Before First Light – Lessons from a Father

I was six the first time my father handed me a .22 rifle.

It wasn’t some grand rite of passage. No ceremony. Just a foggy December morning, the two of us standing in the dark edge of the woods behind our house. He knelt beside me, cradled the rifle in his calloused hands, and said, “This isn’t a toy. If you’re gonna carry it, you’re gonna respect it.”

That was it. My training began not in words but in presence—in watching how he walked, how he listened, how he became part of the woods rather than a disturbance in it.

We hunted squirrels and rabbits mostly, creeping through palmetto thickets and under the dripping moss of live oaks, the ground still cold and damp from the night before. He never explained what to look for. He just expected me to observe. To learn. I didn’t realize it then, but he was teaching me far more than how to spot movement in the branches or aim down a barrel.

He was teaching me how to live.

Those early mornings started long before the sun even considered rising. I’d hear the footsteps outside my room, the back door open, and the scent of black coffee drift in like a wake-up call older than time. No alarm clocks. Just instinct and the rustle of wind through the woods. I’d slip on my jeans from the night before, still caked with dried mud, pull on my boots, and meet him out by the truck.

He wouldn’t say much. Maybe a nod. Maybe nothing at all. But we didn’t need words. The quiet of the pre-dawn world said everything.

There’s something about moving through the woods before first light that makes you feel both small and connected. You hear everything—the crunch of your boot on brittle leaves, the low hoot of an owl, the whisper of breath on cold air. And you learn quickly that noise costs you. The louder you are, the fewer chances you get.

Patience was our currency. And I had to earn it.

The first time I raised the rifle to shoot, I was too slow. The squirrel darted behind a limb and vanished. I sighed in frustration, but my father never scolded me. He simply crouched beside me and whispered, “Sometimes the shot you don’t take is the one that teaches you the most.”

That line stuck with me—through high school football, when I’d want to lash out after a cheap hit. Through Special Operations missions, when waiting five more seconds meant the difference between success and disaster. Through life, when saying nothing said everything.

Looking back now, I realize my father wasn’t just teaching me to hunt. He was shaping how I carried myself in the world. How to move deliberately. How to stay still in chaos. How to understand that the land didn’t owe me anything—I had to earn every rabbit, every fish, every moment.

He never preached about integrity or discipline. He just showed it—every single morning, in every quiet action. He worked hard during the week and then worked just as hard to carve out time for me and the family on the weekend. He didn’t just talk about responsibility. He lived it. And that’s how I learned it.

I still wake up before dawn, even now. Something in me still listens for that sound of the forest coming to life. And sometimes, when the morning is just right—cold, still, hushed—I’ll grab a cup of coffee and sit outside, remembering those walks with my father. The rifle from that first hunt is in my gun safe, worn smooth where my small hands once gripped it. It hasn’t fired a round in years. But it doesn’t have to. The lessons it taught me still echo every day.