Pat McVay used to climb trees to capture live mountain lions. He’d snag them with a cable, finagle them out of the tree and tie them up on the ground. A game farm in Florida paid $250 for each lion, good money back in the day.
Now, at 90 years old, McVay is a little more reserved, but nobody doubts that a mountain lion would still run from the man if he came stalking through the woods with a cable in his hand. Two years ago, he shot one of the biggest bull elk of his life. He’s been hunting for 84 years.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ John Fraley calls McVay a “legend,” but McVay’s stories aren’t legends. They’re verifiable records of fact; affirmations of a life fully lived. They are the stories that make him a legend.
“I’ve had a lot of fun in my life,” McVay said recently from his home east of Kalispell. “I don’t know how I had time to work. I’ve never been idle – there’s just too many things to do.”
McVay is a pioneer of the state’s hunter education program and was the first instructor to certify students in 1957. Today there are 1,600 active instructors and about 10,000 students each year – kids and adults – in FWP’s hunter and bow hunter education programs. McVay still teaches a class out of his basement. His last one of the spring was on March 14, his 90th birthday.
Hollister Pat McVay was born in 1920 in Oklahoma to a farming family. Shortly after his birth, his family moved back to Montana, where he would grow up on a homestead south of Great Falls. McVay claims that even in his most infant stages, he knew he belonged in Montana.
“My mom had me in Oklahoma but I talked her into coming back to Montana when I was two weeks old because I didn’t want to stay there,” he said.
His family moved to Washington near the onset of the Great Depression. In 1933, his father passed away, leaving behind McVay, three siblings and their mother. McVay called these “hard times” and moved out of the house when he was 16 to find work. He returned to finish high school, getting by with odd jobs. Eventually, he would leave the farm for good – the mountains beckoned.
McVay took a job at a lumber mill, trained as a machinist for the Air Force and then served in the Army from 1942-1946 before landing a job at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. He transferred to the Hungry Horse Dam in 1952 and hasn’t left the Flathead since.
To call McVay a mountain man might be misleading. He is certainly a man of the mountains, but he has never shunned society. Quite the contrary, he has dedicated his life to community service. He is as comfortable riding horseback on a remote wilderness trail as he is teaching kids gun safety in his home basement.
Fraley, who runs Region One’s hunter education program, said McVay “teaches a homey, old-fashioned type of class and he’s just as good as the first day I saw him do it.”
“By the second or third class, every kid wants to shake his hand,” Fraley said. “They just love the guy. I don’t know what he has. He’s funny and witty and he loves his students and they kind of return that.”
Adults gravitate to McVay the same way, Fraley added.
“He connects to people so closely – it’s hard to explain,” he said.
McVay’s house, in which he has lived since 1962, is a child’s show-and-tell goldmine: dozens of different types of gun cartridges, trophy animal head mounts, dusty bottles collected over the years and a veritable museum of firearms, some of which are authentic relics. A shooting range and cartridge-reloading shack located on his rural property round out McVay’s Montana playground.
He explains his bottle collection this way: “You can’t shoot them all. You got to save a few.”
McVay’s teaching isn’t limited to hunter education. His first hunter education class was actually a group of kids he already had in his small-bore shooting class. Since the 1950s, McVay has taught various shooting courses and started the Flathead County 4-H Shooting Sports program in 1984. Today the program has 200 students.
At one time, he played a major role in a traveling air rifle and pistol shooting program that held courses in 54 out of Montana’s 56 counties, missing only two counties in the state’s far northeastern and southeastern corners. McVay’s teachings are rooted in a fundamental philosophy: The more kids learn about and handle firearms in supervised settings, the less likely it is they’ll have accidents.
“I think anyone who was hunting conscious realized it was something that needed to be done,” McVay said of starting the hunter education program. “And I really think it’s made a hell of a difference in the number of accidents we have.”
In 1975, McVay retired from Hungry Horse Dam, where he was an operations supervisor. Retirement has given him more time to roam the mountains in pursuit of wild game and fish, and to travel. He regularly visits his three daughters, all retired schoolteachers, on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. His fourth daughter lives in Whitefish.
McVay left this week to visit his girlfriend in Arizona. Even in the desert, he refuses to stay indoors: “I like to coon dog around the desert and do a little prospecting.” He concedes he doesn’t find much gold.
“Well, I get to shovel a lot of dirt,” he said. “But I find a little.”
Perhaps McVay’s only regret is that other people don’t enjoy the natural world as much as he does. Saying he’s “been pretty lucky to have been able to do what I’ve done,” McVay believes the privilege of nature should be universally cherished, or at least recognized.
Aside from satisfying his voracious appetite for books, McVay, even at 90 years old, is rarely found sitting. Of all the gifts he has given Montana’s children, the gift they have returned is eternal youth.
“Working with the kids has been the most rewarding thing,” McVay said. “I get the feeling that you never wasted a minute you spent with a kid.”