"Where are you going to go when the water don't flow?"
Some years and a decade ago, I was elk hunting with a local farmer. He was a devoutly religious, incessantly cheerful, and brutally hard-working man, like many farmers I've met. He soon established a pattern of stopping to drink at every creek, and I eventually asked him if there was a reason he did. I had also been raised where it rained constantly, where the slightest rise in elevation created a drop in elevation nearby that filled or dripped or ran with water, a place where you almost give up on rubber boots to keep your feet dry because it's almost impossible to not have to step in over your boots daily. Little creeks a foot wide trickled off every hill, and all of them flowed clear and sweet.
I never thought twice about drinking straight from creeks. Rivers and standing water were different. The rivers were always full of decaying fish, from salmon runs almost year round. I don't think salmon would drink that water. Standing water... it just never occurred to me to drink from a muskeg pool, or one of the little pocket lakes. There was always a clear, sweet creek within 100 yards. I was never once thirsty enough to think of drinking from any other, questionable, source.
My hunting buddy worked just as hard at hunting elk as he did at everything else. Being a lazy, fat construction worker, I had a tough time keeping up, and secretly rejoiced at the little breaks he gave me when he stopped to drink. He was tall and wiry, with longer legs than I, and set a quicker pace. He had a knack for it. He also had been raised on the land he farmed, and had roamed the mountainside we were on since he could walk. He could tell by smell when there were bulls in the herd, so I was willing to go to almost any length to hunt with him.
I wondered if it was a religious thing, if he knelt to give thanks for the sweet water at every opportunity, as we should. I wondered if it was a habit, a practice started in early youth busting through brush so thick it was sometimes actually practical to walk over a thicket, instead of through it. When we were discussing sighting in our rifles, once, he mentioned he reckoned the average distance at which he took elk was 5 yards. From the kind of country elk took to when under hunting pressure, in the company of such men, so determined to create that pressure, it became apparent to me that it really didn't matter what range we sighted our rifles at.
But, he quirked an eyebrow at me, the gears all whirring and reckoning my considerations, and said "I'm thirsty."
🤣🤣🤣
Best reason I've heard all day. Nowadays that'll just get you a run in with giardia I'm afraid. Used to do much the same when I was out hunting squirrel in the hills and hollers of southeastern Kentucky but I don't know how enthusiastic I would be about it today.