My brother in law is a hunter. He was raised in a hunting family. I on the other hand was not. I knew nothing about hunting until he joined our family. He has taught me bits and pieces of hunting and now is teaching my oldest Son and Husband. They just recently passed their hunter safety tests and will now be able to go hunting.

I don’ t think I could ever be a hunter. I can go with and sit quietly or walk through the bush to “push bush” but I don’t have the reflexes like a cat like my brother in law does.

Recently I went with him bird hunting. There are a lot of different types of birds that you can hunt in our area; Pheasant, Sharp Tailed Grouse, Hungarian Partridge, Geese and Ducks and Sandhill cranes. Residents of Saskatchewan can hunt all of the birds with special licences. Visitors from other provinces can hunt the migratory birds. That’s not to say they can’t hunt the others, but only with guides that have a special hunting license.

He took me to a farm yard just southwest of the city. We stopped and asked the owner of the land if we could hunt on it. I got to visiting with him and asked him about his farm name. It was his parents farm and the name of his farm was a mixture of his parents names. I was surprised because my grandparents had done the same thing and asked if that was common practice. He said not really, he only knew of one other farm. My grandparents. I told him who I was and we had a nice visit about our families and caught up. Thank you for allowing us to visit your beautiful farm. Mr. B. 

My brother in law has a hunting dog, Oreo, that he takes with him to help “point” the birds. I was going to play the role with Oreo. It was my job to walk down a line of trees and scare the bird out the other side. I was to be as loud as possible. That was not a hard task for me. I sang songs…”100 bottles of beer on the wall, 100 bottles of beer, you take one down….” any bird would be scared of that singing and run the other way.

All jokes aside I loved walking that tree line. It was so peaceful out there. We saw about 6 white tail deer that were in the trees. We saw a coyote, we saw pheasants. The sun was shining, hardly a spec of wind. My mind wandered back in time. This is what people did every day not too long ago. This is how they survived. I thought of how the men would do the hunting and the women would do the plucking and cooking and thought of how times have changed.

I am thankful that we live in a place that we can remember the past, in a place we can slow down, we can walk for miles in the beautiful wilderness. We can see wildlife of all sorts, we can feed our families. Thanks Brent for sharing this experience with me.

Get out there and #ExperienceEstevan

Becky