Annual Hunt For Friends And Their Families

These boys and their fathers gather several times during hunting season to enjoy the fellowship of a deer hunt. Here they are pictured from a hunt in November 2009 (from left): Austin Childers, 9 at the time, Griffin Price, 10, Garrison Price, 10 and Devin Cantel, 8. All the boys are from Flowery Branch.

By Sean Childers

I along with Spence Price and Brian Cantel have enjoyed more than 20 years of friendship, and we all share a mutual love of the outdoors. As young hunters, we each spent countless hours with our dads and granddads hunting whitetail deer in the Georgia Piedmont. The time spent with family in our early hunting years has created cherished memories that will last all of us a lifetime.

We in turn are raising our sons to appreciate the outdoors, and we make every effort to take them hunting several times throughout the Georgia deer season. Every year we make it a point to get in at least two hunts together with our sons to enjoy the camaraderie of friendship and to exercise our mutual love of deer hunting.

One of those weekends is spent on Spence’s family farm in Greene County where his twin sons, Garrison and Griffin, are the fifth generation to hunt the farm.  The other weekend is spent on a farm in Madison County where I have 174 acres that we have hunted the past four hunting seasons.

The weekend of Nov. 7, 2009 was our first hunt of the year together. We decided to hunt the Madison County tract. We planned a Friday afternoon through Sunday morning hunting trip, complete with monster-buck videos, trail-cam shots of nice bucks taken on the property and plenty of venison jerky to snack on around camp. We had even agreed to check our sons out of school early on Friday, so we could get a jump start on the weekend. The boys were so excited about the prospects of hunting all weekend together.

As a father, one of the most rewarding feelings is seeing your son genuinely get excited about the opportunity of going hunting with you. I get to experience the same euphoric feeling in adulthood that I did as a child when I was going hunting with my dad.

After checking the boys out of school at lunch, we made the hour-long drive to Madison County discussing stand locations and hunting strategy for the weekend along the way. The excitement and anticipation was obvious on each boy’s face as we strategized the hunt. Upon getting camp set up by mid afternoon, we decided to familiarize everyone with the stand locations and options for the weekend.  After brief discussions, we all settled on areas we would hunt the first evening and made our way to the stands by 4 p.m. All three dads and sons saw deer the first afternoon; however, no one was able to harvest a buck.  The boys each had opportunities to harvest a doe, but none wanted to take his first shot on the first afternoon unless it was a trophy buck.

Friday night we enjoyed a meal together and continued to strategize on where the deer would be moving. We watched monster-buck videos together after supper. The videos provided fuel to drive the excitement of the boys’ hunting experience to a new level that night. The boys were so worked up after seeing deer during the afternoon hunt and watching big-buck videos, we could hardly get them to sleep at a decent hour. Prior to turning down for the night, we made our decisions on hunting locations, so when Saturday morning came we rose with much optimism about the day ahead.

Normally 8- to 10-year-old boys are a bit difficult to rise at 5 a.m. but not on this morning. Each boy jumped out of his bed as if he were spring loaded and began getting his hunting gear together.

Spence and his sons, twins Garrison and Griffin, hunted a tower stand located in a pine/hardwood mix between a bedding area and an adjoining field.

Brian and his son, Devin, hunted a buddy stand on the edge of mature pines and a cutover.

I, along with my son, Austin, hunted a buddy stand located in a hardwood creek bottom. The morning was beautiful with temperatures in the 30s, cloudless and little wind. Everyone saw early morning deer activity and even heard several shots at a distance. Then at 10 a.m., a close rifle shot rang out. The shot sounded as if it came off our hunting tract, but we were unsure.

Austin and I were anxious to know if someone in our hunting party had harvested a whitetail. We waited as long as we could before the urge to check with the others got to us.

We climbed down from the stand and made the 20-minute walk back to camp. When we arrived back at 11 a.m., we saw a nice 8-point buck lying in camp. We did not know who it belonged to, but the smile from ear to ear gave Griffin away. He had harvested his very first buck of his young hunting career. He had made a perfect vital-area shot preventing the deer from running far. The expression on his face along with his dad and brother was priceless. Even more gratifying was the genuine excitement the other boys had for Griffin.

To make the hunt even more memorable, it was the first hunting season since Spence had lost his dad and Garrison and Griffin their granddad.   Papa T, as he was known to Garrison and Griffin, had been an avid outdoorsman who passed his passion for hunting and fishing onto his son and grandsons. Papa T had always appreciated and respected the hunting tradition and knew the importance it played in a child’s upbringing. Somewhere that day Papa T was looking down and smiling, knowing he had passed along one of the greatest gifts a father can give a child, his time spent hunting and experiencing the gratification of the whitetail harvest with friends.

Griffin now has the mount proudly displayed on his dad’s basement wall.  The season went on to yield whitetails to Garrison, Austin and Devin. The boys have learned it is not so much the harvest that provides the greatest gratification but the love of the outdoors and sharing them with close friends. I think we have succeeded in cultivating yet another generation of outdoorsmen who will pass along their love of hunting to future generations.

I don’t know who is prouder, the boys or their dads.

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