Dr Bob
As a child, I learned how to fly fish on manmade ponds which were built by a rich guy thirty-five years earlier. I attempted to catch trout with my fly rod, and those few I did manage to hook went home to become dinner for my family. The wooden box at the head of the last pond where the creek flowed in had a wide door on top you swung up out of the way, and inside sat a baby scale to weigh the trout and the record book where you recorded your catch, number and weight, for the homeowners’ association. I don’t remember how much they charged for a pound of fish, but Mom got the bill at the end of the month. From time to time she suggested that I don’t catch so many fish, onna count of what they charged for a pound of fish.
This wasn’t on the Big Horn River in Montana, or some untrammeled creek in Colorado mountains. It was instead in Northern Illinois, not exactly a hotbed of fly-fishing for trout in the 1960’s when I was there, or the 20’s when the ponds went in. The rich guy built the kind of estate I might consider if I won the lottery. The Roaring Twenties let a few folks get this wealthy, without ever even winning the lottery. Don’t know how this guy made his bucks, but he built a mansion with them, in the center of 360 acres of hills and forest overlooking the Fox River, and it was a nice place. A series of springs fed a creek that ran through the center of the property, and a sequence of rock dams along the stream left him with 13 small ponds and the larger one in which I caught those fish. They were still there when the estate became a subdivision and we moved in.
This rich guy built his own hatchery to supply trout for the ponds, and years later as I grew up on that property, I caught hatchery raised fish. And I suppose the money I cost Mom went to the expense of running that hatchery. Without the hatchery and the ponds, there would have been no fly-fishing for trout in my youth in Northern Illinois.
A farm prospered a short distance to the north and west of our family home. Descendants of the first Hallstroms worked that farm, my father’s two uncles and an aunt. Beulah raised the chickens and gathered the eggs. Herb and Cliff farmed the fields, planting feed corn during the times I remember, and fattening a few steers. I recall some sows popping out pigs, too. Somehow I doubt those three ever harbored the notion that dinner magically appeared plastic wrapped in a refrigerated compartment set strategically to the rear of a chain store.
We miss Clyde. He was that gray cat who presided over our backyard for those many years. Clyde hammered the gopher population, munching down on those voracious rodents. Our landscaping plants thanked him, for dead gophers don’t kill plants by eating all their roots. Without Clyde guarding the farm, the squirrels and gophers ate more from our garden than we did last year.
We want to eat more from our garden, as much as possible. Our own vegetables are not only handy, but they are as fresh as we want them to be. They taste much better, and you certainly can argue that they are better for us than that engineered synthetic rubber in the chain store that is shipped in from who knows where.
We have to compete with the rodents for the fruits of our garden, and I expect to win. That’s just life. And death.
Reality involves competition. Clyde ate gophers. We want to eat zucchini and green beans from our garden. So do the rodents. I’ll be fencing off and covering the garden this year to keep out as many as I can. And I will kill as many gophers and squirrels as I can. Nothing personal. No blood lust here. It’s simply competition.
We eat red meat and the occasional fish. There, I’ve said it. This can start an argument. There are many arguments I could address. I cannot resolve the rift between big government folks and the individual rights/responsibility folks. I won’t solve the abortion debate. I don’t step between the Mac people and the PC folks. I’ll stop here because of how long this paragraph could get.
This tale is not about the morals or merits of being an omnivore. We eat red meat and the occasion fish. The discussion starts here with this as a given. I’m not going into any of that other.
I wanted to explore here how we wish to go about this. We want to do with our meat as we wish to do with our garden. We want to take the responsibility of obtaining our own meat and fish, and thus improve the quality, freshness, and arguably, the health benefits from this. This is why we may someday feed a steer on our retirement property each year. I’m sure Cliff and Herb would appreciate this. And this is why I hunt and why I will fish when I no longer must work, and thus have the time.
I’m not at all sure how many more years I will be able to hunt for elk. Long our favorite meat, for years I have willingly spent the time and money for the chance to bring home this food. But the mountains are growing taller, and my legs shorter, every year. Someday I will no longer be up to the task. Throwing hay over the fence to our steer frankly would be much easier.
We have considered buying a buffalo calf and feeding it up to eating size instead. We very much enjoy the meat from a bison. But keeping bison behind a fence is much more interesting than an Angus steer. Might not be up to that challenge, either.
Which brings me to my recent bison “hunt”….
Elk hunting is a sacred endeavor to me. Took me years of internal debate before I decided to try this. Twas a difficult decision. But from this I have learned the truth of what the native hunters always knew. Without being spiritually ready to pass the test, you don’t see any elk. When you have earned them, you do. You can believe this or not, but without hunting elk you cannot know.
A hunt for Bison would be much the same, but truly wild bison wander few places in this country. Politics and bad science have put the much needed bison hunt north of Yellowstone Park on hold. A few hunts can be had on reservation land if your checkbook is big enough. Custer State Park in South Dakota holds a small hunt to manage their bison population. And I will be looking into this one.
A lottery is held for the few tags permitting a bison hunt in the Henry Mountains in Utah. This would be a true wild buffalo hunt. But winning this lottery is as likely as winning the one that would set me up on a wooded estate, and it is every bit as physically challenging as an elk hunt.
However, many ranches raise bison instead of beef cattle for the growing market of folks who wish to eat bison meat. I can buy one of these animals, and I can assume the responsibility for the act that turns a living animal into the freezer wrapped protein we will consume for the next year. So I chose a bison shoot to fill the freezer this winter.
Hatchery produced fish from an artificial pond rather than a wild river. An Angus steer raised on our own land. A bison harvested from a ranch, a fenced-in piece of its native prairie. Not the same perhaps, as bringing home the meat from a wild elk living high on the mountain. But this is not 1830 and I’m not Jeremiah Johnson. It’s not the same as that plastic wrapped mystery in the store, either. All things considered, this does in fact, work for me.
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