Stories that were told came down from the men of yesterday, passed down to the men of today. Like my father’s father as told to my father and then handed down to me. The stories of yesterday are still told to me by what I see as I walk the old trails that I was on as a boy. Maybe I dream as I walk them. I remember my dog beside me, my brave and fearless dog. He would run when a cow chased him.

There was an apple tree where I could get a partridge any time, and a big butternut orchard where the red squirrel and sometimes the big gray would come to feed on the ever-present butternuts. There were the grapevines that I used to climb and make believe that it was my own jungle.

I used to look at an old cellar hole and wonder who it was that lived there so many years ago. I told the stories to my sons, the stories of the way it was. My Indian ancestors kept the stories alive by passing them down.

As a young boy, my father would tell me stories that kept me spellbound. I would remember how his father would tell me about what went on in the deep woods when he was a boy. He was to take me with him and show me a blackened fireplace where he had his dinner so many years ago. That is what makes stories so real today in the young mind.

How I loved to go over the many things that were told to me.

Today when I try to follow the path that was mine when I was a boy, it is still there. Some of the trees are bigger now and some are gone. High winds and old age have taken their toll.

For many years when I was a boy, I would write down my experience of the happenings in my hunting and fishing trips. Many of my writings were lost when our home was broken up. But my memory of the past is still as fresh as if it just happened yesterday.                                                                 

Remember as you read much of these writings, it is as a young boy I would write, no fancy words were used that would come from a highly educated mind. My spelling was very bad, but I wanted to put it all down on paper.

So you will go from chapter to chapter, and read my stories from yesteryear. The stories of a boy that was born 125 years too late. Stories of growing up on the Canadian border, living off the land and wandering all over the mountains and valleys. Some instinct was born in me and wanted to be free and wild as the wildlife around me. What was it that compelled me to leave the comforts of home and the love of my mother to see and do the things that I did as a youngster.

As I have relived my stories of yesterday, it is still a mystery to me how a boy with hardly any education put this all down on paper. Somewhere back in the pages of time, I new I had to keep a record of my life’s happenings.