Telegraph Creek

Precious Artifacts in a Throwaway World.

- Terry Wieland

Hunters are great ones for keeping and using old stuff, from boots to knives to shooting vests. C.C. Filson, the Seattle outfitter, used to run an ad showing a tattered bird-shooting vest that belonged to one of its customers, and it had belonged to his father before him. The father bought the vest in the 1930s, if memory serves. The son was still wearing it in the 1980s and was planning to pass it along to his own son at some point.

I own shooting vests just like it. In fact, I have two, following Gene Hill’s dictum that if you find something you like, buy two, because they’re sure to stop making it. So I did. The newer vest looks like it has never been worn, for the simple reason that it hasn’t. The old one is tattered, stained, faded, and the game pocket hides feathers from hunting trips decades ago. The leather covering is worn off the buckle. Yet, when I head out bird hunting, it’s the old one I take.

Same with a pair of Filson chaps; the originals are ripped by barbed wire, burnished coppery by grime of every kind, the snaps on the straps are failing and the leather trim is gone. I keep wearing them in preference to the new ones, though. There’s this funny feeling I’m too old a dog to show up in a pair of new chaps. It would be embarrassing.

If anything, big-game hunters are worse than bird shooters for keeping old stuff. The man who first took me deer hunting, a friend of my father, was about 50 when I met him around 1965. He hunted with a Winchester Model 1894, wore rubber boots, an old suit coat (this was before hunter orange was a requirement) and a pair of faded green work pants of the kind hunters used to buy at the general store. In all the years I knew him – we hunted together off and on for almost 20 – I never saw him wear anything else or carry any other rifle.