A man could do worse than helping a young hunter find his way... but I can't imagine him doing much better.
The first time I ever saw Don Poyet, he was trudging down a dirt road in the Fort McCoy Wildlife Management Area (WMA), hauling a homemade climbing stand on his back. At the time, Don was the field superintendent at the company where Dad worked.
I was thirteen years old, and I was riding with Dad in Old White, his 1977 Chevy pickup. We had come up to check out the camp we'd be using with Dad's friends Art, Richard, and Don that season. After checking out the camp itself, Dad, Richard, and I had headed to the woods to find Art and Don, who were bowhunting.
As we drove along, we saw a hunter tromping along the side of the road, traveling the opposite direction. He was dressed in camouflage from head to toe, and he wasn't a particularly large fellow. He carried a compound bow and arrows, and had a heavy-looking climbing stand strapped onto his back.
As we rode along, ourselves without air-conditioning to keep us cool, Dad remarked that here was some poor guy sweating his butt off, who had quite a walk ahead of him. We knew the closest parked vehicle was quite a ways down the road behind us.
Richard commented that he thought the fellow looked like Don, but Dad chugged on past, motored around the woods for a while, then on our way out found Art and Don together at the aforementioned vehicle.
As I'm sure you have surmised, Don was indeed the sweating, red-faced fellow we'd passed earlier. Dad hadn't recognized him in his hunting gear and he'd ignored Richard's observation, and so Don had to make the journey back to his truck on foot, no doubt muttering under his breath about us passing him by. Don had a few choice words to say about it when we met up with them at the truck, as Dad enjoyed a good laugh about it.
Dad never hunted with a bow, so I had to wait until gun season to hunt with the guys at that camp. When we did hunt, the crowd was somewhat varied, but usually included Art (who owned the camp), Richard, Don, Dad, and, occasionally, Jim. These were formative years for me, as I entered my early teens, and the men made good company, all good folks who did me the honor of treating me more like a fellow hunter than a boy.
It was Don who got me to eat my green beans. In all the years before, I would swallow them whole if at all possible, washing them down with my customary suppertime milk. At camp, I would substitute something else for milk, say Orange Crush perhaps, but I did not enjoy green beans - they just didn't look good. Through Don's careful cajoling, I finally tried eating a green bean and actually tasting it as I did so. I found out it was pretty dang good! To this day, green beans are one of my favorite vegetables, and I have him to thank.
After that first season, Don gave me some old faded camo pants and shirt. He had decided that they were too faded to suit him, but I was as tickled as could be. I knew my way around a needle and thread, so I took them in so they'd fit and used them for hunting whenever possible, until I got some new camo duds a while later.
I believe that was the first camo clothing I ever owned, and truth be told I probably still have them stashed somewhere in a box of old hunting stuff, among other things that I refuse to throw away because of the memories they hold for me.
Don could call turkeys like no man I've ever seen. He used to use leaves, but got tired of replacing them, so he got a piece of visqueen plastic, cut it in the approximate shape of a leaf, and sanded the edges. He used to carry it in his wallet, and he could work magic with that thing, placing it between his lips and making any turkey sound you'd care to hear, and then some. I believe the man could sound more like a turkey than most turkeys.
(continued)
