My First Hunt Jim Miles ven before my first deer hunt at the age of 12, I had a history of hunting. It started when I was 3 and asked my mother to make a bow and arrow for me so I could go out into the woods to hunt for bear. She did... and I did. However, I never got a bear in those early years. She didn’t know where my interest in hunting and the outdoors came from. My father didn’t hunt and had no interest in it what so ever. Maybe it was a genetic memory passed down from my grandfather... or maybe it was a past life thing. Native American memories also seemed to be a part of me. I knew how to construct wickiups, a sapling frame hut covered with long grass bundles used by many Indian tribes as a temporary shelter while on the hunt. I learned to identify buffalo trails in the fields behind our house and through exploration, discovered the animal tracks and lairs of the game in my immediate area. The woods and fields were home to me—like part of my back yard. In those days, I and most of the neighborhood kids walked out of the house in the morning and followed our own interests and went our own way without parental supervision We did it all on our own. When I was five, I broke my leg jumping off a wall into a pile of snow on a dare. Unfortunately, I hit the snow shovel, but even that didn’t keep me inside. One day I decided to make an Indian wikiup in the back woods, about a mile and a half from the house. It was slow going with the cast and all, so I skipped going home for lunch to work on my project. This was very out of character for me. I always showed up for meals. I liked to eat! When I missed lunch, my mother panicked and called the sheriff. The sheriff didn’t find me because my wickiup was in a hidden spot, deep in the woods. Even a five-year-old knows you don’t build these kinds of sacred structures right out in the open. It had to be hidden … or so I thought. But come supper time I hobbled home for a brow beating from my worried mother. I didn’t understand her panic. I was just out on one of my adventures … that’s what I was supposed to do … it was my calling.
E
40 Summer 2018
