Farmers Deserve Recognition For Outstanding Work
Farmers are the dirt of the Earth. They produce our basic needs, root our family values and tend to our wildlife.
But for the most part, they make lousy hunters.
I say this with affection for the vocation that has endowed me with everything from bread and wine to venison.
I owe many farmers, especially the two who produced my wife.
When we first met, Meredith told me about an orientation she attended after leaving the farm for medical school in Arizona.
The small group of students sat around a large table and introduced themselves one by one. The young woman next to Meredith gave a long review of her lineage, punctuated with windy praise for her father. “He’s a distinguished psychologist who is outstanding in his field,” the woman said.
My wife is from pioneer stock that doesn’t buckle to pressure.
“My name is Meredith,” she said in turn. “My father’s a farmer in Moscow, Idaho, and he’s probably out standing in his field right now.”
Like any hunter, I’m frustrated by the responsibilities that anchor me indoors. I’ve always envied people who could routinely be in intimate proximity to wildlife.
Farmers don’t need an excuse to get out. They are on the scene to see where the sharptails dance, where the coyotes den, where the biggest grain-fed bucks hide.
Soon after we were married, Meredith and I went pheasant hunting around her family’s farm. Her dad, Leonard, came with us, toting an old .410 shotgun that hadn’t been fired in a decade.
Only one rooster got up in front of Leonard that day, and he dropped it with a load of shot barely heavy enough to anchor a balloon in a breeze.
“You have to do that once in a while just to remind yourself you can,” he said at the time.
Meredith and I ate the rooster. Leonard hasn’t been hunting since.
One might chalk this up to the difference of age, except that younger farmers are typically the same way.
Hunters knock on their doors and ask permission to savor a precious few hours of outdoor time in the same fields that farmers spend the bulk of their days.
Maybe hunting is too easy for men and women who toil all winter keeping the cows alive and getting the combine to run.
Not long ago, I traveled to my hometown in Montana for an annual fall visit. A highlight is reuniting with a childhood friend who farms his own portion of the family’s multi-million dollar chunk of real estate.
It’s an off-day to drive across Randy’s property without flushing partridge, grouse, ducks, geese, pheasants, deer and antelope.
A bull elk once got bogged down in the pond near his house.
Yet Randy’s shotgun would be plugged with cobwebs if I didn’t come knocking on his door every October.
I can remember when Randy shot to kill, and never missed. Nowadays, the main attraction seems to be my stepmother’s mammoth picnic lunch box stuffed with homemade cookies.
Last year, our hunting trip was delayed several days as we rounded up cattle and helped a neighbor ship calves. Even when we get afield, it’s not uncommon to spend half a hunting day inspecting the irrigation equipment or chewing the fat with the neighbors about the grim prices for cattle and wheat. Even in good times, the prices are grim.
This year, however, Randy seemed genuinely interested in hunting, possibly because I had gloated about the performance of my young Brittany.
Randy even bought a hunting license.
Bragging about the dog was a mistake, of course. Radar bumped the first covey of huns and chased them over the horizon.
“Hell of a dog,” Randy said. “Does he point or does he retrieve when the birds finally fall dead from exhaustion?”
Radar settled down later that day, once he returned to the North American continent, but Randy never dropped a bird.
Instead, he dropped to his knees three times as we hiked across a stubble field, running his fingers through the dirt to see if the volunteer oats were sprouting.
Radar skidded to a stop and pinned a covey of huns 200 yards ahead. Randy and I were side by side at first, but when I reached the dog, Randy was 50 yards back looking at the barbed-wire fence.
“When the dog’s on point, it means there’s a bird,” I said, as Radar brought back the first of my double.
“I’m wondering how I can get water in here to the cattle,” he said.
In that same field, Radar made game on running pheasants and pinned them with a picture-perfect point in a patch of cattails.
“Here we go, Randy,” I said, moving in. I dropped two roosters on the flush, and Radar launched out for the retrieve.
Randy was kicking the dirt with his boot, shaking his head and grousing about the volume of grain the combines leave on the ground.
“Nice shootin’,” he said. “I’d be able to pay the bills if I could put all this grain in the bin.”
The next day, I hunted with Randy’s teenage son, Blake, who has the same passion to hunt his dad once had.
The kid bucked brush and leaped creeks. He was there for the shooting. He never missed.
Randy noticed. “You can pay more attention to hunting,” he said, “when you’re not thinking about putting food on the table.”
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review