As this year’s hunting season gets underway, I’m thinking about all of the hunting seasons that I’ve seen over the years. Earliest memories are from when I was a young child, probably around eight years of age, growing up on the ranch. It was a time that ranchers in the area didn’t have hunting outfitting businesses on the side (as many do now), but hunting was still a big deal.

For one thing, my father and his brothers, two of them who ranched in the Morapos/ Deer Creek area, always hunted together. It was a once-a-year adventure. In those days we never saw an elk at the ranch. They stayed up at the forest in summer — I don’t remember where they migrated to during the winter. For that matter, there weren’t that many deer at the ranch elevation either. So Dad and his brothers hunted at the forest where our cattle grazed in the summer, staying in the cow camp cabin at night.

For another thing, hunting was a big deal because our family (and probably my uncles’ families) depended on wild game to get through the winter. We raised cattle, but we didn’t eat that many of them because they were sold for our yearly paycheck. So Dad and his brothers got licenses. They purchased canned goods, (to which Mom added food items), and gathered up other gear that was packed into saddle bags. The rode horses and led pack horses behind to get to the cow camp.

We girls and Mom were at home to milk the cow and do other chores. As I remember, the annual shipping season would have already taken place, but we wouldn’t have started winter feeding yet. We waited for Dad to come home with hunting stories. We didn’t have a phone in the house during the earlier years, let alone cell phones.

During those years, my mother’s nephew and a friend from Denver often came over for hunting season. I think they hunted the lower part of the forest during the day and then stayed with us at night. We lived in a small house so I can remember how crowded it seemed when, after a day of hunting, they crowded around the heater in the living room/dining room area. October was most often snowy and muddy so there were lots of coats and boots around.

There were lots of guns around, too. My sisters and I were taught from an early age to have respect for guns. We would never have touched them so having extra guns around was kind of scary.

After the hunting trip, game had to be processed, which Dad and Mom did themselves. The meat was brought into the house meaning a saw, knives, a number of bowls for the meat and even a grinder. In short, it was a mess. Mom canned some of the meat. In the years that we didn’t have a freezer, some meat was wrapped and taken to Craig be stored in a meat locker, rented from Bill’s Market.

That’s the way I remember the earlier years. It’s “mind-boggling” to think how many changes have occurred over the years, but that’s the next column.