Growing up in rural Texas, in the gravel hills near Cummins Creek just above the Gulf Coast Prairie, hunting, fishing and camping played an important role in my early life. My first real “camp” was my Dad’s enclosed dog trailer, wood walls with a tin roof, all of four-feet wide, six-feet long and three-feet tall. Two small windows provided ventilation. I spread hay on the wood floor, then laid a homemade quilt on top of it. To keep warm when it was cold, I used a “feather bed” made from wild and domestic duck and goose down. It proved to be most efficient and comfortable camp.
In time, my parents built a “camp house” on the backside of our property under an ancient live oak that had lived through at least 400 summers. I could not help but wonder if perhaps Indians and early European explorers and settlers had camped under the same tree many years before.
Our camp house was a one-room, uninsulated, two-by-four framed structure covered with in. A cast-iron, wood stove, which previously belonged to my great grandparents, provided heat for warmth and cooking.
On really cold nights, we placed large “river rocks” under the stove to heat them, then wrapped them in a towel or two and placed them under the covers near the foot of the bed to warm our feet to keep warm during the night.
Some of my fondest memories of growing up were those spent “in camp” during the fall whitetail hunting season. We moved to camp the week before the deer season opened, “we”, being my parents, younger brother Glenn and me. Arriving a week early gave time to do some last-minute scouting, make certain our deer stands were still sound and shooting lanes were cleared. We still, however, had to take care of the livestock we had at home. Back then, we were in the chicken, hog and cattle business, and all of the animals required daily care.
A big part of “camp” was the food. Meals prepared on the woodstove always tasted better than prepared back home, even if they were cooked and fried in the same cast-iron pots and pans. To fry our food, we used lard rendered from the hogs we butchered.
For several years, our hunting camp played an important part in my growing up. Unfortunately, in time “life” got in the way. Today, it is merely an old building filled with memories.
Those early “hunting camps” had much to do with me becoming a wildlife biologist and an outdoor communicator who has been fortunate and blessed to visit a pretty fair number of hunting camps throughout the world. All have been truly memorable. Some more so than others.
During my early days as a wildlife biologist living in Abilene, Texas, I hunted with Roy Bamberg and Chuck Dalchau, fishery biologists with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. At the time, I worked for the Wildlife Division. Each fall, we and other friends hauled an old Army Command tent to New Mexico’s mountains to hunt mule deer.
Our cots lined the walls, knowing Dalchau would soon have a fire going in the wood stove that would turn it cherry red. Bamberg usually appointed himself as camp cook and prepared unbelievably delicious meals. After a hard day’s hunt, hunger satiated, plied with a bit of “safe water,” the stories would begin; tales of present and past hunts, of great stags bested and being bested.
Taking deer on those trips was important, for they provided needed food for our families. State pay back then could best be described as “meager.” We supplemented our meals with what we took while hunting and fishing. But, perhaps equally if not more important, was the time we spent together in camp.
As my writing and outdoor television career progressed, I experienced many hunting camps in Africa, Canada, Alaska and elsewhere. Sometimes, my “up North” camps meant living in a tent barely big enough for my sleeping bag and me. Occasionally, I “lived” in those tight quarters for several days when inclement weather set in. In one camp on the north side of Alaska’s Brook Range, I slept in a wall tent surrounded by moose and caribou quarters hanging from meat poles. Each night the heavily laden meatpoles were visited by a grizzly sow and her two grown cubs, to feed on moose and caribou. Trees in the area were barely tall enough to hang quarters just off the ground. There really was not much that could be done to keep the grizzlies from feeding the quarters. Throughout that hunt, I hoped the bears would prefer “tender dead meat” to “tough live meat.” I slept with a loaded .375 H&H Mag at my side and a single shot .45-70 handgun in my hand.
Hunting camps in Africa were always interesting, some more so than others. In a camp in Zimbabwe on the Save Conservancy, lions roared just outside my tent and nightly rubbed on my tent’s walls. I slept with a fully loaded .375 Ruger at my side. A couple of years prior to that hunt, in what is now called the Zambezi Strip, formerly the Caprivi Strip in northeastern Namibia, elephants fed nightly on tender leaves practically above our tent. I slept with a .375 Ruger fully loaded alternately with Hornady’s 300-grain Dangerous Game Solid (DGS) and Dangerous Game Expandable (DGX).
While hunting greater kudu in central Namibia, my tent was “home” to a brown cobra. I was later told it slithered into at my tent about 8 in the morning, after I had gone hunting. After sleeping there for a few hours, it would leave my tent around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, before I returned.
The “situation” was not remedied until the cobra’s snooze was disturbed by the woman leaving freshly laundered clothes in my tent. Then and only then were efforts made to rid my nighttime abode of that daytime border. I was not told of my daily visitor until after the cobra had been made “one with Nature.”as Interestingly, the camp manager had known about the snake’s coming and going evidenced by the trail it left on the sandy ground around my tent, which each day was swept with a broom.
Hunting the Brush Country of South Texas, I often camped in old line shacks and otherwise abandoned homes. Rattlesnakes in the region were, shall we say, plentiful. When fall temperatures turned cool, rattlesnakes headed to their winter dens. It was not uncommon for them to den under the floors of ranch buildings, which served as our hunting camp.
I recall spending nights in South Texas camps where all was quiet except for the slight rattles of snakes as they crawled around under the cabin floor. We made certain there were no rat holes or missing boards that would give the snakes access to where we slept. We also made certain that every time we put on boots or crawled into our sleeping bags that there were no unwelcomed visitors.
Several years ago, I set up camp in an old bunkhouse not far from the Rio Grande. I cleared and cleaned the grounds next to the building, hauled in sand and swept it clean before heading home.
While I was gone, the first cold spell of the year blew through the area. When I got to camp where I intended to spend the next several days, I discovered what seemed like hundreds of snake drags traversing the sand to get under the old building. Needless to say, I quickly changed my mind about where I would be sleeping the next several nights.
Thankfully, not all of my hunting camps were fraught with adventure. Most have been safe, comfortable, enjoyable and great fun! I would not trade anything for the time I’ve spent in them. Almost all of my time in hunting camps provided to be “educational,” because of the great stories told around campfires and the friendships developed. Adventuresome or not, I can hardly wait to get back to camp.