![]() Outdoor writer and TV host Ron Spomer bristles at the sexism and writes, “Because she’s human.Their maternal ancestors pursued everything from grass seeds and grasshoppers to gophers and giraffes for as long as men did. There are stories in all the industry magazines, stories asking why women hunt. Women are a demographic of hunters getting a lot of attention these days. I try to imagine hunting with my grandchildren but, having grown up in the suburbs and only now putting down roots here, it’s hard to see myself in the role of elder hunter. My time in the woods with him has been precious. My son loves hunting, which is why I got involved. At the start of my fourth season of hunting, having begun at age fifty-one with no family connections to it except my teenage son, who had started hunting the year before I did, I envied the legacy others had. When I met Janice, I knew her stories were what I’d been seeking without realizing it. The men ran out to the shop to see Dad’s bear, and the women went in the house to see baby Linda.” Their driveway was full of cars for two days. “Dad finally got a bear and Mom gave birth to their fourth child. But-“If you measured success by the good times,” she says, “these hunters were very successful.” Janice says that 1958 was a doubly successful year for her parents. Many of the rosters are blank in the column for “Big Game Killed.” And when there is an entry, it’s often just one. It was even more frightening coming down at night. Then they’d head south to the game lands, making their precarious way up Armenia Mountain on an icy road out of Troy (this without four-wheel-drive). Home for their hunting license or ammo, but no one ever forgot their lunch,” she says. Those were the red-plaid Woolrich days.” She’d sneak downstairs in her PJs to sit on her uncle’s lap to watch the fun. “Opinions were offered about whose gun was too big or too small for the job, or who had outgrown their coat since last year. They were mostly men but also a few women, in great spirits and kidding around. “Some of my greatest childhood memories came in November when I’d wake up at 5 a.m., hearing the local bear-hunting gang assembling in my parents’ house in Bentley Creek to fill out the roster,” Janice says. Janice, raised in a family of hunters, begins telling stories. They span from the forties through the late eighties when Elmer, born in 1918, stopped leading gangs. These were left on a windshield for the game warden. Names, addresses, hunting license numbers, make and caliber of firearm were all collected, often along with Elmer’s ![]() ![]() The gold lettering declares “Elmer’s Giant Scrap Book.” She turns the pages, reading the logs that were faithfully filled out when the bear or deer gangs congregated for the hunt. She inherited her mother’s matter-of-factness and her father’s collection of hunting rosters, kept in a burgundy plastic book that covers half the picnic table when it’s spread open. ![]()
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