Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/728154
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 45 T here is a tendency among old sportsmen to look back on vanished days and to vilify and glorify the immutable and irrevocable past. On the one hand, as children we had always to walk through snow to and from school, uphill both ways, all year round. On the other hand, we lived in a golden age of hunting that will never come again. To an extent, and with qualifications, both attitudes are true. Growing up in Europe in a day and age when children were not catered to, I attended schools that made Dickens' "Dotheboys Hall" in Nicholas Nickleby look like a cross between Disneyland and a five-star Caribbean luxury resort. But when we returned to America and I was old enough to hunt, I discovered a world of freedoms and opportunities my grandchildren can't imagine and that their grandchildren will not believe ever existed. Sometime back in the late '70s or early '80s, I read an article in one of the Big Three hook-and-bullet magazines predicting that hunting in America would eventually go the way of hunting in Europe, i.e., a sort of high-end pay-as- you-go proposition entirely on private property. I had just returned from a do- it-yourself hunt with friends in the mountains of southern Utah—a state where hunting is taken so seriously that you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't hunt—so I remember reading that article and thinking the writer was an idiot. This was America! It was and is and always will be, if we're willing to fight for it, but the population in America in 1980 was 220 million. Today, it's 100 million more, and that alone has had a devastating impact on American hunting and American attitudes. The fields and woods of northern Virginia, where once the local rabbits cursed my name and warned their children about me, where legions of bobwhites drove countless generations of dogs loopy with desire, and ghostly whitetails slipped phantom-like through the woods, are now wall-to-wall housing developments and sub-divisions and shopping malls. If there were any fields left with rabbits SPorting Life by JAmeSon PArker Carpe Diem. in them, a boy with a .22 rifle would have SWAT teams descending on him. The bobwhites are gone, victims of mono- culture, pesticides, and herbicides. Only the whitetail has thrived, but in such over-abundance that their numbers— like the human numbers—are nothing more than a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecosystem. In the West, from about the end of World War II to the late '80s, ranching, farming, and sparse hunting pressure combined to create a mule deer paradise. We invariably saw far more deer than we did other hunters, and every now and then someone would take a 30-inch-plus specimen that would drive the rest of us into frenzies of competitive desire, spending more time at the range, reading more how-to articles, working out harder, poring over record books to find the most likely places, and, of course, wasting our money on newer, lighter, warmer, more up-to-the-minute gear. Today in the West, the mule deer are in decline, whitetails are taking their place, Sister cries out from her baby bed, Brother runs in, feathers on his head. Momma's in her room, learning how to sew, Daddy's drinking beer, listening to the radio. Hank Williams sings "Kaw Liga" and "Dear John," And time marches on, time marches on. Time Marches On Written by Bobby Braddock Recorded by Tracy Lawrence DEF CSA-PrintStoCk/iStoCkPhoto.Com