Pipi’s Pasture: Mud and trespassers
Pipi's Pasture

When I was a little kid growing up on the ranch, October and November were hunting months, just like now. During our growing-up years, my sisters and I were taught to respect guns — in other words, to leave them alone and that’s what we did.
Years later my grandchildren excelled in 4-H shooting sports, but there was no such project area when my sisters and I were 4-H members, nothing to entice us to learn to shoot a gun.
It was a little different for boys; when they were old enough, they went hunting with the men. Thus my brother Duane looked forward to hunting season.
Anyway, as young kids, we watched Dad and his brothers head off, on horseback, for the high country forest where our cattle grazed in the summer. The men packed food and hunting gear, put orange bands on their hats, and started off for the cow camp cabin where they would stay for several days.
The wild meat was important to our family because although we raised beef we didn’t eat many of them. Beef animals made up our yearly paycheck. So while Dad hunted with his brothers, we girls and Mom stayed home and milked the cow and did the other chores.
We waited for Dad to come home with the meat and a lot of stories. We girls got the treat of being allowed to sleep on the living room couch while Dad was gone.
In later years — maybe when I was about 8 years old — our cousins and friends started coming from Denver to stay with us and hunt. I think they hunted elk in the high country and deer down on the ranch where there weren’t cows.
We didn’t have a very big house so I can remember how crowded it was when our cousins brought in all of their gear. As now, the weather was unpredictable so it was dry, snowy or muddy. The men couldn’t help but track mud into the house, and that’s one thing I remember about hunting season.
The other memory is trespassing.
As the years went on, ranchers started taking in hunters for fees. I’m not sure how this started, but it was a way that ranchers supplemented their fall paycheck. Hunters came from Colorado, mostly Denver, and from out of state. Hunters who were allowed on ranch properties weren’t the problem — it was those who drove the county roads hunting for game.
Hunters tend to get excited when they spot game animals so in those days — not such a problem today — if they spotted a deer in a meadow beside the county road, they stopped their vehicle and shot, no matter if there were cattle grazing there.
I don’t think we ever had a cow shot, but Dad and Mom kept close watch of the meadows. Trespassers got turned into the game warden.
I can remember one morning when I was feeding my 4-H steers at the barn, which is next to the county road. A hunter came by, spotted a deer, and started shooting. If I had stuck my head out of the barn door, I might have been shot. It was the only time I ever heard my dad swear.
Mud and trespassers are prominent memories of hunting season.

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