The Fine Art of Freezing for Food: A Father’s Guide to the First Harvest
There are few things more fundamental to the human experience than learning to hunt and prepare your own food. It is a primal, essential connection to the world around us. It is also, quite frankly, the most fun, frustrating, and mind-numbingly boring thing you will ever do with your children.
Before you fire off a fleet of “cancel” emails because I dared to call hunting with kids boring, let’s get real for a moment. We aren’t talking about the polished, high-speed highlight reels you see on outdoor networks. We are talking about reality. We are talking about the Herculean effort of dragging a semi-conscious twelve-year-old out of a warm bed at 4:00 AM. We are talking about making them march through knee-deep Ohio snow, or a freezing horizontal rain—or, if the universe is feeling particularly spiteful, both—to reach a stand.
Once you arrive, the boredom kicks in. You must convince a creature naturally composed of 90% kinetic energy and 10% YouTube references to sit perfectly still for four hours. You will spend half your morning explaining, in a frantic whisper, why they can’t eat their entire pack of jerky in the first ten minutes and the other half explaining why they shouldn’t have missed that terrible shot—or why that great shot still requires a long track through the brush. Then comes the gutting with frozen hands, the inevitable complaints about the smells, and the physical comedy of dragging a whitetail out of the woods.
It’s chaos. It’s messy. And honestly? It’s the best thing you’ll ever do.
The Logic of the Loading Bench
If you really want to lean into the beautiful chaos of raising a self-reliant human, you don’t just teach them to hunt; you teach them to reload. I know what you’re thinking: “Why on earth would I add gunpowder and precision measurements to an already volatile situation?” The answer is simple: Time and Pride. If you’re a parent, you know the feeling of the closing window. If your child is twelve or older, you realize that the clock isn’t just ticking; it’s sprinting. Soon, they’ll have their own lives, their own families, and their own schedules that don’t involve you. Every hour spent at the reloading bench is an hour stolen back from the future.
In our house, my kids have their own “space.” They use an RCBS Summit Single Stage and a Hornady Lock’ n’ Load progressive, depending on what we’re feeding. Giving them ownership of the gear—letting them pick out the Hornady bullets, the Federal primers, and the Hodgdon powder—transforms the hunt from a passive activity into a creative process. There is a specific, unmatched pride in a young person’s eyes when they realize that the round that provided the family’s dinner was one they crafted with their own two hands. It teaches patience, math, and the high-stakes reality of trial-and-error. It turns “boring” into an investment.
Choices (And a Little Jealousy)
Growing up in Ohio during the 80s and 90s, our whitetail options were… limited. You had a shotgun, a muzzleloader, or a bow. If you were a kid watching Delta Force or Rambo, you wanted to hunt with something that looked like it belonged in an action movie. Instead, we had wood-stocked slug guns that kicked like a mule. I spent many cold mornings dreaming of hunting deer with a Uzi, shooting from the hip like Chuck Norris with supernatural accuracy.
My kids, however, are living the dream. Their cool factor is significantly higher than mine ever was. They rotate between an IWI Zion with a 350 Legend barrel—outfitted with an IWI suppressor—and a Henry .44 Magnum lever action decked out with Midwest Industries furniture and a Rugged suppressor. Whether they are looking through a Primary Arms 1-8x scope or a Holosun red dot, they have the kind of kit I would have traded my entire baseball, even Pokémon, card collection for in 1988.
But the gear is just the bait. The real trap is the silence of the blind.
The Silence and the Smile
Last season, I sat in the blind with my oldest. We were trying to be silent, trying to stay warm, and I was trying my hardest to keep him engaged as the hours crawled by. It is a humbling, exhausting place to be.
As I watched him through the corner of my eye, I didn’t just see a kid in camo. I saw the boy he was, the young man he is rapidly becoming, and a glimmer of the man he will eventually be. I wondered if my own father felt the same tightness in his chest as he watched me. I wondered if, twenty years from now, my son will be sitting in a similar blind, whispering to his own child, “Just wait five more minutes.”
When that whitetail finally stepped into the clearing, the world narrowed down to a single point. All the “boring” hours of reloading, all the “frustrating” early mornings, and all the “messy” practice sessions culminated in a single breath. He lined up the shot, the suppressed bark of the rifle broke the silence, and in that moment, he grew up.
The truck ride home was loud. The silence was replaced by a play-by-play recap that lasted forty-five minutes. He had a smile that nothing on this green earth could take away. He was proud of his gear, proud of his shot, and—though he might not admit it yet—proud of the time we spent together.
Hunting isn’t just about the harvest. It’s about the preparedness, the discipline, and the sheer, ridiculous joy of being cold and tired with the people you love most. It’s about teaching them that they can provide, that they can be patient, and that even the boring parts of life are worth it if you’re waiting for something meaningful.
And if you get to use a suppressed lever action while doing it? Well, that’s just a bonus for the cool dad archives.
