Hunting & Fishing

Journal Jar - Who taught you to hunt or fish?

    My Dad, Mom, Brothers, Grandma, Aunts, my whole family taught me to fish and hunt.  The picture above is of my Aunt Florence in this case teaching us to hunt for arrow heads.  She lives in Cascade and influenced my life for the good with hunting stories, especially hunting of huckleberries, bears, bugs, flowers, fish, feathers, and even four leaf clovers. 

   We started out young as shown below.  Whenever I see a creel like the one on Dave I have to smile and usually get a tear in my eye because it is such a part of my life with my Dad.

My Dad carried me (as shown below) to go fishing when I was young.....

My brothers taught me much too....they taught me that (water snakes don't bite)....however as with many things they taught, I found out that, that is not true, when I caught and played with a water snake.  They do bite.  At least I am not afraid of snakes thanks to them.

 We all fished.  It was the get away and vacation that we could take and enjoy.  We also ate all the fish caught and kept.

 Even in the winter we could fish and get away ...  That is a picture of Granddad, Karen & Dave.

This is Grandma Hanks in the picture above .. so it was a part of our lives before we even were born.

Now a few memories ...

  There are many streams, and places called notellem crick (no tell em).  Most I don't even know the real name nor now even the right direction but my Dad knew.  He could remember the particular hole, and the correct roads to take, the reason that sounds so particular is that many of the places were out in the Owyhees where you only have dirt roads and no signs ... such as this (However this picture is from Dad and Mom's mission.     

   I learned that the harder it is to get to a place the better the fishing.  We had a favorite "notellem" place on the middle fork *I think of the Payette River.  It was along a main road but it was pretty straight down and a good hike.  It was great fishing until boaters started coming in the easy way and fishing it.  One trip down I remember Mom didn't want me to go because the day before I had cut open my heal (stepped on a sharpened hoe and cut a nice cut from one side to the other)  I made it with very little bleeding.

 One trip was I went with my Grandma, a cousin and her friend to stay and my grandparents cabin for a week in New Meadows.  We went fishing and I remember I caught about 40 little perch in the time that my cousin and friend caught maybe zero....Grandma spent her whole time baiting and then untangleing their lines.  So our supper was made up of my fish.  (It was a catch all you can because they were going to drain the lake and restock it with trout instead.)  I believe I was around 11 yrs old.

   I didn't like fishing with range cows around, because I knew there would be a range bull somewhere near.  I could get across a stream pretty fast if they made themselves known. (Like they couldn't go in the water to get across too)

   This picture above is Dale and Larry fishing in the water on the lawn. 

   Many of our family pictures were of catches ....

We were definitely a stream or crick fishing family ..... 

Times changed though so that there were too many fisherman and too few fish.  Also needed regulation of only a few fish allowed too so even though it was needed it wasn't worth a day trip to get 2 fish.  Good times though and good memories. 

    Hunting .... I think we all learned to hunt for pheasants, sage hens, or chuckers and deer.  The boys more than the girls, two brothers still hunt only now with bow and arrows.  I think the only thing I ever succeeded in hitting was a balloon.