Welcome to Craig, hunters
Each fall, when hunters begin to trickle into Craig, I welcome them as happily as I greet lowflying geese silhouetted against a burnished evening sky, the distant clamor of a Friday night football game, mountains highlighted by broad strokes of yellow, and the Yampa River dotted with leaves as it flows easily toward winter.
Though I don’t hunt, I never disparage those who do. Hunting was as familiar to my childhood as swatting mosquitoes and tattling. I grew up thinking everybody ate venison, hung antlers on outbuildings and transported dead deer on car fenders.
My high school principal overlooked absentees on the first day of deer season, and the town sponsored a deer hunters’ ball the night before — an event featuring chili, red hunting apparel and more action in the parking lot than the dance hall.
My dad initiated my brothers into the culture of hunting, but not my sisters and me. I don’t remember caring — except when my brothers tell stories at family reunions about hunting with Dad, and I can’t correct them on the details.
My brother Bob, who served a mission in Canada for two years a young adult, told us he was homesick during hunting season. He missed the smell of crushed sagebrush in fields populated by pheasants, dreamed about stalking deer up a draw, longed to sight ducks in the cold morning fog on Utah Lake. He didn’t mention being homesick at Christmas, on his birthday or for his family. I never questioned his priorities.
When my dad worked the night shift at an iron mill, he hunted deer during the day and never met a mountain he couldn’t climb with quick efficiency. He continued to hunt through his 80s, though he no longer cared if he killed anything. He didn’t need the meat; he just liked looking out from the
top of a mountain.
I had one deer adventure of my own: My parents moved to Lander, Wyo., while I was in college, so I traveled there during Christmas vacations. The first year I did so, a friend I’d met the summer before called and invited me to go nighttime tobogganing in Sink’s Canyon with her and a couple of boys she’d gone to high school with.
A full moon lit our way down a swooping track crossed by tree shadows; a bonfire warmed us between runs; and I began to understand the appeal of life in Lander. Later, as we drove down the canyon, a deer jumped in front of the car. After impact, it thrashed wildly on the ground until one of the boys took a gun from the trunk and killed it — familiar stuff to me until they dressed out the deer, found its liver, cut off a chunk and ate it.
When offered a piece, I declined.
So I felt right at home when I moved to Craig. Local hunters seemed safe and skilled, and the hunters who arrived from across the United States and Colorado seemed appreciative of our town, its mountains and its game. Though some residents grumble about the increased traffic, long supermarket lines and crowded restaurants that arrive with hunting season, most see these shortlived inconveniences and their boost to our economy as reason for dancing in the streets — except during the mini traffic jams that bookend the school day, when such cavorting would be dangerous.
As for me, I look forward to the familiarfromchildhood uptick in activity that occurs in Craig when the days shorten, the mountains change color, snow rides into town and hunters take to the hills.