"Being out here is like being in another world." That's when I knew she had been bitten by the outdoor bug.
It was about sunrise of the third morning on my son's unit 8 elk hunt. One of my grand daughters had made it out to go with us. The birds were chirping, the coyotes were yelping and my toes felt the tingle of a 15 degree morning. It was perfect!
My youngest son, in real life, is an electronic engineer over in San Jose and I get the pleasure of his company on maybe two to three occasions each year. It's almost always a big game hunting season that precipitates those happenings. Arizona has a big game lottery system and sometimes I'm drawn, sometimes he's drawn, sometimes both of us get drawn and once in a while neither of us are drawn so we just go with somebody else.
There are some that would portray us hunters as ruthless blood thirsty savages but, of course, that is not true. Our main motivation for doing it is largely the pleasure of each others company but it also satisfies some primal survival need within us. There is something about hunting that returns the soul to a more natural existence. Acquiring food by driving down to the store, loading up a shopping cart with highly processed, rigorously packaged, food and paying for it with paper or plastic just doesn't get it by comparison.
Of course, that 'in the wild' feeling gets renewed almost any time we can find an excuse to get out camping. And there is that great side benefit of "being in another world" as my grand daughter Emily has discovered.
We go because we like being in that every changing 'other world'. Welcome to it Emily, may you find a lifetime of wonder out there as we have.
Go Camping!
Ken
