Tap is right; kids still believing in Santa are not ready to hunt or shoot deer. I'm glad I grew up in a different era as many of you have. The many years of "hunting" with other kids with our BB guns for years were priceless, and then we advanced to 22's at around 9 years old but could only carry it with an adult present. Finally at around 12 years old we were all allowed to take our 22's hunting without adults. By then no one ever pointed a gun in another's direction loaded or empty and safeties were on until the second before the gun hit your shoulder to shoot and we ALWAYS unloaded the guns when crossing fences. A lot of winter cottontails were taken those years. Hunting deer was something we could have cared less about.
And at 12 was also when most of us got our first shotguns; they were single shots and after a year or two seldom was a duck or pheasant missed and even Mr. Grouse was at risk once he flushed. It was a cardinal sin to even think of shooting a bird out of a tree or on the ground; any shot at a bird with our shotguns other than flying was simply not acceptable. There was a giant crow roost nearby where thousands of crows came to nightly; every Saturday the adults took the whole gang of us shooting crows. We had hundreds of crow decoys that we had all made together which over the years fooled many a crow. That was something all of us very much enjoyed. I had deer hunted once or twice at age 12 but found it way too slow. Chasing birds from behind our setters, that was real hunting then. And trapping coon and rats was really living. Finally at 17 most of us took up deer hunting annually but only for a few days a year. It wasn't until my late thirties that deer hunting became more interesting. It came easy to all of us "used to be kids". We were all pretty accomplished stillhunters by then having stillhunted and shot untold #'s of rabbits with our 22's and bull frogs with our arrows deer hunting came easy then. And the zillions of hours spent in the woods by then hunting upland game by day and chasing coon at night made us all completely comfortable anywhere in the woods close to the road or in deep far from civilization. All of the woods knowledge and skills that were learned and honed in our childhood and teenage years had us well prepared for deer hunting.
I love deer hunting now but still miss those days of all the other hunting that we as kids chose to do ourselves. It is a different era for sure; kids in most areas I guess no longer get to disappear in the woods with their guns all day without adults. In contrast for us it was the most natural thing in the world to see two or three of us with shotguns walking together down the street on our way to the woods. Of course the guns would be empty and cracked open until we reached the woods.The kids today deer hunting at age 5 or 8 or even 12 will miss a lot of that. Hope it balances out.
