Published: June 20, 2008 06:51 pm         

They’re huntin’ again

There likely won’t be many squirrels left in heaven once June Metz and Frank Sawyers get done with them.

The veteran central West Virginia hunters who thought of each other as brothers got back together this week with June’s passing. Frank, my dad, moved on in 2003. Each was in his early 80s when the time to rest came along. Each had earned that peace, epitomizing the greatest generation. They grew up during The Great Depression. They served their country in the European Theater of World War II.

Each was honed with the good American family values of Lewis County life. June stayed there where he and his wife, Ethel, reared a large and loving family. Dad, with my mom, Angela, and my sister, Tonita, and I, landed eventually in Cumberland. Nothing separated June and Frank when squirrel season became a reality in Lewis County.

When they were young men, of course, the sight of a deer track in Lewis County was cause for publication in the Weston Democrat, the weekly newspaper. Consequently, squirrel hunting was the passion of the time.

Now, thousands of deer, including some dandy bucks, are harvested there.

I have hunted every opening day of the gun season in Lewis County since 1985, enjoying as much June’s jokes, many of which were repeated every year, as I did the steep ridges and the fat bucks that lived among them.

This past season, 2007, was the first that June didn’t hunt. As the years went by, his participation decreased, though there was always an afternoon or two that he hunted.

I remember as well my dad’s last hunt there and on it he killed a spike with extremely long antlers.

I look forward to many more hunts with June’s sons, Tommy, Tim and Sonny in that part of Almost Heaven.

In the early 1990s, June and Ethel still lived in a mobile home just a rifle shot away from where we hunt. One afternoon, dad and I took Tim’s pickup and drove up a steep road to hunt deer. When dark came, we headed out, but I high-centered the vehicle on a rock.

I told dad to stay put and I would walk back to the house for help. These were pre-cellphone days.

“Just sit still,” he said. “They’ll be here to help.”

I was skeptical, but no more than 10 minutes passed when here came Chad and Roger, June’s grandsons, who not only found us, but got the truck freed.

“If you don’t show up at dark, they come looking for you,” dad told me later. Now that’s family.

Mrs. Metz would tell me when I walked in her door each fall, “When you’re here, you’re home.”

Now they are all home.

Contact Outdoor Editor Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.