and I wasn't there for an hour when he told me there were cow hunting opportunities on the big island.
I've heard many great things about the islands. I've seen advertisements on TV. Beaches, surfing, hula dancers, waterfalls, jungles, volcanoes with flowing lava, girls gone wild, plus they've got Pearl harbor. You can't see it all on one vacation. The Hawaiians seem to be nice folks, take great pride in it all, and charge you for it.
Nobody ever mentioned cow hunting though. I'm scooping the Travel Channel on this one.
It seems there are cows wondering around on public lands that are screwing up the delicate, native ecology of the Island State. You can kill one and eat it if you are so inclined. And help the ecology.
I haven’t hunted since I was a very young man and I’ve been known to poke fun at those who do, particularly here in Texas where it’s such a business. Exorbitant lease fees, hunting stands, automatic corn feeders to lure in the deer and such. The deer in Texas are also very small compared to up north. There’s a principle about that in biology. The same species of mammals tend to be smaller the closer you are to the equator. Texas cows on the other hand have plenty of meat on them.
Another thing about cows is that they are not exactly an endangered species. From an evolutionary standpoint they are doing better than ever. They are the second most successful large mammal species on the planet, right behind us. There are 1.5 billion of them. About a cow for every four people. Considering how big they are, they currently outweigh us. If the bird flu or some other global pandemic sweeps through our species they could end up dominating.
On some of our many trips in South Texas I used to joke with my son about the excitement and sport of cow hunting on the big spreads. The King, Kenedy, Yturria, and Armstrong ranches. We figured the penalty for making a single mistake would be a shallow grave. Now there’s some sport.
We were just joking; it was a way to kill some time on the duller stretches of highway 77. I must admit though it never occurred to me that one of the dangers facing us would be the possibility of getting shot by the vice president. At the time of this writing Cheney’s quarry seems to be recovering. I understand he is an attorney and prominent Republican fundraiser. Lawyer hunting... hmmm.
Back in Hawaii I think one of the reasons my son and I enjoyed kicking over the possibilities of cow hunting was kind of philosophical. If you eat cows, perhaps you should be willing to kill one. Are we being hypocrites? Also our conversation drove his fiancée crazy.
“What are you going to do with an entire cow?” she pleaded.
“Good thinking, lets check the classifieds for used freezers.” I replied.
“But they have those big brown eyes.”
“So do deer, but perhaps they close them when they die.”
One day they got the first big snow up on the volcano (something else I didn’t know about Hawaii) and we all drove up the mountain to see it. They wouldn’t let us go up past 9,000 feet because there was too much snow, but on the way back down we took some rough back roads and there was a hunter check-in station. The hunting regulations were all posted. We were smack in the middle of cow hunting country!
I asked my son what kind of weaponry we had aboard besides the tire iron. A 22-ounce framing hammer, and the possibility of making a spear by duct-taping a wood chisel to a broom handle was about it. On the other hand he did have his portable reciprocal saw with an extra battery for the real dirty work should we succeed in our “quest”. Brooke, my son’s fiancée, started looking panicky as we pretended to rummage through the tools in the truck.
It’s all short grass prairie and lava fields up there, and we could see for miles. All the way up to the snow. It was all so very beautiful. There were no cows. Thank God. I’m a sucker for those big brown eyes myself.
Questions comments and non-hunting tips can be sent to
Waltssalt@yahoo.com
