 with a 357 python by myself while everyone else was a long ways away. When it fell i was so excited i kept shooting at it a few times cuz i was scared it would get up and run away and no one would believe me.

 

In high school i got a bow to "keep me out of trouble" well that turned every day of fishing to everyday shooting at the archery range. When my buddy could finally drive we would go to prescott and chase muleys archery in the rut for days on end and only come home to resupply for food while we were off on christmas break. The first year i entered for elk and pronghorn i drew archery pronghorn and archery bull elk. ill tell ya 6 days alone gettin dropped off on fain road and chasing pronghorn with 0 experience will teach you alot, and never pass a barely legal goat at 15 even if your monster is on his way in. elk the truck broke after one evening, but in that one evening i realized i could actually call elk with all that practice. every time i heard a bugle i knew in my head it was another hunter until mr giant bull came runnin in with a tree stuck in his rack and peeing allover. Looking back its still one of the biggest bulls ive seen and probably 360 then. wouldnt come in past 60yds. Honestly its probably good cuz on the ground i didnt know how to gut or skin nor did my dad let alone the gutless deal and it woulda been really scary. But its a funny thing to look back on.

 

Now i try to teach myself as much as i can every time im out and occasionally learn from others i meet. It was very hard not haveing anyone to teach me but i enjoyed the time out there with my Dad and it was well worth it. Now i teach him things and convince him to enter for tags or go scouting or chase quail.

 

I think they got me into hunting/hiking/fishing to keep me out of the other things kids get into. and didnt wanna see me blowing my money on a drug habit or somthing.....but now i am realizing this is much more EXPENSIVE!!! But i imagine its still alot better. Im glad that this is what i love however i got into it, ill never get out.

[azcouesandelk]

I grew up on acerage in Queen Creek before it got populated. I would go out with my dad and grandpa dove and quail hunting when I was able to walk! My dad would let me shoot rabbits in our yard when I was 5. I first started big game hunting when I was 10, for javelina, but never drew an elk or deer tag til I was 14 when I was able to take a doe off of the kaibab then 2 weeks later I was fortunate enough to take a cow elk!

[Browning'sCustomMeat]

My first deer was a coues. 410yds and I was 16, it was 7:30 in the morning, last day of finals at school. I was coming out one morning from glassing the hills and glassed a buck chasing a doe, took off hiking and took a shot. 4hrs of packing and a missed day of high school finals I made it out. The things that bugs me and my dad is that he has never seen me take an animal. Hopefully this is the year when we are out chasing goats!

 

-Jeremy-

[youngbuck]

I grew up pretty secluded from other houses and people. I used to cruize around with a wrist rocket or bb gun. Also had a place up north to hone my skills. I was always buildin traps or snares or somethin when I was little. It kept me out of trouble. My dad never preasured me into going out with him. I was always buggin him. I went on many big game hunts before I finally drew my tag. It was a cow elk when i was 10. I didn't wanna use a 25-06 and I hated the lever action 30-30. So I used a 243. 100 yard shot. It was a hunge confidence booster for me expecialy to watch how excited my dad was. I never understood how excited he was until helped my sister bag her first animal, a javalina I was very fortunate drawing tags when i was younger. I would draw a deer and javalina tag every year. I think I was 16 when i first put in for a whitetail hunt and I haven't looked back since. Every late start in high school we would either go varmint calling or hunt quail, whatever was in season. After school when it was archery deer season we would go sit tanks in the afternoon. I lived real close to saguaro lake, so we would fish that a couple times a week before the big fish kill a few years back. I grew up in a HUGE hunting family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Now i get to pay my dad and family out as much as possible. My dad has a bum back so I usually pack his stuff for him. I kinda owe it to him, he did for me for a long time. I try and make it so he is just the trigger man.

[Snapshot]

I started hunting quail and rabbits in 1973 when my Mom and Dad moved us to Tucson, a man that my Dad knew took us out to unit 37B. My Dad bought me a winchester youth model single shot 20 guage. When I turned 14, after passing the hunters safety course my Dad bought me a remington model 700 in .308, and that thing kicked like a mule to a bony 14 year old. I took my first mule deer 3 years later down in unit 30B after I figured out how to hunt them.

