Pass Along RJ
November 2011

I just got off the phone with my son. He was calling from South Dakota where he’d been hunting ducks and pheasants. He’d shot his limit of both that day, but he was heartbroken.Somehow, he’d lost his lanyard with a very good duck call on it.But it also had a few duck leg bands, including a band from the last duck he ever shot over his old Lab.He can buy a new call; but that band is gone forever, and with it, a piece of his past that someday he may not be able to recall.

Keepsakes. It’s something of an odd word. I mean, I get the “keep” part of it, but I’m a little fuzzy on the “sake.” The dictionary says it means “the good, advantage, or enhancement of some entity (as an ideal).” I guess that works. We keep something because it enhances the ideal, that ideal being a remembrance. And I don’t know any group of people who keep more of these mementos than sportsmen.

What’s a big-game hunter’s trophy room if not walls full of stuffed mementos? Maybe you have a mount of a special bird. I have a pair of mallards in a flight pose on a wall in my den, coming in for a landing on my desk. I shot them in just that pose, and my old, now dead, Lab Roxie the Rocket brought them back to me, one at a time, on the last hunt of her last season. The taxidermist had them so long I was going to send his wife a sympathy card because I figured he was dead, but he called before I did.

What have you got set aside somewhere that reminds you of something in your sporting life? Have you got a tailfeather of a ruffed grouse stuck inside an empty shotshell, the one you used to bag that grouse, the first one your new pup – now long passed – retrieved for you? Maybe it’s a photo of a hunt in South Dakota, and you’re standing there with a smirk on your face with the three roosters you took with three shots in front of witnesses – and you haven’t done it since?

If you’re like most of us, you’ve got them, those keepsakes. At the end of the day, the memories they bring back are all we’ll really have.

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