Getting my campfire fix

I’ve been going into some kind of hunting camp every fall since I was a kid.

Dad and cousin Carlton used to hunt rabbits and quail at a relative’s farm in Illinois for a few days each November. I started tagging along before I was old enough to carry a gun. We’d stay in a tiny, unheated trailer behind the barn, cooking all of our meals there except Sunday dinner, which we always ate at the farmhouse.

It was an old place and it sat in a fertile creek bottom bordered by hardwoods. The country there was as wild as I’d ever seen. You could say it was my gateway drug and I’ve been hooked ever since.

After high school I headed west, eventually ending up in Cooke City working for an outfitter. Hunting camps there were a bit more traditional -- canvas wall tents, wood stoves, pole corrals.

Located deep in the Beartooth mountains, the outfitter camps were accessible only by foot or horseback. They were fun to set up during the warm days of early September, but a drag to break down and pack out at the end of the season with a couple of feet of snow on the ground.

Eventually I left Cooke and got a real job, but I still I spent time in a hunting camp every fall. A friend and I discovered the Missouri Breaks and for years set up a camp there at the end of a two-track each October. It was easier country than the mountains and you didn’t need horses to get there.

Then I moved to Malta and there was no longer any need to camp. I could easily hunt the most wonderful country in the world and still sleep in my own bed at night.

For friends and family, my place in Malta is a hunting camp. It even has cable TV.

But come September, like the elk, I get restless. I need to get out of town, off the grid, back to where it all began. So my wife and I pack our tiny trailer with guns, dogs and food, and head to the mountains.

We won’t stay long, but long enough that I get my campfire fix, maybe hear an elk bugle, and if I’m lucky, see a bear.

It’s not quite like an extended pack trip into the Beartooths, but it’s certainly a lot wilder than that creek bottom back in Illinois.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]