Brittany Moulton of East Charleston takes her turn at the firing line. Brittany showed remarkable poise and maturity as she took her shots with the .22 rifle. That maturity was perhaps best evidenced by her refusal to try the 20-gauge knowing that she would have trouble controlling the more powerful gun. Photo by Richard Creaser
LYNDON – There are a great many things I will walk away from my hunter education course with. I now know the proper way to cross a fence with or without a partner. I have a rudimentary grasp of what needs doing in order to field dress my prey. I also learned that it is never okay to hunt with a crossbow. The lesson that is likeliest to stay with me the longest, however, I never learned from textbooks, videos or my instructors.
The drive down I-91 was filled with apprehension and reservation. I had taken my hunter safety course some 17 years earlier, in another country. Would what I learned then compete with what I learned over the last few weeks of my home study course? Worse, would my classmates all be 12 years old and wonder who the oversized reprobate was lurking in the background?
Pulling into the parking lot of Rick’s Gun Shop my worst fears were realized and amplified. Parents accompanying their minor children, many of those children seven, eight or nine years old milled around the sloping lawn. At least half were dressed in camo. This was going to be a long day.
Our instructor started off the field day by inserting a video for our viewing pleasure. As expected it was a tale about careless gun handling and the dire consequences sure to follow. Two young boys out shooting and having a great time conclude their day in tragedy and despair. My classmates drank it all in with a sobriety befitting much older people.
I missed the point or, rather, had already come to that same conclusion a few decades earlier and focused instead on the disparate elements of the film. I was distracted by the antiquity of the piece, the fact that the ambulances were in the same style as a modern hearse, the Pepsi cans were white and decorated in a fashion dating back to a time before I was born. Every piece of equipment in the emergency room was sadly dated looking more like a set from the original Star Trek series and less than a hospital space as I have come to know it.
The doctor, for instance, came into the ER sporting a tweed sport coat and never once wore gloves, a hat or mask while examining his gunshot patient. Had he come in smoking and carrying an afternoon aperitif I could not have been any more delighted. The ethereal concertina music that played in the background was to haunt me for hours afterward.
But this was not what my classmates saw and, undoubtedly, was also not what the instructors had hoped I would see. Whether or not they had ever contemplated the consequences of an errant shot of a hunting rifle I cannot say with any certainty. What I can assure you is that this film had a very sobering effect on the others.
That is when I began to view this course in a different light. I began to pay more attention to my classmates and their parents and less to the ancient shocker-films. They would certainly see such films again in the coming years when they take driver’s ed, I told myself. No, it was far more interesting to see how these boys and girls responded to the teachings.
That’s when I began to understand who was here and why. I cannot say for certain if it was required that the parents remain with their kids the entire time but they did. There was nothing forced or untrue about the bonds I could see between parent and child as they watched foolishly outdated movies, listened to the game wardens and their plea to help stop dangerous and illegal hunting or took their turns on the live-firing range.
I have attended enough youth sports games to be able to tell which children play for fun and which are there to appease their sires. I had certainly expected at least half of the youngsters at Saturday morning’s class to be present simply to give their fathers a chance to get out on youth hunting weekend. Instead, I found that each and every child took a distinct interest, took complete ownership of what they were being taught.
Hunter education was not a necessary evil taken merely as a means to get a hunting license. Hunter education was not the vehicle whereby fathers and mothers could hunt vicariously through their progeny. Hunter education, at its most basic level, wasn’t really about hunting at all.
It is about hunting as a family tradition. It is a tradition that binds together generations whose experiences have been as unalike to those who followed as those who came before. Children of the atomic age giving way to those of the digital revolution giving way once more to the offspring of Pokemon and the information superhighway.
Hunting is their common thread tying them back millennia to the ancient hunters who prowled Vermont’s green hills before Columbus ever left Spain.
I saw fathers take the time to instruct their children on how to load and handle a .22 and a 20-gauge shotgun. More importantly, those same fathers spent just as much time with the children of other men as with their own. Hunting is not merely a sport or a diversion it is a passion. That passion was conveyed on a sun-dappled afternoon as easily as .22 shells were passed from hand to hand.
There was something innately comical about watching young children struggle with the recoil of a 20-gauge. It was not a perverse comedy in the sense of watching children fire guns far too large for their tiny bodies. What I found amusing was their reluctance to conceded defeat and the dedication they applied to ensure that they handled their weapons safely at all times, even when their balance seemed to be on the verge of abandoning them.
The shotgun blasts echoed through the wooded hills and the children reeled back like old French 88’s at the battle of Tobruk. Hitting the target was of secondary importance by that time, the true focus being on how to continue to handle a firearm and getting used to the proper stance needed to keep from being thrown backward.
I was so lost in my observations that I seemed to be last to the firing line every time. The shotgun targets were shredded memories by that time, bits of paper debris filtering down through the nest of alders on their way to the forest floor. I took my shots, hoping that I didn’t lurch back as much as the little ones did.
However much hunter education isn’t supposed to be a macho thing, a part of me still didn’t want to stumble back as much as an eight-year-old girl. Later that afternoon we gathered back in the indoor archery range to take our test, a 50-question multiple-choice exam. As much as I wanted a perfect score I fell two questions shy of that feat. Luckily my bonus points gave the illusion that I was indeed perfect, if only for a day. Guess I’ll need to brush up on my Vermont wildlife history and take another look at that section on hypothermia.
