As any gardener will tell you, often the health of a plant depends on the depth of its roots.
My father was an enthusiastic hunter, yet his five sons were not.
My dad did sow the seeds, but the roots didn’t go very deep for any of us, as it turned out.
I think I have a pretty good explanation for why it turned out like that.
My dad belonged to a different era.
Fred Austin Smith, was born in 1918 in Tippah County, Mississippi, with four brothers and three sisters. Hunting to the Smith boys came naturally. Although it would be inaccurate to say they relied on hunting for their survival, fresh game was a regular part of the diet, complementing the domestic chickens and hogs the family raised.
The Smith boys grew up on a little farm in a county that remains sparsely populated. According to the 1920 Census, Tippah County had a population of a little more than 15,000 which translates in 30 people per square mile. The wilderness was a few steps out of just about everybody’s back door, and hunting and fishing were just about the only entertainment to be had at a time when organized sports, TV and even electricity were still over the horizon.
Dad and his brother would often go on hunting trips that lasted two or three days, shooting whatever the came across. Nobody went deer hunting or duck hunting in those days. They went hunting. Sometimes they came back with a deer, sometimes a turkey or any other wild animal considered to be suitable for eating — which in those days was almost everything.
There were no “hunting seasons” then. You didn’t have to look at a calendar to know what game you could take. If you ran across it, you shot it, whether it was a deer, quail or a black bear.
They were cash poor, as most of the people in county were in those days. That meant conserving ammo and becoming skilled marksmen. You never wasted a shot, and a miss was something to be grieved.
My dad and his brothers were not remarkable, in this respect. Country boys all over shared the passion for hunting and fishing.
My dad carried that passion into his adult years, even after moving to the “city” of Tupelo, even after hunting required a license and you were told when and where and how you could take each type of game.
In his adult years, he never went deer hunting — which he said required more patience than skill. He much preferred bird hunting and was especially fond of squirrel and rabbit hunting, which requires the kind of marksmanship that a man could be proud of. Even so, it was not uncommon for Dad to come home with a game pouch full of squirrels and rabbits, enough to feed his family of eight. It takes a lot of squirrels and rabbits to feed a family of that size, you might suspect.
Dad made sure all of his boys were introduced to hunting at any early age. I was 10 years old when I got my first shotgun — a 20-gauge Browning. It was a gift from Santa Claus, in fact.
We all joined dad on his trips back to Tippah County, where he went on dove hunts on his brother’s farm. We went quail hunting, too, and accompanied dad on his notorious rabbit and squirrel hunts, where the carnage was indeed great.
Somehow, though, each son drifted away from hunting. I remember hunting as a teenager on some land north of Tupelo owned by Balfour Ruff. Nobody hunts there anymore, though. It’s the Barnes Crossing Mall now.
We all found other things to do, hobbies and diversions and interests that didn’t exist when my dad was a teen. We all played sports, especially football and baseball, which seemed to take the place of hunting.
By the time I got to college, I sold my last shotgun for beer money, a Remington 12-gauge. I haven’t fired a gun in probably 35 years now.
I’m not opposed to hunting, certainly. But I’d rather sit on a bank and fish. It’s calmer, more peaceful, more relaxing, in my opinion.
Somehow, the roots of hunting just never took hold, I guess.
I suspect that’s true for a lot of people in my generation.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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