[skyhawkbowhunter]

I grew up hunting turkey in 27 and pigs in 32 When i turned 11 i passed tthe hunter saftey course and got my first big game animal when i was 12 years old it was a 500 pound cow elk in 6a.Last year i shot a 300 pund cow elk still have not got a deer yet.

[billrquimby]

This is from my book, "Sixty Years A Hunter," that Safari Press will introduce in January:

 

TWO

 

Mule Deer: My First Big Game Animal

 

 

THERE IS nothing like the smell and sound of pine burning and crackling in an old-fashioned, red-hot, pot-bellied iron stove, especially when you are twelve years old and in a wood shanty that has been wallpapered with newspapers to keep the wind from blowing through its widest cracks. The corner with the stove was uncomfortably hot while the other corners were cold enough to hang meat. The place belonged to someone my father had befriended, a man named Theodore Gallardo. In those days people could “patent” government land if they found valuable minerals on it. They only had to “improve” (mine) their claim and live on it for a specified number of years to get full ownership of the land.

 

Theo was a veteran who had found this spot on Lynx Creek near Prescott after the Spanish-American War. He dug a tunnel with a pick and shovel and claimed that he was getting gold from it. I doubt that the gold (if any) he found amounted to much, however.

 

His “guest house” was my first hunting camp. I still remember struggling to get under the heavy, hand-sewn quilts that covered the iron bed my father and I shared the night before my first deer hunt began in October 1948. I still can see myself going outside to relieve myself while wearing only socks and my first pair of long underwear. It was so cold I wanted to run back inside but I gritted my teeth and did what I needed to do -- on the firewood stacked outside the door. The smell of the Ponderosa pines and the sight of a dusting of snow in the moonlight made everything seem magical. The smell of urine-soaked wood burning in a crowded shack was something else, I soon learned.

 

My first deer hunt did not last long. We were out before daylight after a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and coffee (my first taste of it) that my father cooked in a tin skillet and a blue-enameled pot on top of the little stove. Everything about this hunt was memorable. I still can see the stars above us as we ventured out of our shelter in the dark and started climbing the hill behind Gallardo's house. I was wearing an old pair of leather-soled “street” shoes, and not boots, and I constantly slipped on rocks and loose dirt. Over my long underwear I wore a heavy shirt and a thin, olive-colored military jacket I'd bought at one of the hundreds of army surplus stores that opened after World War II. In my pocket was my first hunting license and deer tag, which had cost a total of $4 -- $3 for the license, $1 for the tag.

 

(I kept the license for a long time under the butt plate of my .303 Savage Model 99 lever-action rifle. I lost it several years later when I installed a stock with a flatter plate.)

 

Many years after this hunt the U.S. Forest Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department built a dam across Lynx Creek and the lake that flooded Gallardo's place began attracting hundreds of visitors from Phoenix and Prescott on weekends. In 1948, though, Lynx Creek was as remote and unknown as anyplace in Arizona. There were pine trees in the canyons and along the creek but the slopes were covered with manzanita, an awful brush whose name means “little apple” in Spanish. The stuff grows reddish-purple branches that intertwine and make it impossible for a human to walk through it. Deer may eat its leaves and twigs and they also use its dense growth for cover. Other than that it has no other reason for existing that I can see.

 

We had climbed only one or two ridges when a mule deer buck ran out of a patch of manzanita and my father shot at it and missed. I started shooting, too. My father stopped to reload just as the deer was about to go out of sight across the canyon. I fired my last shot, saw the deer drop, and immediately heard the “splat” of my bullet hitting the deer. There was no doubt that I had killed that buck, but all my father would say later was that “we” had gotten it.

 

In the late 1940s the only reasonable way to reach Prescott and points north by car from Phoenix, Yuma, or even Tucson, was via a two-lane road that twisted up Yarnell Hill and on to Prescott. That part of the road was the only stretch of pavement between Yuma and the Grand Canyon except for the streets in Prescott and Flagstaff. Every other inch of the trip was on gravel and dirt. Near the base of Yarnell Hill was a gasoline station and cafe at a junction called “Aguila,” or eagle in Spanish, although I doubt that any self-respecting eagle was ever seen there. A sign pointed toward a place called “Bagdad” somewhere down a dirt road. Despite the misspelling, it brought visions of the Arabian Nights to my young mind.

