Gary Greene's Memories from an Old Hunter....#42
As a parent, certain accomplishments by your children stand out more than others. At least for me, getting to participate with my sons, during a few of those accomplishments, made it much more rewarding.
My oldest son Ty is a special education teacher in Whitefish Bay, which alone is something I am extremely proud of. It takes a very caring individual to work with special needs students. He is a non-hunter. However, the Greene men do enjoy competing on the sporting clays course, but Ty, my younger son Nate and I have never mastered sporting clays. Ty and Nate usually shoot in the high 30’s (out of 50), and for me, let’s just say, I’m in the same county. It is great fun, because of the camaraderie that we share, which leads to the harassment that we also share. We don’t seem to take our shooting as seriously as many of the other competitors on the course. Afterward, we usually share more discussions over a few beverages and some food. My time with my sons has become rarer, with me homesteading in East Troy, Ty living in Milwaukee and Nate going to veterinarian school in Madison. Not many things in life are better than sharing time with my adult sons. My sons and my wife Chris remain my best friends.
The Greene boys: Nate, Gary and Ty during an Easter moment. (2017)
My sons grew up watching me leave the house with gun in hand, to go bird hunting. I was primarily a pheasant hunter, but also hunted geese and a few ducks. Nate, just naturally, wanted to be a hunter, but his mother didn’t allow him to hunt until he was sixteen. As I previously mentioned, that didn’t work out as she had planned since he became a special forces, Army Ranger with five wartime deployments.
However, I did get to build up Nate’s outdoor interests a bit when his mom was gone. In the woods, across the street from our home, we cut saplings, and made bows. They usually lasted about a week until they dried out and cracked, but they served their purpose. We shot the BB gun in the backyard, the pellet gun in the basement and we were allowed to go to the Whitnall Park archery range. That progressed to us taking our carp shooting, accessorized bows along with our fishing poles. We began shooting carp below the dam, on the river between Big Muskego and Wind Lake.
Nate Greene, at age 16, proudly displays his first double pheasant harvest with our first lab Libby.
The first time attempting to shoot carp, Nate was on a high bank above the river and made a nice shot on a carp, but as the carp fought, his arrow line snapped. To retrieve his arrow and that carp, Nate, with his clothes on, never hesitated and jumped about eight feet off that river bank into chest high water. From that time on, I knew I had a hunting partner for life. I put up a picture of him and a carp he shot on the bulletin board at the Franklin Gander Mountain. That picture remained posted on that wall until he returned home well after his military career had ended.
As I previously mentioned in a prior memory, both Nate and I started hunting with a J.C. Higgins, Bolt action, 12 gauge shotgun. It was a good learning gun for both of us. I figured with basically, only one shot, it was safer and he was more likely to take his time aiming. I was not entirely correct with that prediction.
When Nate turned sixteen, we were hunting Tichigan public hunting grounds near Waterford for state stocked pheasants and our yellow lab Libby quickly flushed a rooster right in the direction of Nate. He could not have shot faster and that bird could not have been closer. When your first pheasant flies directly over your head, the talk of shooting techniques can go right out the window. Nate didn’t miss but the head of that bird was nowhere to be found. He and I have never forgotten his first pheasant.
That same year, we were hunting Honey Creek public hunting grounds near Rochester, and we were having success at finding a good number of birds. If possible, I always wanted Nate to have the first shot, but I was in position for the shots and I had my limit in the bag. It was getting near the end of shooting time with about fifteen minutes remaining, so I decided we would cover the standing corn north of the parking lot and the road. It is a small section of land and in that time, we could walk it all. We weren’t in that field two minutes, when Libby flushed two roosters.
Nate took aim with his bolt action J.C. Higgins and dropped the first rooster at fifteen yards. He brought down his gun, worked the bolt and took aim a second time and dropped the second rooster at about forty yards. His first successful double harvest and it was with his bolt action. Numerous times, I have seen him drop three ducks in three shots with his semi-auto Beretta, but being a young hunter, in that standing cornfield that was over his head, I was never more proud of his shooting and composure as I was with his difficult rooster double, that fall day in November, 2002.