YOUR
OUTDOORS
Father-son memories grow more meaningful as years go by WILL BUROS
Throughout my life, I have marked my time here on Earth by outdoor mileposts — the first time I caught a trout by myself, the first pheasant I shot on the wing, my first buck big enough to justify a shoulder mount. But it was the day my father fell that I realized my time here is not only measured in first times, but also in last times. It was my father, Walter Buros, who taught me to hunt and fish. He was fond of reminding me he’d sacrificed several good years of fishing while I was more interested in throwing rocks at fish than casting lures. Still, with his tutelage, I eventually got hooked. There wasn’t anything I didn’t think he could do. He would brag how, in his younger days, he could jump over a four-strand barbed-wire fence without getting snagged. Behind our house was a small woodlot filled with oak trees and gooseberry brambles. It was the perfect habitat for rabbits and squirrels, and it was the perfect training ground for my father to take his young son hunting. We started with simple walking expeditions into the woods. Once, while he guided me and my younger
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cousin, Carl, through the woodlot, we stumbled upon the remains of an old soup bone left half buried, undoubtedly, from a neighborhood hound. As my father turned it over in his big hands, he got serious and proclaimed we’d made an important discovery — we’d found a dinosaur bone. Our eyes grew wider as he pointed out teeth marks where most likely, he said, a Tyrannosaurus rex had felled this Brontosaurus. As he motioned to the landscape and described how dinosaurs once had roamed this land, he was not only improving our observation skills, but also expanding our imaginations. TOGETHER OUTDOORS
When I was old enough to carry a gun, he got me an old Stevens Crack Shot .22. Armed with that little gun, my father and I would stalk elusive
small game in the back woods. On one transformational hunt, I peeked inside the hollow log we’d often sit upon to rest and talk. “Dad, there’s a rabbit in here!” I shouted with excitement. “Should I shoot it?” “Go ahead!” he shouted back. In hindsight, it wasn’t all that difficult or sporting to shoot a “rabbit in a barrel.” Still, with that simple pop, I became a hunter. Through the 1970s and ’80s, my father and I were hunting and fishing partners. We made yearly trips to Minocqua to cast for muskies. Back then, a mere follow constituted a successful day on the water. There was our annual trip to Waupun to hunt Horicon Marsh geese. Since we rarely saw geese on the Mississippi River near us, we would join the firing line of rentable blinds along
