When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of the outdoors. I was raised in a city in upstate New York and entertained myself for hours by lying on the sidewalk and feeding bread crumbs to ants, watching them grab the morsels and drag them into their ant house. And then there were the spiders that lived in the hedge. I fed them insects and watched them grow. A highlight of my bug mania was a pet praying mantis that I kept in a big cage and fed grasshoppers. And then, of course, there were the snakes. The men of my family were outdoorsmen. I followed them around as we chased rabbits with Grandpa Corbo’s beagle hounds, fished local waters, searched for wild mushrooms, and, when I was old enough, became a Boy Scout when my Dad was Scoutmaster.
When the editor of Outdoor Life told Pat McManus and I to go on a hunt and write a double feature, we were all for it. For those of you unfamiliar with Pat, he wrote the back page for Outdoor Life for years. He was the Humor Columnist, and was regarded as the most-followed outdoor writer in the business. In the double feature article, Pat and I would each write our own versions of the hunt. Interesting concept with plenty of room for humor. And maybe some of it would be true.
My cameraman and I had flown into Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to film a black bear hunt with Linda Powell. She was Press Relations Manager for a firearms company and was hosting a hunt with a group of outdoor writers. My cameraman, who I'll call Larry, and I were going through customs. He was carrying a huge camera that was probably two feet long. I breezed through customs, but a female agent who spotted the camera confronted Larry and asked him a number of questions. We were vaguely aware of a Canadian work permit, but didn't have one. We'd been to Canada many times before with no problems but we'd heard the agents were cracking down. Larry invented fib after fib as the agent kept up the interrogation. He said he was just tagging along as a friend and filming the hunt for personal use. Finally, the agent stuck her finger in Larry's chest and said, "I'm tired of your bullshitting. You guys are up here on business. I'm deporting you right now." And she led Larry away where he went to a departure gate for a flight back home. Work permits protect Canadians who could do the work, rather than an American. In other words, I could have hired a Canadian cameraman. I was ok to go because there's only one me. No one else could obviously fulfill my role on my TV show.
Of the most common big game species to hunt in the lower 48, excluding hogs and bears, the most popular are, in descending order, whitetails, mule deer, elk and pronghorn antelope. Of the four, elk require the most complicated logistics because of the difficulty of hunting mountain terrain, unfamiliar hunting strategies, and simply transporting them out of the woods. Then too, an elk hunt may mean a long drive from home if you don't live in the west, an expensive nonresident license, and, if you choose to hire an outfitter -- an expensive hunt. Over the years, I've heard many folks lamenting the fact that they couldn't afford an elk hunt. The perception of an expensive hunt is due to assumptions that aren't necessarily true. Notice the word "expensive" here, used many times.
