ArmedBear said:
Apart from being an entertaining poster, you sound like a great Dad!
Thanks a bunch for saying that - but I don't think I'm a great Dad so much as I just have a good memory of what a raving idiot I often was when I was a kid.
True story: When I was 13 or 14, I was deer hunting with my Dad, just up the holler from the little town where we lived. Dad had put me on stand, and he was working a little one-man drive around the ridge towards me. I was hunting with a Winchester Model 37 single-shot 16-gauge with slugs at the time, and Dad had told me my cardinal rules for hunting with that gun over and over and over again. "Don't put it to your shoulder until you SEE the deer. Don't pull the hammer back until you SEE antlers. Don't pull the trigger unless it's close enough that you KNOW you can kill it."
We didn't know it at the time, but we weren't alone in the woods that day. An
old (he must have been pushing 80) man named Cuthbert Simms (yeah, that was really his name) who lived a few houses up the road from us decided to go hunting that day too. It was state law by that point that everyone had to wear orange when they were deer hunting, but apparently Mr. Simms hadn't gotten that memo. He had on a green pair of pants, a grey wool sweater, a
white button-up shirt, and a grey felt hat.
So as I'm sitting there on that stump, with barely-teenaged eyes and ears peeled, Mr. Simms came crashing along through a thicket of mountain laurel, right along in front of me. All I could see through the thick brush was grey fur and white belly, and I raised the gun to my shoulder, but I didn't cock it. A couple of things stopped me. I hadn't seen any antlers yet, and Dad had
really hammered those rules into me. Plus, I knew that if my first shot wasn't perfect, I probably wouldn't get another. By the time I reloaded that single-shot, the deer would be long gone. So I was frozen there with my gun up, waiting for a break in the thicket, heart hammering and nerves on edge.
I'm not a bit embarassed to say that when Mr. Simms came out of that thicket and I saw it was a person and not a deer, I dropped the gun and threw up right there on the spot. To this day I'm thankful for my Dad's rules and his insistence on them, and everytime I take my son in the woods I think about Mr. Simms and say a little prayer that my son will never have that close a call.