By Dr. Johnnie Rosenauer
I watched a Texas Trophy Hunters TV show about an 11-year-old young lady selected out of the audience at the Hunters Extravaganza in Houston to do a hunt at Jerry Johnston’s place. Her joy and enthusiasm reminded me of a similar incident, which was my pleasure to lend a helping hand in creating. I am writing about it as a way of encouraging our readership to find ways to create something similar within their own circles of young people.
In fall 2018, my wife Danell and I participated in a community wide service project called BIG SERVE. Instead of the usual worship services that day, churches banded together to help in a half-day effort to support area non-profits by cleaning, patching, sorting, etc., around different locations. We were team leaders for Hope Hospice in New Braunfels and would do some outside and inside painting for them. But a big storm came through the night before and it rained buckets on the scheduled day.
It was way too wet to paint and our team was reassigned to other “rainy day” activities. However, in planning for the proposed work, I was very impressed with the staff members I met. I ended up donating a doe/hog hunt for their annual gala, a fundraising event held in May 2019.
The successful bidder that night was Dr. Michael Cole, DDS. Dr. Mike called to introduce himself and explained his goal was to take his soon to be 11-year-old stepson, Caleb, on the hunt. The time would be scheduled after buck season in early January 2020. We knew some of the same people, and we hit it off right away just talking over the phone. I asked if he and Caleb would like to take a tour of our place so they would know what to expect when the hunt time came around. After what I imagine was a pretty brief conversation on the topic, we arranged a time.
The afternoon of our hunting trip, I took along a Remington Model 7 Youth chambered in .223 that we bought for our daughter when she was about Caleb’s age. It is an accurate and well-scoped firearm. As a beginning hunter, Jessica killed several hogs with that little rifle, giving them what we called an “ear wax job.” She soon graduated to a .257 Roberts to take her first trophy deer and has now used a Model 70 Featherweight in 7mm-08 for several years, taking a couple of very nice bucks, along with several management deer.
The .223 has been my occasional varmint rifle, but mostly serves as a gun safe queen. What a great choice for a young person to begin shooting with. As a slight side note, Jessica’s story of that memorable hunt plus a picture of her and the deer was published in The Journal, and the framed article hangs in her home right under the mounted antlers of that very nice South Texas buck.
We stopped by my family place east of Pearsall first and had a little gun safety class that Dr. Mike agreed was appropriate. Caleb was very attentive, and afterwards, proceeded to demonstrate his shooting skills by doing a superior job for a first-time centerfire rifle shooter. He was quickly hitting the kill zone on the target with every shot. His enthusiasm and confidence were both raised up a notch, and it felt good to see him and his dad excited to proceed to the next step of the afternoon.
We then headed over to a high fenced pasture I have leased for many years and set off a feeder that runs all year long. I left the hunters in the blind and proceeded to check on several things around the place before settling myself into another location about a quarter mile away from them.
A few deer came out, but no hogs. Close to dark, I thought I heard a shot. I was upwind and that small caliber from an enclosed structure does not make much noise, so was not certain. Upon driving up to them, lo and behold, I found a sure ’nuff grinning young man and his proud father.
Caleb has managed to conduct what Dr. Mike called a frontal lobectomy. To us non-medical folks, that means he about took the top of the skull off a young hog. After the time-honored tradition of story recounting and celebrating, we headed to Devine for a Triple C meal where a certain old South Texas farm boy Aggie had a few hunting yarns to spin for the happy hog hunters while we were eating. It was a real fun time for yours truly to have “fresh ears” for some of my old stories from the 60 years the good Lord has blessed me to hunt in South Texas.
The experience was all the better, considering it was the evening before Caleb’s 11th birthday. In talking about writing this article, Dr. Mike has assured me his son had plenty of listeners when he told and retold the story in the following days at school. Seems like they are both pretty excited about coming back, and Caleb’s two sisters think they should come along as well.
I encourage us all to keep our tradition of good stewardship of the land through effective game management going on by exposing the next generation to the experience. Like my longtime friend, Jim Mullen is fond of saying: Take a kid hunting. It’s good for both of you!
