A Hunter's Story
John Barsness started publishing outdoor articles more than 30 years ago. He's written about many outdoor topics, including hunting, fishing, optics, firearms, and Western history. His stories have appeared in every major outdoor magazine, including Field & Stream, where his first article appeared in 1982. He has published seven books on subjects from flyfishing to hunting optics, the most recent being “The Hunter’s Book of Elk.” Barsness lives in Montana with his wife, Eileen Clarke (also a writer). This piece, about a grandfather figure who played an important role in John’s life, is typical of the author’s style: evocative, descriptive, heartfelt. It appeared in March 1987.

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He began hunting back in the time when men first learned to fly. Seven decades later, when I began hunting with him in the Missouri Breaks, he still had not accepted winged humanity, was convinced that every Piper Cub droning above the juniper hills was determined to drive the deer from his land, his black eyes tracking the plane across the sky like a young jack rabbit watching a red-tailed hawk.

They were the same hills he’d hunted since he was a child, when his mother, half-Assiniboine and half-Scot, drove the wagon across the high winter prairie to a coal vein eroding from a cutbank near the Dakota border, winter fuel in a treeless land. They rode wrapped in Pendleton trade blankets, and when a cottontail ran from the wind-carved snow, he would jump down from the wagon and follow the rabbit to its burrow and stamp the hole full of snow, knowing (because his mother told him so) that the rabbit would leave by another entrance and seek the sun. On the trip back, late in the afternoon with the brittle sky the same white of the hills, the rabbits would run up the hillsides and stand confused by their snow-stamped holes and his mother would lean one elbow on the wagon seat to steady the single-shot .22. When he was six or seven and could hold the little rifle she let him shoot sometimes, but he always helped gut and skin the carcasses and pack them frozen in a barrel in the barn. Sometimes there would be smoke in the distance from a coal vein struck by lightning the autumn before, and it seemed strange to his child-mind that the fire didn’t freeze during blizzards like the cattle they sometimes found standing upright after storms.

He told me his father was a metis horse trader from the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan who believed in fast horseflesh and fat cattle, who could see nothing of value in rifles but the death of wolves. He would not allow his son to hunt when fences needed fixing. So the son told the teachers at the Indian school that he was needed at home, and told his father at home that he was needed after school, and by the age of eleven was breaking horses for ranchers around town, riding his black gelding 30 miles between jobs. By his twelfth birthday he owned a Winchester .30/30 with a 26-inch octagonal barrel and broke horses during summer for a ranch 100 miles up the Missouri. They gave him a $1 gold piece for each greenbroke cowpony, and everyone knew they could afford it because they had made their fortune robbing trains back in the 1890’s. The railroad they’d robbed ran through towns named Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Harlem, and Zurich, tank towns named by the railroad baron’s daughter who’d spent a year in Europe, then traveled West in her private car, bringing the names with her.