Several years ago, I bought my husband a duck hunting journal. The heavy green binding, gold edged pages and famous duck head stamped on the front made the journal far too nice to actually use. At the moment, it’s holding a place of honor under an antique mallard decoy in the livingroom. In it’s place, Todd used a spiral bound (cheap) notebook to record days/hours hunting, location, who he was with and the results. Somewhere along the way, the paper frayed and the spiral unwound, probably from being stuffed repeatedly into the bottom of the decoy bag. Missing pages felt like lost days.
Now that our kids are getting older and starting to learn about waterfowling (they know plenty about the birds themselves, but the actual hunting is a new experience), I don’t want to risk losing any pages covering their first time laying out decoys, rigging up the blind, or hauling the boat behind cover.
I’ve always known time sneaks away when you least want it to, and I am powerless to stop our children from growing up. It is our responsibility to teach them how to appreciate nature’s beauty. If our children can understand, from the time they are young, that it is a fine thing to simply watch ducks fly overhead and listen to their calling, then hopefully they can also understand the responsibility we are giving them when we teach them how to hunt.
