Otero County Stories

I was born in 1927 and the Stock Market crashed in 1929, so I grew up during the Great Depression in the Sacramento Mountains east of Alamogordo, NM. The mountain people, as we referred to ourselves, supplemented our food supply with meat from deer and wild turkey. Mountain people paid little attention to hunting season or hunting licenses. The Forest Service had the responsibility to protect the game but these laws were pretty lax for the local citizenry. As a young boy, part of my duties was to keep meat on the table and not to use too much ammunition in doing it.   Out of necessity I became a very good shot at a very young age.  Each year just before Thanksgiving I had a flock of turkeys located and I would kill a couple for my family's festive dinner.  In those days everyone had a large cast iron pot in the yard to wash clothes. You would fill the pot with water, chop some wood and build a fire around the pot and boil the clothes. I needed hot water to dunk the turkey...

  Dear Dad, This morning the air smelled like autumn and I noticed a few leaves beginning to change colors.  The fall season always reminds me of hunting turkeys with you.  You would grab the shotgun off of the back porch and invite me to go along.  Sorry I wasn’t the son that you probably wanted for a hunting partner, but you were wonderful to let me be your buddy.   I really didn’t enjoy hunting but the individual attention I got from you was worth the effort it took to search for those elusive birds. You always seemed to know where they would be and always said that hunting turkeys was a skill few people had. Most hunters would accidently run across a flock but to set out to find a turkey was something else altogether.  Remember how you would caution me to be quiet and not walk in the dry leaves and to tread softly. I remember you stopping to listen and telling me not to breathe so loudly.  You would take that old cheap watch out of your pocket and ...