It may be my earliest memory. I'm under the dining room table, curled up next to the rangy setter who would be my closest companion for the next 17 years. Now and then, the windows shake as the cold storm rises in the darkness outside.

Dad is sitting at the table; I can see his feet in heavy wool socks and, now and then, the lambswool end of a wooden cleaning rod poking out of a shotgun bore. Half a century later, the warm, safe feeling of family and home always comes back to me when I catch a whiff of Hoppe's No. 9.

In the years that followed that moment, Dad provided the equipment along with coaching on marksmanship and safety. I walked with the men while Sam the beagle-dog serenaded cottontails to us, learned to stalk squirrels in the fall timber and, when I was 14, killed my first goose.

It was the classic beginning for a hunter, the best way to start. The importance of this kind of classic introduction is getting hard to find. Unless something changes, the sport of hunting could be relegated to high-end clubs and the men who can afford them.

Numbers Don't Lie
The National Survey of Hunting, Fishing, and Outdoor-related Recreation tracks the populations of hunters and anglers in the United States. According to the survey, there were 14.1 million U.S. hunters (16 years or older) in 1991. In 1996, there were 14.0 million, and in 2001, there were 13.0 million. The trend is certainly no collapse, but it's worth noting that, from 1991 to 2001, U.S. population increased by more than 13 percent while the population of hunters dropped by about eight percent.

Over the same period, the population of U.S. waterfowl hunters grew significantly. In 1991-92, 1.4 million people bought duck stamps. In 1996-97, the number grew to 1.6 million, and in 2001-02, it stood at 1.7 million. That's 19 percent growth in a decade.

But the trend is misleading. As graybeards may recall, 1991 was one of the worst duck years in the last 50, and 2001 was one of the best. A longer view shows a more discouraging pattern. In the glory years of the late 1950s, duck stamp sales peaked at more than 2.2 million before slumping during the drought of the early 1960s. When duck production rebounded in the early 1970s, duck stamp sales soared to 2.4 million. If we compare the peak of hunter interest in the early 1970s with the most recent peak in 2000, duck stamp sales declined by 30 percent.

I'm not quite sure what happens to old duck hunters. A few may sneak off to Argentina to spend their declining years and Social Security checks in pursuit of the rosy-billed pochard. Many probably expire from overdoses of black coffee. Whatever the proximal cause, they make their way out of the duck blind, leaving vacancies that can only be filled by the next generation.

The Loss Of Hunting's Appeal
Therein lies the real problem. Hunting is losing its appeal among America's younger generation. Some of this is due to raw demographics. The actual number of Americans under the age of 18 has been increasing slowly, but the proportion of young people in the population has been dropping. According to an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "The proportion of children in the U.S. population has fallen from 36 percent (in1960) to 26 percent (in 1998), and is expected to drop to approximately 24 percent in 2020."