Been Bear Hunting Lately.......

Yep, it’s time for the last of my series “Is The Traditional Male an Endangered Species”. I am going to hold that one until next week to tell you about an awesome display of Traditional Maleness I observed today. We are on our way to New York for the Word of Life National Staff Conference and took a little detour onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were driving a long at 40MPH Listening to Jesus Messiah by Chris Tomlin and having a little worship time when we saw five “Hounds” in the middle of the road. It was obvious they were not strays as they were all wearing collars and seemed to even have a small antenna on each one. There with his truck was the owner. He called and they quickly jumped into the cage on the back of the truck. Within the next quarter mile, we saw maybe ten more pickup trucks with dog cages and their owners. There were perhaps 25 men and boys  of varying ages.

Shortly we came up on one of the trucks stopped in the road. I pulled up and asked, “you guys hunting or just running the dogs” an older guy (bout my age) replied, “mostly just running the dogs” with a laugh. A quick conversation revealed they were bear hunting though I think he said “Bar”. He asked if we had seen the two up a tree a ways back. We had not, and he told us where they were so we turned around and went back to see them. Sure enough it was where we had seen one group of the guys with the trucks and dogs. The dogs had “Treed” the two young bears. We stopped and chatted for a few minutes and discovered they were all from the same community near Roanoke, VA. I ask if it were gun season and if they planned to shoot grown bears and received an interesting reply. “Yeah, sometimes for meat or if one gets “mean” with the dogs”.

My main point of interest however was the group of Men and the Boys. There were Dads with their sons and some Granddads with their grandsons. And get this they called one of the guys “Preacher” or “Preacher Man”. He was Pastor of a church in the community where many of the men attended. WOW! It was an amazing display of Traditional Maleness. Join me next time for the last in the series. After that we will look at some questions I have been asked in recent Mens Retreats.

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