Last fall I was trying to help a customer at the sporting goods store where I used to work. She needed gloves to wear while hunting. She wanted something that was warm, but not so thick she couldn’t handle a rifle safely.
We plowed through glove after glove, seeming to settle on a pair of mittens I suggested that came with a pair of thin gloves dotted with a rubber-like material for grip. The mittens provided warmth. The gloves, designed to be worn underneath, provided a pleasing tactile feel on the trigger once she removed the mittens.
Finally, as she continued trying on gloves, the elk hunter looked at me and said, “You’re not a big game hunter anyway.”
Work in retail sales for any length of time and you quickly learn the verbal clues customers use to rationalize when they have decided they’re not going to buy. You let it roll off your back, or you move on to another profession.
This, however, was kind of personal.
“What do you mean?” I asked, not sure whether to take her statement as a compliment or insult.
“Well,” she explained, “you look like a fly fisherman or a bird hunter. You don’t look like an elk hunter.”
This actually turned into one of those pleasing exchanges I sometimes had with anonymous strangers in the store. I explained that I’d killed a couple of elk, and one deer, but that the last was almost a decade ago. Still, I felt as though I qualified as a big game hunter, to which she agreed. But she was right; I am now in fact primarily a fly fisherman and bird hunter.
I’ve seen the Internet memes that suggest how over time humans come to look like their dogs. I didn’t realize our shape-shifting skills also allow us to take on the appearance of our favorite hobbies.
My last elk kill coincides roughly with the purchase of my first bird dog. That last elk was something of a milestone. I was living in Flagstaff at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, and those remnants of an extinct volcano have an almost mystical power for folks in the southwest. I made it a goal to someday kill a bull elk on the slopes of those mountains, which I finally did in 2003.
I killed that old bull two or three miles from the nearest road. Hauling it out took the better part of two days. It nearly killed me, as well as the four dudes who came to help. The day-and-night ordeal has come to be known in my circle of friends (I kept most of them) as “Purgatory on the Peaks.” Actually I made that up just now. But let’s just say that that isn’t a night that’s spoken of in glowing terms, if it’s brought up at all.
If that were all the heavy lifting I’d done when it came to that elk it would be plenty. But that’s just the start of it. I had that old bull mounted, and I’ve moved five times since then. Now whenever I see a U-Haul cruising down the street an image of that elk head forms in my mind and I start breaking out in hives.
So, for those who know me and are convinced I’m well beyond getting a clue, here’s something I’ve learned through all this. Only if you are in a totally stable, permanent place in your life, with no possibility of moving, ever, should you be allowed to have a big game animal mounted.
I now also understand where the supply of cheap, big game mounts that decorate pubs and college binge-drinking establishments comes from.
Needless to say, I haven’t hunted elk since. And it’s not really that I don’t want to do the elk thing again, maybe with a little better planning next time. It’s just that, as I said, the bird dogs came along about the same time as Purg on the Peaks. I’ve found that I’m quite happy to spend my falls walking behind my setters looking for game that’s a little more manageable on the rare occasions I’m successful.
And at least when I’m bird hunting, I look the part.