 

The opening of Arizona's annual deer hunting season was a major event in the late 1940s. There was a continuous line of hunters' vehicles going up Yarnell Hill on the night before the season opened, and a long line of vehicles going down two or three days later. An itinerant photographer had set up shop in Aguila to photograph successful hunters with their deer and I convinced my father to stop at the man's stand. I don't remember how much he charged to photograph me with my buck but I do remember that I paid for it. You can imagine my disappointment when the photo arrived in the mail a couple of weeks later and I opened the envelope to find a glare on the camera's lens had obliterated most of my image. The photographer had staged the photo with the deer in the trunk of my father's car while I held its antlers as my father sat on the bumper.

 

All that could be seen of me in that photo were my waist and legs.

 

Bill Quimby

[iwannakillsomething]

no father in house... so uncle took me to white mt. first draw i got and got a spike. was way happy THEN my cousin got a 10 pointer and rubbed it in my face

[.270]

when i was 7 and my brother was 3 1/2, my dad took us bowhunting with him. a long time ago. to make the story short, he snuck up on a coues buck and killed it. we got to watch the whole thing. he gutted it and put it on his shoulders and on the way back i carried his ol' bear "grizzly". we were almost back to the truck and a big ol' bobcat jumped up on a rock. i handed him his bow and without even putting the buck down, he drilled the bobcat too. man, i thought davy crocket and dan'l boone were sissies compared to this guy. i remember that like it was yesterday. Lark.

[elmergoo]

Talk about redneck. I used to whack lizards off the mesquite trees with a stick down by the Kearney golf course, in bare feet no- less. Some of the best times I ever had.

[azpackhorse]

I was the only one out of my immediate family that was born with the hunting gene, my old man didn't hunt but thought it was cool that I loved it so much. I can remember talking my mom into letting me bring my Western Auto .22 single shot and ditch it in the bushes outside my grade school and after school on Friday I would walk home and no kidding it was around 8 miles. I would shoot rabbits and build a little fire and cook them for supper, even ate blackbirds and whatever else got in front of me. Nobody even thought twice about see'n a kid pack'n a rifle through town.

My first high power rifle was a Winchester 94 30-30, still have it. I remember the first blacktail I whacked with it, big fat doe and I plugged her right in the brisket, no one else around so I gutted her and walked home to get my dad and he drove our 52 Chevy car across the fields and threw her in the trunk. I was one proud 10 year old.

 

Some of the best memories were my buddy and I duck hunting, I had an old Mossberg bolt action .410 and his old man let him bring a double barrel 12 ga. We quickly learned that that old 12 ga had a gob more range that the .410 so we would take turns shooting it. We were in 2nd grade and that old 12 ga was darn near bigger than us and of course his old man thought it was funny to give us high brass shells to shoot, we would go to school on Monday and compare bruises. Every once in a while we would even kill a duck.

 

I look at my grandkids and just can't imagine turn'n them loose with a high power rifle or shotgun.........

[CouesWhitetail]

Great thread! Some good stories in here.

 

Amanda

 

[azslim]

I was 6 with my pants around my ankles and cactus thorns in my butt when I killed my first deer. It was in Wyo in 1966 on the Wind River Indian Reservation, my Dad was an enrolled Shoshone and I had hunting privledges until I turned 18. We were in the old green Jeep on the bench above my Grandma's place when we kicked him up. My Dad watched where he ran and we headed over that way, snuck up on the edge of a big draw and my Dad picked him up looking up our way. He didn't see us because we were peeking around a sage brush. Dad said "roll over and rest your rifle on that bush", so I rolled over - butt first into a cactus. Dad pulled my pants down, pulled out a thorn or two then said "shoot the deer, these stickers ain't going anyplace", I aimed between the eyes and squeezed, it was a long downhill shot and the bullet hit him in the neck and down he went, then Dad got the rest of the cactus out. Looking back it was a great rack, but I have no idea what happened to it. Back then we cared more about the meat than horns and gave them away. I killed a lot of deer and elk growing up, that was our source of meat. No matter where we lived we would always drive to Burris and get a couple deer and elk for us and my grandparents.