10-18-2020, 02:10 PM
'Just to be here is enjoyable': On the hunt with 93-year-old Bud GrantWESTERN NORTH DAKOTA – Bud Grant had seen moons as full as the one that hung in the otherwise dark sky on a recent early morning, but few that were bigger, rounder or brighter.
Bouncing in his truck over a harvested barley field, the retired Vikings coach peered into the shadowy edges of the vehicle’s headlights for the wetland near which he and others with him would hunt.
Now 93 years of age, Grant has been retired from football for more than three decades. He’s lived longer than he thought he would, and all but a handful of his close friends are dead. But of regrets, he has none.
“I love every minute of this,” Grant said. “Just to be here is enjoyable.”
Alert and keen for the sun to bruise the eastern sky, foreshadowing the prairie’s first duck flights, Grant, with two fake knees and a cane-assisted gait that befits his age, is as happy, it seems, as the proverbial lark.
This was the opening of North Dakota’s nonresident duck hunting season, and Grant and his partner, Pat Smith, were guests of their friends, Mark and Penny Hamilton of Minot, N.D.
Kindred spirits, Grant and Mark Hamilton met in the mid-1980s when the latter asked Grant to travel to Canada to speak to the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.
“I said I’d speak if I could go hunting while I was there,” Grant said.
In the years since, Grant has become a regular autumn visitor to North Dakota, where he is hosted by the Hamiltons, whose log home graces a convergence of tree-filled draws that divide the prairie starkly. With a museum’s worth of taxidermied mementos, the home’s decorating motif is hunting and more hunting.
Now, as night yields grudgingly to an unusually still North Dakota morning, a few dozen decoys have been spread into the field, and Grant, who sits in a type of lawn chair whose convertible top can be flipped open when he wants to shoot, has tucked in with Smith against giant barley bales that will nourish pastured cattle in the coming cold winter.
https://www.startribune.com/legendary-ex...572740041/
Bouncing in his truck over a harvested barley field, the retired Vikings coach peered into the shadowy edges of the vehicle’s headlights for the wetland near which he and others with him would hunt.
Now 93 years of age, Grant has been retired from football for more than three decades. He’s lived longer than he thought he would, and all but a handful of his close friends are dead. But of regrets, he has none.
“I love every minute of this,” Grant said. “Just to be here is enjoyable.”
Alert and keen for the sun to bruise the eastern sky, foreshadowing the prairie’s first duck flights, Grant, with two fake knees and a cane-assisted gait that befits his age, is as happy, it seems, as the proverbial lark.
This was the opening of North Dakota’s nonresident duck hunting season, and Grant and his partner, Pat Smith, were guests of their friends, Mark and Penny Hamilton of Minot, N.D.
Kindred spirits, Grant and Mark Hamilton met in the mid-1980s when the latter asked Grant to travel to Canada to speak to the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.
“I said I’d speak if I could go hunting while I was there,” Grant said.
In the years since, Grant has become a regular autumn visitor to North Dakota, where he is hosted by the Hamiltons, whose log home graces a convergence of tree-filled draws that divide the prairie starkly. With a museum’s worth of taxidermied mementos, the home’s decorating motif is hunting and more hunting.
Now, as night yields grudgingly to an unusually still North Dakota morning, a few dozen decoys have been spread into the field, and Grant, who sits in a type of lawn chair whose convertible top can be flipped open when he wants to shoot, has tucked in with Smith against giant barley bales that will nourish pastured cattle in the coming cold winter.
https://www.startribune.com/legendary-ex...572740041/