In the almost 40 years that I’ve been penning this weekly outdoors column, I’ve written many times about some of the highlights of my life that began as a very rural kid hunting and fishing in northeast Texas, and later to outdoor adventures like bass fishing in Japan and the wilds of Canada to guiding for elk and bear hunts in the Rocky Mountains.
Now in my mid-70s, I feel truly blessed to still be able to climb into a bow stand in pursuit of whitetail or walk a backwoods creek bank in the early spring in pursuit of spawning white bass. I’m truly blessed with memories of countless outdoor adventures and even more blessed to still be able to make more in my golden years.
I would like to share some of the special times in the outdoors that I’ve been privileged to enjoy throughout my lengthy career, beginning when I was about 7 years old packing a single shot J.C. Higgings .22 in the woods behind our little farm.
My dad was a hard worker and stayed busy raising 14,000 chickens on our poultry farm when I was a kid growing up, but he found time to occasionally take me on a squirrel hunt and we camped and fished at a little lake in southeast Oklahoma every 9 or 10 weeks when the chickens sold and he was free of duties for a few days.
I remember using my little rifle in the woods behind our house to harvest a fat fox squirrel that later became the centerpiece of a pot of squirrel and dumplings. It was a windy fall day, and the squirrel was high up in the limbs of a big oak. The limb was swaying gently moving the squirrel several inches in a rhythmic motion that I timed and made a perfect but lucky shot.
Another time Daddy and I were running a trotline and had a nice channel catfish a couple of stagings up the line. He reached over to boat the fish, and in my excitement, I leaned too far and tipped the little 12-foot boat over. The water was only 4 feet deep. I remember grabbing a nearby tree trunk and hanging on. I can still picture my Dad’s bald head going underwater to flip the boat over.
Looking back, I can recall many such instances that at the time seemed of little consequence but in later life give me much pleasure in recalling.
I recall fishing in a rural lake in Japan with a couple of newspaper outdoor writers from a big newspaper in Tokyo. They didn’t speak English and I knew only a few words of Japanese, but we were fishermen and through gestures and facial expressions we were able to communicate nicely. Once I convinced them I knew how to Texas rig a plastic worm, we got along just fine. This was back in the 80s and I remember watching Japanese fighter jets on training missions over the lake we were fishing. I recall thinking 40 years earlier both our countries were in a death struggle for survival in World War II, and now here I was having a blast with a couple of fine Japanese fellows. I am sure they must have had the same thoughts.
I won’t forget my first time to fish a remote lake in northern Saskatchewan. My guide was a Cree Indian fellow then in his early seventies. He was old school and told me about hunting caribou with a short bow his father had made when he was a young teenager. He pulled the boat into a little cove and handed me and my buddy spinning rods.
My first time casting a lure for northern pike, I remember asking my guide for advice as to what type structure to target. His word was “water” and he was not wrong. His advice was sound, I needed to simply get my lure in the water, it didn’t matter where I cast, the fish had never seen a hook and catching was easy.
For several years, I traveled to North Dakota in early October to bow hunt deer with a family that outfitted hunts on the thousands of acres of farmland they owned. There were only a few hundred people that lived in the quaint little town. I became great friends with the family and thoroughly enjoyed hunting the big body whitetail deer the region is known for. The Canadian border was only a few miles to the north and occasionally a moose that drifted down from the north would be spotted feeding along the shore of one of the many pothole lakes.
I remember some memorable dinners served each evening in one of the old homes in town that doubled as lodges. Those ladies knew how to cook, and we often dined on pheasant we shot during mid-day between deer hunts. One of the family members served as an upland bird guide. He had a well-trained Setter and we hunted around the many old farmsteads in the area. I can still picture a big rooster pheasant flushing from hiding around some rusty old farm equipment that had been abandoned during the early part of the past century.
Old, abandoned one-room schoolhouses were situated about the countryside and for some reason, pheasant hunting was always good around the cover near these old building as well as abandoned farm houses, maybe because they provide shelter from the heavy snow in the winter.
I could go on and on recounting things I’ve seen and experienced in the six-plus decades I can recall in the outdoors. I’m sure if you are a bit long in the tooth you too have countless fond memories of people and places, this is one of the benefits of living an outdoor lifestyle. In retrospect, it’s not the big fish I caught or the game animals I have hunted for sport and meat, it’s the wonderful people I have had the privilege of spending time with that now matter most to me.
This coming week, it will be time to make a few more memories; I have a fishing guide buddy that has been catching some big blue catfish during the summer. As most serious catfishermen know, fall and winter months have always been the best for targeting big blues. My buddy says he believes the big fish spawn is over and catfish are no longer guarding nest but rather dispersed on the lake again, chasing baitfish. Duty calls and more on this rather unique fishing pattern later.
Listen to Luke’s radio show www.catfishradio.org or podcast “Catfish Radio with Luke Clayton and Friends” wherever podcasts are found.
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